12-03-2017, 03:29 PM
(12-03-2017, 05:14 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(12-03-2017, 12:44 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(12-02-2017, 06:47 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: The student loan and tuition rebate treatment merely levels the playing field with those who save for their own or their kids' education. Why should people who manage their money well be penalized relative to those who save nothing and depend on loans or payment in kind for their education?
Tell me how a poor child with great college scores and great talent can save $80K for college through work. The savings that most kids have for college end up going for clothes, recreational reading, an occasional movie ticket, a dinner date, or maybe (if 21+) a drink.
A kid with great college scores and great talent should have no problem saving $20k/year from a part time job. That said, the bill doesn't prevent people from taking out loans; it just stops advantaging such people over those who work their way through college or save first.
$20K a year from a part-time job? Millions work full-time jobs and get much less than that. Working-class kids have expenses like commuting costs, clothes, food...
Quote:Quote:We are going to throw away talent that could be our great engineers, creative people, and executives, perhaps to be domestic servants and farm laborers because they cannot pay taxes on a college scholarship.
Scholarships continue not to be taxed. It's only people who are being paid partially through tuition forgiveness that are now taxed on that pay - you know, same as if they were paid the full amount in the first place and then used some of that money for their tuition payments. Basically the law just closed a loophole that permitted universities to bilk grant payers - usually the taxpayer - by artificially inflating their tuition rates.
The work that gets the tuition forgiveness is often a condition of work for a degree, typically research or graduate teaching. Research and graduate teaching are legitimate parts of graduate-sch9ool education because of their connection to what one does with a graduate degree -- quite often, research or teaching.
One of the schools mentioned for such a practice is MIT. You know what its students are like, and how desirable their research can be.
Quote:Quote:I understand how people who are receiving government benefits and fear they might be forced to take jobs they consider to be beneath them might object, but for those of us who actually work, pay taxes, and support the rest of society, it is merely justice.
In my case I consider suicide an option, as I hate my life and see no other escape. End of my suffering. I have quit taking my blood pressure medication.
Save your melodrama. Blood pressure medication just prevents your body from elevating blood pressure in order to get adequate oxygen to your tissues through narrowed arteries; it's a treatment of symptoms, not causes. Granted sedentary modern man doesn't need the oxygen delivery capability that active hunter gatherers needed, so the medication probably doesn't do that much harm, either.[/quiote]
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Having had my talents and abilities wasted, misused, or under-developed because I was led early into areas completely unsuited to my character (this is not a question of underpayment for my efforts), I have empathy for some kid who, because he is not born into the Right Family, finds himself consigned to raw labor, domestic service, retail sales, or other work typically paid badly and whose performers get treated less than human. The more inequitable the society, the more common and severe such waste is.
I'm not disparaging such work. There are people who find such work an invigorating challenge and ratification of their humanity. Such people typically have low-normal IQs suited for such work.
As a general rule, just about every job has an optimal level of intellectual ability for its performance. Below that level one is not up to the task. Above that level, the objectionable characteristics become obvious. Danger. Steady degradation of health. Ugly environment. No sense of distinctive achievement. Social stigma. I believe that I have shown such a chart.
If we are going to have an aristocratic society that keeps people from having any chance of success because of their class origin, then we need to find ways to ensure that people unhappy with their plight from coming into existence. But that suggests the dystopian Brave New World, which does not depend upon breeding people to be "alphas", "betas", "gammas", "deltas", etc. An aristocratic society that Donald Trump and the GOP wants depends upon forcing people into places established by birth, which is even crueler.
If you consider yourself a conservative, then just remember: that is the sort of sick society that creates the likes of Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro. That is the sort of society in which terrorism flourishes. Lenin and Mao are symptoms of a sick society and not the cause.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.