It’s Silly (Election) Season

It scares me that people are so zealous in their support of candidates for the upcoming election. A candidate will toss off some catch phase and people accept the entire program. I’ll pick Bernie Sanders’s “Free Tuition” platform. I don’t know about you, but as a parent of college age kids, I like the idea of free tuition. But lets look closer. (For reference I’m getting my information from this page: https://berniesanders.com/issues/its-time-to-make-college-tuition-free-and-debt-free/ )

OK, so it’s not free tuition. It’s free tuition at public schools and universities. Private schools and universities will not be free. Loosk like my kids aren’t going to Harvard or MIT. And knowing the way government works, the schools aren’t going to get the money they need, so the quality of education will drop. People won’t want to send their kids to public universities since the level of education isn’t as good as they get at a private university. That leads to businesses seeing a degree from a public university as something less than a degree from a private university. (Think a degree from Princeton vs. a degree from community college.)

From the page mentioned above: “The cost of this $75 billion a year plan is fully paid for by imposing a tax of a fraction of a percent on Wall Street speculators who nearly destroyed the economy seven years ago.” So we are covered right? Just like the way money from lottery goes to pay for education. Which it doesn’t. The taxes on “Wall Street speculators” will not go to pay for the schools, but for something else.

But wait, what is a “Wall Street speculator”?

Honestly, the quoted sentence above is so full of preconceptions that it can be considered propaganda. I’d grant that there are some rich folks who are “Wall Street speculators”, but I’d wager that the lion’s share of people considered “Wall Street Speculators” are people running retirement funds. If the government taxes “Wall Street Speculators” the firms running retirement funds are not going to pay those taxes, the taxes will be passed on to the people with money in retirement funds. This means your retirement fund is going to be taxed to pay for free tuition to public colleges and universities. Since we are also pretty sure the money will not go to education (like the proceeds from the lottery) we can also be sure that these taxes aren’t going to public universities either.

I’ve picked on Bernie Sanders, but all the candidates are shading the truth in order to convince people to vote for them. Both Democratic and Republican. I’m, frightened at how poor the current candidates are and terrified that people are fanatically supporting them.

It makes me wonder if people think about what candidates say at all, or if they just hear what they want and accept it without question. Which is even more terrifying.