Problems with the Dem's "100 hours" student loan proposals
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From Brian Riedl over at National Review.
Riedl's critique makes good sense to me - if the goal was really to help make college more affordable, it seems like they'd be more likely to target something else.
What about expanding these SMART grants? Sounds like the perfect way for the government to get involved to me - I want the government to be helping to make college more affordable, but not if the kids are going to become Comparative Literature majors. Incentivizing the hard sciences and critical language skills makes good sense, and that's what our government should be focusing on.
Same with raising the minimum wage, an inane and meaningless gesture - if congress really wants to help people, they should be boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit instead.
Riedl's critique makes good sense to me - if the goal was really to help make college more affordable, it seems like they'd be more likely to target something else.
What about expanding these SMART grants? Sounds like the perfect way for the government to get involved to me - I want the government to be helping to make college more affordable, but not if the kids are going to become Comparative Literature majors. Incentivizing the hard sciences and critical language skills makes good sense, and that's what our government should be focusing on.
Same with raising the minimum wage, an inane and meaningless gesture - if congress really wants to help people, they should be boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit instead.
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And the minimum wage increase is a good thing - the minimum wage hasn't been worth this little in a long while. But, once again, that's only half a solution.
Why should the government be subsidising that? What we need as a nation are more hard science students and more experts on languages critical to our security.
You may feel like pursuing whatever degree you want, but from the federal government's perspective not all degrees are valued equally.
The existence of a minimum wage itself is, at least in the present day, not a good thing, most economists agree.
Really now? Most economists?
"Hundreds of Economists support the Minimum Wage"
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"Economists call for minimum wage to be raised"
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"Higher minimum wage no longer seen as US job killer"
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"WalMart calls for minimum wage hike"
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Be careful before you generalize.
Have most economists ever worked for minimum wage?
Look, the minimum wage remained stagnant for the last decade, real wages have fallen, and we still saw substantial inflation. Let's stop scapegoating the one measure the government can take to help workers cope with inflationary pressure.
That being said, I know personally that I took interest rates into serious consideration when making my education decisions. The margin of difference between the current rate and the new one very likely may mean, for example, more law school students being able to afford to become public interest/community legal services lawyers (though a Federal LRAP would go much further).
But we can target these things! I'm all in favor of cutting someone's interest rate to 1% if they'll sign a contract to slug it out for the little guy for 5-7 years.
Didn't Wisconsin start doing this recently?
Cutting interest rates is a fine tool if it's targetted to make sure we, the people, are getting Return on Investment.
Incidentally, it’s interesting this concern about small business. It'd make much more sense if you had the same criticism regarding Wal-Mart. But then again those who stand behind Wal-Mart the most have and will never work there themselves.
You talk about government subsidization regarding one end of the spectrum. But realize this: we're also paying for Wal-mart employee's health care just as we also happen to be subsidizing Big Oil even if we ride a bike all our lives.
In your world I'm sure that minimum wage is a trivial matter. In any event one thing is absolutely certain. The framing of this issue has NOTHING to do with any intellectual superiority. That's pretty damn clear
And you can take your self-importance and shove it--anyone who's ever studied migrant farm wages knows that the EITC isn't going to do shit to help them, and that expanding the minimum wage to cover agricultural workers is the first step towards providing them with anything better than the slave wages they currently make. So don't give me that "isn't really serious" crap--it's just you using another derogatory phrase to put down an idea with which you don't agree and, like always, it makes you look like a dismissive, closed-minded dilettante.
I don't see a problem with the wages migrant farm workers currently make. If you do, care to justify why? I see a problem with the working conditions in some places, sure, but there's no such thing as "slave wages" - their labor is worth what someone's willing to pay for it.
If the wages aren't worthwhile, migrant farm workers are free not to, well, migrate.
I'll get to the Hilroy piece in a bit.
Nowadays, farms are either all consolidated in an area under one corporate entity that has uniformly abyssmal wages, or those few growers in a given area collude to keep wages down. That's a textbook market failure, and needs to be corrected to protect workers from unfair business practices. When you put your faith in market forces and then ignore the pollution of those forces by corrupt practices, you make a mockery of the market.
In other words: One can be a progressive or a liberal without clinging to foolish notion that progressives and liberals are always right and that conservatives bring nothing intelligent or necessary to a policy debate. America works best when smart people of different ideologies keep each other honest.
If anything, I'd say as a liberal I benefit more from reading the National Review than I do the American Prospect. Similarly, I'd imagine a smart conservative getting more out of TAP, Democracy, TNR, or the writings of Christopher Hitchens than out of their own house organs.