Can America Afford Bernie Sanders?

That's the starting point, at least. Any amount of reduced tuition at any level would be very helpful.

When I was at a 4-year state-supported college, the state was paying about 70% of the total expense of operating the school. Having students and parents pay the other 30% cut back on the number of people abusing the system, spending four years cutting class and partying all the time, not caring if they learned anything or not. I don't see anything wrong with requiring students to pay something like 15% or 20%, if they can.

State Farm is set up as a nonprofit co-op, technically owned by its customers. If there is extra cash left over at the end of the year, some goes into cash reserves for large claims (such as a major hurricane) and all the customers get a small check in the mail. I like their business model. I wish it was more common in the insurance world.

But... with healthcare, most insurance-related work is computerized now, so I don't see any reason why a single payer government department couldn't handle it. Through the Federal Reserve banks, Treasury Department, and IRS, the federal government processes billions of financial transactions every year, mostly without problems.

 

In northern Colorado people (homeowners) have been waiting since the summer of 2012 to get paid by StateFarm insurance for the High Park Fire. StateFarm created lots of homeless people. They are an example of why we need strong government oversight of big business. If I pay for insurance coverage, I should get my benefits from that coverage. After that fire, insurance companies gave us a cock and bull story about Acts of God and Events of Nature, all meaning they don't want to pony up according to the policy. So, in the mountain states, insurance companies don't want to pay for wild fire damage. In the south and midwest states, they don't want to pay for tornado damage. On coastal regions, they don't want to pay for high wind storms, water, and land damage. In earthquake zones, they don't want to pay for people to rebuild at the same location. In high crime areas, they don't want to cover vandalism damage. And God help you if you ever present a claim. You might get your policy canceled. So, why should we pay insurance companies to stick it to us like that?

 

some people, not everybody, get newspapers that cover events in Venezuela & Argentina and Cuba.

Perhaps your news feeds do not contain these nations.
Do it.

Nuf said.

 

motion

In the UK we have colleges that specialise in sport and music but even when higher education was ‘free’ here we still had sports and music clubs in colleges and there are many other programmes (public and private) outside of college so I’m not sure your argument works.

[SIZE=11pt]Really the benefits of realising that potential far out weight the rather minor drawbacks you seem to envision[/SIZE]

 

Well, just looking at the way economics and society works it unfortunately isn't that ludicrous. It is just the way it is. Ideally it would be different I agree, but where it comes to getting a whole country properly organized with afforadable healthcare for everybody I guess people should pick their battles one at a time.
But I have to point out that there are insurance companies out there already that are non profit. I guess if enough healthcare customers make it clear enough there's a demand for it the supply can grow. So as long as we as a society don't change how the economy works insurance companies have a right to exist perfectly fine. They just need to conform to proper rules, and if enough people care about the companies being non profit they should make that clear of course.

 

MeAgain

Yes I find this argument against free education rather weak if not silly, I didn’t go to college for the extracurricular activities it offered it wasn’t even on the list of things I was looking for when researching which university to choose.

Motion

Can you give us some better arguments as to why you think Sanders ideas couldn’t be afforded?

 

Are college sports a huge deal in the UK? I have no idea.

Around here, some people would kill for a chance to get student tickets to Duke University basketball games. They have 5,000 seats at Cameron, and they could easily sell 100,000 tickets to every home game. It's like a religious cult. On TV, sports fanatics will even sit through games between pathetic piece of shit universities like High Point College and Elon.

 

Karen

In the UK our major sport is what Americans call soccer and the rest of the world recognises as football. We have a number of leagues and many local teams that people passionately support. There are also lots of amateur and junior teams and scouts for clubs often pick from them a long time before the age people normally go to university although there are university leagues they are not a big thing.

I should point out that I’m not into football; I don’t have a team or even watch it, so my knowledge is limited.

From what you and others have been saying about US college sports they would seem to be semi-professional if not wholly and are also financial and status entities, that have little to do with the educational attainment of the majority of university students.

 

At the higher levels, bigger schools, it's a very corrupt and hypocritical system. Players are not supposed to get paid even though they're bringing in millions or tens of millions of dollars in TV revenue and sports merchandising revenue every year, plus hefty alumni contributions. So, a lot of universities illegally pay their players in cash or other things of value that are hard to trace. Sometimes wealthy almumni handle this so there won't be a trail of evidence leading to university employees, especially the head coach. The better players usually move on to the pro leagues after a year or two, having no interest in finishing their degree. Schools are under pressure to ignore their own academic standards to bring in and keep the best athletes.

