<p>Similarly, there is a difference between A) realizing that the highway infrastructure, police, firemen, court systems, universities, FDA, etc., is what creates the dynamic necessary for the rich to grow extremely wealthy, and feeling some obligation to the people who support that system/community; and B) feeling opposed to anyone who wants to take a fraction of the money you’ve “earned ON YOUR OWN” (my emphasis added) in order to maintain that system.</p>
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<p>This has been going on for years, and it isn’t getting any prettier. In our area, retail stores would love to pay $8-11/hour and they have hard time finding people to work. Many people in our area are unwilling to work for those wages when half a gallon of OJ or a box of cereal is $4+. Someone would need to work for an hour, and pay taxes on that money first to afford the one box of breakfast cereal.</p>
<p>taxguy, I remember when you told the story about Syracuse, and how you resented paying for the next student attend. If I remember correctly posters were saying that you are not carrying the other student, and there was the usual “everyone receives a discount”. Frankly, I agree with you.</p>
<p>posterX,</p>
<p>Any papers? I’m interested in seeing some peer reviewed work as extreme as what you’re suggesting (i.e. people not being able to afford coffee).</p>
<p>The downturn is really happening.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.newsweek.com/id/43345[/url]”>http://www.newsweek.com/id/43345</a></p>
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<p>Oh, I don’t doubt that a downturn is happening. I doubt that we’re going to enter into some period of extreme stagflation where Americans can’t even afford one bedroom homes or coffee.</p>
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<p>PosterX,</p>
<p>I don’t know that the “average” American is flipping burgers. But let’s use my family, who was far below the median income during my high school and undergrad years. I’ve now graduated from an average university (UCLA) and will have an MA from another average school (UCSD). I afforded it. I somehow find it hard to believe that the “average” person can’t afford to send their child to a university. I mean, UCLA may not be that prestigious, but it’s not half bad.</p>
<p>But, aren’t I entitled to a BMW and Porsche rather than the Dodge and Hyundai I currently have even though I’m unwilling to pay any more money? I mean, other people have them so why shouldn’t I?</p>
<p>It’s not about a Porche versus a Dodge. Both are cars, who cares about a piece of cr&> car that costs $100K and is worth $20K the minute you drive it off the showroom floor. I personally wouldn’t spend more than $500 on a car. It’s about someone with a $70,000,000 penthouse in Manhattan, a $20M cottage in Connecticut, a $10M flat in Paris, a $15M “second home” in L.A., and a $100M yacht, plus another billion dollars in the bank, versus a few thousand families who are out on the street, homeless, because our society doesn’t give a crap about trying to see that every child has food and shelter. Or the few hundred thousand families who can’t save a dime because they spend 80 hours per week working so they can pay off a health care bill for their 3 year old, since they didn’t have health insurance and the day their kid spent in the hospital cost them $80,000. What does that say about us?</p>
<p>It’s also about the guy with the $1,000 per minute salary versus the fact that many young people are avoiding college due to its extremely high cost, preferring instead to join the military and risk their lives to ensure oil keeps flowing to the guy making $1.5 million per day, and the implications of that for our society 10 or 20 years from now when we’re facing greater and greater global competition with a less and less educated workforce, not to mention a few hundred thousand seriously injured veterans who have no decent health care. Unless things like that change, the future of our country is just not very bright.</p>
<p>posterx, i see your (exaggerated) point. </p>
<p>What i think you’re forgetting is that America still has the vastest natural resources in the world.</p>
<p>After your depression, wouldn’t it make sense for the (richer) china to outsource its jobs back to us? We could be rich again!!</p>
<p>China is OVERPOPULATED (to some extent). They wont be self sufficient once everyone is driving cars there.</p>
<p>Also, I can’t vision our country becoming socialist/communist any time soon. </p>
<p>There has always been that rich 1% (see the Gilded Age).</p>
<p>I have a question: It seems than in Europe (particularly England) that everyone is working for the government in some way shape or form. It appears that they have a fake economy. Their $, however, remains strong. I dont get it.</p>
<p>European countries pay a tiny, tiny fraction per person for healthcare, yet their population is far healthier. The reason is because we refuse to create a system that would guarantee basic standards of human decency (i.e. health care, keyword being CARE) to everyone, and we encourage corporate profits in order to line the pockets of the billionaire HMO owners. Our companies and our middle class bears much of the cost of this ineffiency. Trust me, I’ve visited European hospitals extensively - their system is far, far more efficient. They don’t have to kick up 20-50% of the cost of everything to the ultra-rich shareholders of J&J, Humana or whoever. In a European hospital, there is no such thing as “insurance” – even as a foreigner, you will pay about $100 for a full day of care, long visits with several brilliant and articulate doctors, extensive scientific and radiological examinations, full regimen of prescribed drugs, etc. In the U.S. you will pay thousands of not tens of thousands for the exact same (or worse) care. Yes, it is an insult to you as a person to compare the two. But that’s how it is. The reason is because you’re paying for some dude’s second yacht. In Europe, the rich dudes have their yachts - just go to the French Riviera and you’ll see. They just might not have two of them.</p>
