People should pay tax to buy higher education and college degrees.
Colleges are now exposed as evil corporations, overpaying their CEOs and star faculty, underpaying their actual workers, and overcharging their customers and the government, and blatantly misrepresenting the cost and value of their diplomas, and they pay no taxes, not even a property tax. Screw them!
A nice steep progressive tax on tuition would curb the trend of ever-rising tuition costs, and take the money from the schools, not the taxpayers. Yes, the increased cost of the tax would cause people to either pay it if they could, or choose a cheaper school, but soon I think the tax would eventually be absorbed by the schools, who would immediately have to lower their tuition rates to continue to attract students, and so they would have to cut salaries and research programs and new building projects and land grabs.
Ooh, and we should grab back some of that land, just to sell it to developers to make money, as per Kelo. We know where the money is, we can see all the new expensive buildings going up and see the Lexuses and BMW’s at the end of long perfectly manicured Cambridge driveways, we hear about needless research and programs they spend money on. If there is going to be a bail-out of student debt, and there should be, it should not be paid by the tax payers, it should be paid by the schools.
I know that this was posted tongue-in-cheek, but for those who suggest adopting a consumption tax, this is one area that needs to be addressed: wealthy people spend more (most?) of their income on services, not goods, and thus don’t pay a lot in sales taxes.
If you suddenly got a raise of $50k per year, what would you do? After you upgraded your car, you might take a trip (untaxed). Or maybe hire that lawn service (untaxed). Maybe you’d send your kids to private school (untaxed) or get your nails done more often (untaxed). Maybe you’d buy a second home (you don’t pay the state 6.25% of the purchase price, do you?).
No it’s not tongue in cheek. You’re right about other services too. Lawyers, doctors, houses, medical equipment, these things are all things that rich people splurge on and drive up the cost for everyone else. Taxing them would mean other taxes could go down.
I guess you’re not flying, renting a car, staying in a hotel, going to a restaurant. What’s the trip? A walk around the block?
Here’s an idea with a $50K raise. Save for your retirement. Save for your kids education. Pay off your credit card debt.
Don’t buy a new car. Don’t take a trip. Don’t get you nails done. Also if Barack get’s his Buffett rule passed, don’t invest it and face a 100% capital gains tax increase.
I don’t think anybody to whom the so-called “Buffett rule” is relevant will be thinking about either a $50K raise or what to do with it — the proposed increases in the capital gains tax will apply to those for whom $50K is pocket-change.
I didn’t take it that way, especially since DGC has a history of “interesting” ideas. Some places, like Canada, have Good AND SERVICES tax so in general it might be worthy of discussion. However, my first reaction to the idea of taxing tuition specifically is, “You want to make tuition even LESS affordable?” That’s a service many non-wealthy strive to obtain!
Universities will still be competing for the same students with the same amount of money. So I’m arguing that to stay competitive and keep their enrollments up, schools would absorb the tax and lower their tuition by the amount of the tax so their students can still afford it. Make them be the villains if they don’t lower their tuition.
It’s the same as Dan Winslow’s argument that raising the cigarette tax won’t raise prices if we also lower the minimum price the same amount, because distributors will absorb the tax to keep the prices low and stores happy.
time to try to extract the meaning from what our conservatives post. This is one of those times.
No mystery in the case of this particular conservative, for her/him everything is ultimately about their own personal gamete-related bogeyman, or just simple trolling.
Rich people shouldn’t get to have a building named after themselves AND get a deduction fo it.
Wow, you mean rich people don’t even pay income tax on income if they give it to a university? The school steps in front of the government and says, sorry Uncle Sam we’ll be taking that, none of it is for you? Wow.