Cost of tuition = 10% of net worth

The Sandbox Political Topics
41

Make it mandatory. And not sending your kids to university would be the equivalent of child abuse. Easy.

42

So we have, real life squid games, ridiculous university cost, or estate tax as the three proposals to fix inequity.

And, somehow, the estate tax is lagging behind…

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43

Ok Mr. I always argue in good faith :rofl:

44

I’m half serious. But yes, if you want to tax the rich, extreme measures need to be taken.

1 Like
45

Then those kids would leave the country.

Would you also propose making it illegal to leave the country?

46

Extreme, like, a simple estate tax?

47

But like you said, the rich would simply get around an estate tax, like they already do.

48

How do you think the IRS tax people who live abroad?

49

It would be much simpler to enact an estate tax than what is proposed by the OP, ETA and further amended by you to the point of truly unworkable even as a thought experiment.

1 Like
50

my basis for this is to tax luxury spending. Rich kids don’t need a harvard degree. It’s really just a luxury good

51

i’m for an estate tax as well. This is probably way easier to pass but won’t. As jsm mentioned it’s the rich who make the laws

52

Build the Wall!!!

53

At the very top they will not send their kids to college they will create an organization that does all the things a college does that is legally defined as not a college. That is where their kids go. So those with assets above a certain buy in amount would, say $50m, would not pay tuition this way. Making this another barrier to entry to the top.

54

To tax the rich tax wealth.

  1. Make all ownership public and track back to actual individuals.
  2. Tax ownership.

In a capitalist system you should tax capital not income.

1 Like
55

Eh, this would bankrupt a lot of people.

56

Let’s think about how this plan might apply in practice. Regardless of what my cost X is (assuming this is total for college; per year could be as easy as /4 and then you pay that rate for extra years - something a number of kids have to do because of switching majors, work/life things that get in the way of taking all the classes in the 4 allotted years, etc.) based on 10% of net worth, I’ll seek out the best institution of higher learning that I can attend. So will everyone else. Harvard and Yale and Princeton can’t support 130,000 kids attending at once, so how are we going to decide who gets in and who has to resort to Indiana State, Youngstown State, UW-Stout, Fort Hayes State U. and on down the chain?

Did anyone account for room/board? At my alma mater, that’s as much as (or slightly more than) tuition. Fees are another $5600, or about 60% of tuition. Did we account for books, especially where every year an author releases a new edition with 4 changes and students have to pay $360 new for it? [One of the smart things my JuCo did was have everyone rent books at a flat cost, and then you got a guaranteed amount back at the end of the semester when you returned it (provided you didn’t rip the shit out of the book). You didn’t return it, you got charged full price.]

Do schools have an incentive to improve in this plan? I don’t know. I suspect not. Do they have the resources to do so? If they’re getting 18,000 kids who pay an average $135 because the vast majority of them are poor, then not from tuition alone. We have to go back and fix how schools are funded in the first place. Got ideas for that, especially where government has re-allocated funds that were originally supposed to go to education that are now going toward other crap? What all are we giving up in this?

57

With all the educational youtube videos online, I really don’t see the benefit of paying anything.

I learned more from 3Blue1Brown videos than I did in my entirety of math classes.

58

Yep.

Here’ my plan: You can borrow up to the full cost of college from the federal gov’t. When you graduate, you get a payment based on a 10 year amortization schedule.

But, your payments are capped at x% of your annual income in excess of the average pay of people with just a HS diploma. (about $35,000/yr for 25-34 year-olds.)

If you’re short in one year, the gov’t forgives half the shortfall in that year and the college pays the gov’t the other half. At the end of 10 years, you’re done with the loan.

I think we’d rapidly discover that colleges would work very hard to make sure that students’ talents matched their degree asperations and those degrees had a market value. And, colleges would put their own caps on total loans, even if the gov’t doesn’t.

59

But, you have to actually collect that estate tax:

( Gary Cohen was the COO of Goldman Sachs. GS has an active “wealth management” division. I trust Cohen to know something about avoiding estate taxes.)

I’m sure the techies at the IRS know how people avoid estate taxes and can write laws to close the loopholes. But, congress won’t pass those laws because … they don’t really want to tax rich people.

Look at step-up-in-basis. An obvious, gaping loophole that is heavily biased toward the rich. Congress refuses to close it.

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60

A shock would do that.
So, increment slowly.