<p>Another reason is because their economies are more efficient since they invest much more in long-term projects such as more functional transportation systems. In the U.S., we’re spending just as much money if not more on transport, but a lot more of it is going to the oil refineries, auto manufacturers and tire factories – in other words, it is going up in smoke and producing no real long-term economic benefit/investment except to line the pockets of the top 1% of the top 1% and encourage greater and greater urban sprawl. In Europe, they are building incredible transit networks and bridges that make our transportation system look like something from the Bronze Age. Instead of being covered with rat carcasses and making you go deaf, their subways are covered with wall to wall carpeting and imported teak and you can hear a pin drop even when they reach their top speed.</p>
<p>The third reason is because they aren’t drowning in debt like the U.S. is. The U.S. might not be drowning in debt so much if its currency weren’t massively overvalued, of course, but there are other factors, such as the way the government in this country subsidizes mortgages, especially mortgages for the rich, in order to “encourage homeownership” – which again, actually means “encouraging” waste. Many of those new homes being built out of crappy materials are just causing disinvestment & abandonment in older homes, and they are built so far outside the cities that they create the need to drive/burn oil/waste rubber at even greater and greater rates. Europe is totally different - cities are far more compact and efficient, because they don’t subsidize waste that lines the pockets of the ultra-rich.</p>
<p>I better stop, because I might get shot by the CIA for telling the truth. And to the poster above, I am not exaggerating - the $1000 per minute salary is the AVERAGE for the managers.</p>
<p>Allmusic, nice link. Do people know that spending $4 for a cup of coffee everyday is a $1460 a year habit?</p>
<p>If they cut tuition, prestige come down. If they increase tuition, and give more folks “scholarships”, prestige goes up. Good ol’ Veblen again. </p>
<p>If there IS a problem, it is that list prices are way too low.</p>
<p>Agree, mini. The rich should be charged even more. I hope tuition continues to rise rapidly and colleges use increased funds to distribute greater financial aid.</p>
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<p>That’s a clear exaggeration.</p>
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<p>Yes, because the same CIA that now looks at open source information because of the poor state of the clandestine service is really worried about posters on college admissions sites…</p>
<p>posterX, you still haven’t presented any decent peer reviewed economic papers that back up your claims. By the way, I’ve been in some of the best trains in the world (Japan), and trust me… you can’t hear a pin drop. Not that we shouldn’t invest in such things, but oh well.</p>
<p>By the way, you’re ignoring a few key differences between the US and European countries when it comes to how they developed-- size, population, and type of government. Federalism isn’t exactly geared toward rapid change; in fact, the whole point is that it AVOIDS rapid change. Besides, go to rural Japan and you know what you see? SPRAWL. More land encourages sprawl.</p>
<p>“More land encourages sprawl” I don’t think that’s accurate at all. Sprawl is driven directly by government policies that set how easy it is to consume and waste land, gasoline & oil, not by whether land is there or not. If you subsidize mortgages to the extent that our country does through the Fed (tax deductions, etc), and only put a tiny tax on gasoline that doesn’t even pay for the roads we need (look at Minneapolis), you’re going to have massive sprawl, larger cars, more oil burned, and little investment in older properties. Europe has plenty of land, and very little sprawl, because they don’t have such policies and charge for gasoline what it actually costs. Fly into CDG and you’ll fly over the roofs of thousand year old farmhouses and see the tractors and corn. Fly into JFK or EWR and you’ll first spend 40 minutes flying over sprawl. Just look out the window of the airplane and you’ll see what I mean. Sometimes I will be flying into a major European city and think that the pilot is lost and/or out of his mind, because I won’t see any development until I land. Fly into SVQ and it looks like you are about to land in the desert. Visit a mid-sized European town and you’ll only need to walk about four or five blocks out from the center before you hit an endless stretch of farmland; visit a small town in America and you have a 3-mile-long strip mall lined by chains, which also benefit from the government’s policies. Again, the U.S. is investing in sprawl, gas guzzling, waste and consumer goods in order to line the pockets of the ultra, ultra-rich; Europe is investing in long-term community assets that will actually be worth something in 10 or 20 years and contribute to the health of their societies as a whole. Incidentally, they don’t have a “fake” economy – they also export a lot of things that are incredibly valuable.</p>
<p>As far as the papers go, I don’t have time to go into JSTOR and drag out links for you, but also, economists generally don’t try to predict what the price of coffee will be because, like I said with university endowment growth, values are very relative measures, especially when “Bretton Woods II” collapses in the near future.</p>
<p>posterX,</p>
<p>You don’t have time to go into JSTOR, but you have time to make strong claims? Look, I’m more than willing to admit that you may be right to an extent (it’s hard to tell with the exaggerations you make), but you have to back up some of these claims. All of my economics coursework here at UCSD has suggested that while changes are going to happen, a serious crash is unlikely given the state of the world economy. </p>
<p>Furthermore, you’re missing the point with sprawl. Farmland isn’t “undeveloped” land. It’s land in use. We could get into the issues of subsidies and whether European cities are being choked by over-reliance on domestic agriculture, but that’s a different story. Suffice it to say, more land does strongly correlate with more sprawl-- look at NYC at 10,500/sq. km vs. LA at 3100/sq. km. What was likely the key difference? For one, Los Angeles had a lot more room to breathe!</p>
