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News Brief: Phony Outrage Over Sanders' 'Regressive' College Plan (Patreon)

Published:
2019-06-27 16:16:35
Imported:
2026-06

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On this Patreon News Brief we discuss the backlash against Sanders' and Warren's plans to forgive student debt and make college free or close to it. 

Show notes:

Why means testing benefits is not efficient or fair Peter Beresford - The Guardian (Jan 14, 2013)

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An human

small misspeak by adam about higher ed in australia, it's not free for us but you get an inflation-indexed loan from the government that you have to pay back once your income rises above a certain threshold. it seems a lot better than the american system but it still fucking sucks

Citations Needed

Apologies, meant the general principle of welfare state not college but I’ll correct in next episode

Dr. N

There’s kind of a conflation here where you guys make all the arguments against means testing public college (which are all good arguments and public college should 100% not be means tested) but then seem to say that the same line of reasoning would apply to the debt cancellation. However, that’s a different issue for a couple reasons. First, it’s a one time transfer so the sustainability argument doesn’t really apply. But more importantly, Sanders plan is to cancel all debt including private school debt, which is more like saying “yeah if you got some debt sending your kid to Phillips Exeter or some other ridiculous prep school, we’re still gonna pay it off” than it is like saying “Yeah, Donald Trump’s kids can go to public school if they want.” As people like Matt Breunig and Eric Levitz have pointed out there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why you couldn’t exclude private school students (Sorry Neema) or the very wealthy from a cancellation...other than that those people are likely to vote for and donate to Sanders. The two reasons I see why they maybe should be excluded is that, on the one hand, they seem to carry a significant amount of the debt. And on the other, I’m seeing these weird argument now on Twitter where “Actually people who make 250k a year aren’t necessarily well-off depending on what they had to do to get there so if they have debt it should be cancelled”—which is unfortunate because one of the nice things about being on the left is that we’ve historically been able to call rich and privileged people on their shit when they try say they’re the ones struggling.