Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by agitator 1391 days ago
So why not a tax return for all lower income brackets?

Why should someone with a B.A. be fed and not someone with only a high school diploma?

1 comments

It's not about feeding people with a degree. It's about reducing the punishment they had but shouldn't have. Ideally, higher education wouldn't cost extra, or at least not excessively so. But since it does, these efforts are to counteract that existing punishment, nothing more or less.
Should those specially seeking education be capable of doing reasonably simple calculations before taking massive amount of loans? It is not like the information of anything related was exactly hidden.
Who said anything was hidden? Most high school graduates in the US understand that going to college almost certainly means a lifetime of debt. But they also recognize the opportunity cost of being uneducated, which they deem a greater cost than the financial cost of loans. And please don't claim that's invalid, because (a) I agree, which is why I did it, and (b) claiming it's invalid implies that money is the only thing of importance in a person's life, which is kind of dystopian a view.
So they made a decision that opportunity > debt. Thus I see no reason to have others pay for their decisions. They freely chose that option. They should be adult enough to live with it and not ask for handouts with tax payers money.
Do you live on a deserted island alone? If not, then why do you seem to think the opportunity cost of other people being uneducated -- your neighbors, local business owners, motorists driving by your house, voters, politicians, etc. -- is only a cost to them, and doesn't affect your life?