One thing that has helped the popularity of sports programs at smaller schools is the realization that their athletes have different motives for playing. Those guys don't have enough talent to reach the pro level, so they want to use their athletic scholarship to get a real education. Some of their lesser players don't even have athletic scholarships, so they are only participating because they enjoy the game. That dynamic appeals to a growing number of fans. It goes back to the roots of college sports.

If somebody like Sanders wanted to push for some serious cost cutting at state-supported schools in order to reduce student costs, I'm not convinced that the high profile sports programs would be a good target. It appears that these teams often bring in a lot more money than they cost the schools. Contributions from wealthy alumni are especially valuable and important. And a significant number of these universities are private, so they won't be touched by any federal or state level reforms.
























And... for any American sports fans who haven't heard yet, Duke beat arch rival Carolina by one point last night, with two of their best players injured and on the bench, IN CHAPEL HILL!!
:rastana:
Sorry for the temporary diversion. This is just too good.

 

[SIZE=11pt]Karen[/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]So again this argument about sports extra curriculum activities been drastically cut if Sanders brought in state funded tuition doesn’t really seem to fly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Motion - have you anything else? [/SIZE]

 

Yes we absolutally can afford it.. When we are not funding sencless wars and actually taxing Wall St, that frees up trillions of dollars.

 

Balbus my friend.

Why are we picking on Senator Sanders?

I don't think we can afford Hillary or Marco or Trump either! So lets not single out Bernie.

When I hear Senator Rubio speak of growing The Navy to 400 ships, I cringe. We can't afford it.

During Mr. Obama's term we have added something like eight trillion dollars to the national debt; which stands at 18 trillion today.
we have little enough to show for it.

I'm struggling with the rush to further subsidize the Universities, who pay no taxes and burden their "Clients" with thousands in debt for a degree that may not pay.

If these Universities were Corporations with stockholders we would be in an uproar about a consumer rip off.
why do they get a pass?

How nice that Mr Sanders will waive the student loan debt for graduates.
He is buying votes.

 

Piney

Well thanks for being my friend but it wasn’t me but Motion that singled out Sanders.

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[SIZE=11pt]That called Military Keynesianism, a right wing corrupt form of Keynesianism that was the bedrock of the so called military/industrial complex and was famously used by Reagan in the 80’s. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]“Military Keynesianism is the position that the government should increase military spending in order to increase economic growth. The term is often used pejoratively to refer to politicians who reject Keynesian economics, except when arguing for the positive job creation of military spending.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=11pt]Keynesians maintain that government spending should first be used for useful purposes such as infrastructure investment, but that even non-useful spending may be helpful during recessions. John Maynard Keynes advocated that government spending be used "in the interests of peace and prosperity" instead of "war and destruction".[4] An example of such policies are the Public Works Administration in the 1930s in the United States[/SIZE][SIZE=11pt].“ wiki[/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt][/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Well what stimulus that has been used means that the US and the world is going through a recession rather than a depression. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]But the stimulus has not been great and not enough to bring about the growth that is needed and QE has brought about an economic bubble and increased inequality. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Meaning that the poor and middle class have seen little benefit. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]But a lot of the reason why extra (and different) stimulus couldn’t be applied was in large part due to opposition in Congress. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt][/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]This reveals a certain ‘market’ based way of thinking [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]Should education be a market place or a societal resource? What is best for society to get as many people into education as possible and gain the social benefit as ‘payment’ or make education ‘pay’ for itself (at least partially) in paid back student loans? [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]It has to be remembered that originally student loans were meant to boost the uptake of higher education and was done for military purposes, the price of loans later ballooned when the system was privatized (it has now been re-nationalized by Obamacare*). [/SIZE]

[SIZE=11pt]U.S. Government-backed student loans were first offered in the 1950s under the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), and were only available to select categories of students, such as those studying toward engineering, science, or education degrees. The student loan program, along with other parts of the Act, which subsidized college professor training, was established in response to the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite, and a widespread perception that the United States was falling behind in science and technology, in the middle of the Cold War. Student loans were extended more broadly in the 1960s under the Higher Education Act of 1965, with the goal of encouraging greater social mobility and equality of opportunity - wiki[/SIZE]

*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/19/history-of-student-loans_n_3622709.html