Bernie Sanders has finally admitted that every working American will have to pay for his unfeasible plans
Source: Bernie Sanders: “Yes, I Will Raise Taxes On Everybody”
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Sorry, Clinton And Sanders, There’s No Such Thing As Free College
Candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, have both promised that if elected, they would put forth legislation that would dramatically reduce tuition and student debt for public universities in one form or another. This opportunity is a lie in itself. In order for the federal government to pay for all these students, it would be necessary for more tax money to get funneled to students who hold no real obligation to complete their degrees, and a lot of students who should not have gone to college in the first place would get degrees they don’t know what to ultimately do with.
The first issue to bring up regarding this progressive scheme to attract millennial voters is the financing of this project. Lindsey Burke, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, pointed out in her Daily Signal article, “Why Free Community College Is Anything But Free”, a fundamental issue with financing tuition free 2-year college alone:
“Once again, the administration is pursuing initiatives to subsidize rising costs, instead of working with Congress on policies that actually would address the driver of college cost increases: the open spigot of federal student aid. Over the past several decades, college costs have risen at more than twice the rate of inflation, thanks in large part to federal subsidies.”
By sending more grants and subsidizing higher education even more, that bad habit only creates the incentive for schools to drive up the costs, the ultimate reason behind soaring tuition rates. Because of this effect, every year students take out thousands of dollars in student loans to cover the cost of an education they can’t afford, in order to get a degree for a job that doesn’t exist or isn’t available, leaving them with debt and unemployment. This betrayal of the American people takes away from ways people can still invest in themselves without being slaves to debts owned by the banks.
The idea behind free community college alone isn’t about greater access to education. In today’s world, information is everywhere thanks to greater access to technologies and the internet, bridging the gaps between social mobility and economic opportunity greater than any point in human history. Looking at great sources like a local library or even the online Khan Academy alone shows just several ways people can access knowledge on their own accord. These resources are free and readily available to the entire public, the only thing that free community college would do is grow faux credentials by inflating the number of degree holders and promote more obtrusive, more burdensome, federal regulation.
The problem behind the average $29,000 student debt in America is obvious, and the reason why Sanders and Clinton don’t want to talk about it is because its extremely easy to win votes by promising to give people something by taking the money, and resources from other people, by use of the government in order to provide it. Burke brings about a common sense solution to address this madness:
“Allow markets in higher education to work by limiting federal subsidies instead of increasing them, and costs will fall for students attending colleges of all types.”
Source: Sorry, Clinton And Sanders, There’s No Such Thing As Free College | FreedomWorks
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Here’s Why Bernie Sanders is Wrong About Everything
Senator Bernie Sanders recently published an op-ed in the Huffington Post where he makes numerous claims about the economy. In typical leftist political theater, his narratives are either grossly misrepresented or outright lies, nor does he include a single citation for his wild claims.
From “stagnant middle class” and “income inequality” to “child poverty” and “evil corporations”, his analysis employs one step thinking and over-generalization to draw incomplete conclusions. I will directly address some of his specific claims.
Income inequality is one of today’s most popular economic myths derived from the misconception that wealth and income are fixed pies. Sanders makes the usual claim of the “1%” having a disproportionate amount of both.
Economic inequality is largely overstated through aggregate statistics, nor is there a connection between inequality levels and overall economic well-being.
In a paper for Columbia University, economists Emmanuel Saez and Wojciech Kopczuk analyzed wealth shares from 1916 to 2000 using more inclusive and exact definitions of income and wealth. They found that “there has been a sharp reduction in wealth concentration throughout the 20th century”. Around the 1920s, the top 1% held about 40% of wealth, but that has remained about 20% in the last few decades. Saez, who worked with Thomas Piketty at one point, postulates that, in 2004, the top 1% held about 18% of total wealth, which is a historic low.
Robert Haig and Henry Simons developed the Haig-Simon metric. Their measurement includes: wages/salaries, transfer payments (such as employer insurance), gifts of inheritance, income in-kind, and net increases in the real value of assets.
In a 2013 paper, economists found that Haigs-Simon is an attractive standard for calculating wealth and income because of its inclusive definition. By employing Haigs-Simon, observed growth of income inequality within tax brackets is dramatically reduced.
Based on the inclusive metric, top income shares have not significantly increased in the last 20 years, and most income growth has been in the bottom 80% of earners. Also, by incorporating accrued capital gains and not just IRS-realized capital gains, economic inequality quickly dissipates.
Leftists such as Sanders often cite the Gini Coefficient, which is the measure of a country’s inequality. The United States ranks next to African countries, while egalitarian Norway ranks next to Afghanistan. The Gini Coefficient might measure inequality to a degree, but, if anything, it proves that income inequality is not associated with economic well-being.
Bernie Sanders must not care to read further. Instead, he bases his claim off incomplete data by adjusting the CPI for inflation, which overstates it, and then excludes fringe benefits, which have doubled since 1970. Why would you when pandering to the base is more profitable?
“Income inequality” is expectedly followed by claims of a “shrinking middle class”. In reality, however, the middle class has “shrunk” upwards to higher incomes.
According to Census Bureau data compiled by the American Enterprise Institution, 61% of families qualified as middle-class income in 1967. They define “middle class” as $25K to $75K per family per year. In the same year, upper-income families, or over $75K, only made up about 16% of families.
Fast forward to 2009 and things have dramatically changed. We have 43% of families in middle class incomes and 38% of families in the upper class. It’s also worth mentioning that lower incomes declined from 22.8% to 17% in that same time period.
A well-respected paper published by NBER further illustrates the increasing wealth and income going to the middle class. According to their findings: “using our broadest measure of available resources – post-tax, post-transfer size-adjusted household income – median income growth of individual Americans improved to 36.7% from 1979 to 2007”.
In other words, by expanding the definition of “income” and “wealth”, much like in the Haig-Simon metric, the narrative changes dramatically. Such a narrative, however, doesn’t make for vote-inducing rhetoric.
Sanders also claims that alongside the “decline of middle class”, there has been a decline in overall economic mobility. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Source: Here’s Why Bernie Sanders is Wrong About Everything