> That model doesn’t really work to fund higher education. The public won’t accept doubling or tripling their property tax.
[citation needed]
And I can give you a citation against. In my local municipality the tax base is roughly $1.5 billion. The annual expenditures for the local vo-tech school for that municipality is $30 million. If all of the state and tuition funding for the vo-tech school suddenly vanished the property owners would see a rise of ... wait for it ... a grand total of 2%. Certainly a far cry from the doubling or tripling you suggested.
Amortizing the tuition across all public post-secondary institutions in the state via income and property tax bases of the entire state would likely be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2% total every year. Based on that analysis it seems monumentally stupid to NOT publicly fund post-secondary education.
Ditch the NCAA sports programs and it probably gets cheaper. The whole sales pitch for sports is that scholarships provide a pathway for some students to go to college that otherwise could not afford it. Get rid of tuition and suddenly that reason goes away, too.
Colleges/Universities absolutely do not need more money...they need more accountability.
I'm not arguing with your numbers, I guess my point is that I don't think taxpayers will accept a huge "freebie" for one group which results in their taxes going up. The optics are terrible.
Public community colleges primarily attract and accept students from the local community and are usually supported by local tax revenue - from Wikipedia.
If they were free, more people would take advantage of them, potentially earning more, bumping them into higher tax brackets, where their taxes would be used to fund tuition free education, and the cycle would continue.
In Germany, taxes are 39.5% of GDP. In the US, they are 26.6% of GDP. There’s no realistic proposal that has ever been advanced, not even from the Bernie/AOC/Warren types, on how to raise the extra $2.8 trillion annually that would be required. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax wouldn’t even raise that much money over a decade, much less annually.
"extra $2.8 trillion" is incredibly dishonest. Nothing in any universal/single-payer healthcare proposal magically adds $2.8 trillion in actual medical expenses to the system. It's fundamentally an accounting change, akin to a married couple with a joint banking account deciding who'll pay the restaurant bill this time.
To be like Germany, you would have to take $2.8 trillion from the private sector and put it into the public sector by taxing and spending an extra $2.8 trillion. That’s not an accounting change—the government doesn’t have a joint bank account with the private sector.
> To be like Germany, you would have to take $2.8 trillion from the private sector and put it into the public sector by taxing and spending an extra $2.8 trillion.
And those taxes would replace the insurance premiums employers and individuals are currently paying out the ass for. It's a difference in who writes the checks, not how much actually goes out of individuals' pockets.
Claiming "$2.8B in new taxes" is like claiming "I Venmo you $5, you Venmo me $10" costs me five bucks.
> That’s not an accounting change—the government doesn’t have a joint bank account with the private sector.
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