<p>But let’s compare NYC to other major cities:</p>
<p>London: 4700/sq. km
Berlin: 10,000/sq. km
Tokyo: 5800/sq. km
Paris: 24,000/sq. km
Rome: 2000/sq. km</p>
<p>It seems to me that population densities wildly vary, so we’d have to use other measures. However, have you been to Asia? Sprawl is everywhere there! Tokyo, Shanghai, etc. The only major city in Asia that has managed to avoid onerous sprawl is Hong Kong. And what does HK lack?</p>
<p>Land.</p>
<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density</a></p>
<p>Notice how much lower the US is on the population/sq. km ranking. Honestly, do you think that the Japanese live in tiny houses because they WANT to?</p>
<p>And another question comes up in my mind.</p>
<p>Just because top schools in other countries have lower price tags, do they necessarily provide more social mobility? I know that in Japan, for example, Tokyo University and other top schools are usually only attainable for more affluent students. It’s rare that you hear rural kids getting the chance to attend a top university in Japan, simply because the families can’t afford the necessary preparation (after school school, etc.) I remember reading an article in The Economist that Oxbridge were seriously concerned with their inability to draw more qualified poorer students, and that a lot of that was a consequence of their resources up until college.</p>
<p>Is the price tag really what’s keeping people out? Or is it another set of factors that colleges maybe have less control over.</p>
<p>And I still would like to hear how I, on a very low income, managed to graduate from my (at least) average university if there are so many barriers.</p>
<p>posterX:</p>
<p>I think you missed my point. My Dodge and Hyundai get me just as far as a BMW or Porsche albeit less expensively and probably with fewer trips to the repair shop. I feel that my kids studying at UCLAri’s alma maters will be able to do just as well as if they studied at HYPS… Some won’t agree with me but that’s my belief. I ‘could’ have spent more money to send them to an expensive private school but I chose not to (they didn’t want to go anyway). I ‘could’ have spent less money to send them to less expensive colleges but I chose to send them where they are instead. I don’t feel a private college is any more obliged to charge any less than the market will bear than I think BMW or Porsche should. It’s a private U - let them charge what they want. People don’t ‘need’ to go to the private U, it’s just that some ‘want’ to. Not going to an expensive private U or even not going to any U doesn’t preclude one from being successful. A number of the public colleges are actually ranked higher than many private colleges anyway. It’s actually surprising how inexpensively one can obtain a college degree if they choose that route.</p>
<p>If you think Europeans aren’t paying for their medical care think again. Have you seen what they pay in income taxes, fuel taxes, VAT taxes, and taxes of every other sort? I still remember walking by a car dealership in Sweden and noting that the tax on a new car purchase was MORE than the actual cost of the car excluding tax. I recently got back from a driving vacation in Europe where I was paying more than double for fuel with that differential all taxes.</p>
<p>I’m very happy to be living in what I consider the land of opportunity. It might not be perfect but I can think of few places I’d rather be. Apparently there are many thousands of others who think so as well judging from the large numbers of people willing to sacrifice everything to come to this country.</p>
<p>I find it interesting that people in the US both defend private sector autonomy, and attack private universities for being exclusive.</p>
<p>Then again, they also attack top publics for being exclusive, so really it just comes down to people wanting their cake and to eat it too. Yes, there is something to be said for having strict controls on education. But look at schools like Oxbridge and Tokyo U. and their constant money woes, and all of a sudden a place like Harvard sounds pretty nice if you’re a grad student.</p>
<p>mini notes, " If they cut tuition, prestige come down. If they increase tuition, and give more folks “scholarships”, prestige goes up. </p>
<p>Actually Mini, I know how to increase prestige of a university,but it has NOTHING to do with scholarships. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that a university’s rankings and admission scores would skyrocket using the following technique:</p>
<p>First, the university raises tuition by at least $1,000 more than necessary for inflation costs. Smaller colleges may have to raise it by $2,000 for at least two to three years.</p>
<p>Second, using a large university of $35,000 students as an example, this would increase overall revenue by $35,000,000 in the first year alone. This money would be placed in endowment and NOT spent.</p>
<p>Third, use two-thirds of any interest revenue and endow 50 new chairs per year in different departments, where each department would get between 1-3 of these endowed chairs. This may take as much as two to three years to reach all departments. I would slowly wait till faculty leave to endow the chair in that department. I would seek out very well-known folks for these chairs.</p>
<p>Result: The university would attract top notch talent,which would substantally raise the peer review ranking of US News and other rankings,which inturn would result in better students for both undergrad and graduate. This means higher admission standards and better retention. Ergo- more prestige.</p>
<p>Notice, scholarships have nothing at all to do with this! In fact, need based scholarships might be a nice thing to talk about,but they won’t be as effective as the method outlined above.</p>
<p>I will admit that giving large scholarships can attract top folks such as the endowment at Yale that gives free tuition to graduate music students. However, this can only be done with one or two departments unless the university is very small (Cooper Union) or has a huge enough endowment to pull this off each year.</p>