Moshe Koppel and me; Dan Williams on beliefs as signals; Coleman Hughes and the moral dyad; Alice Evans on the case against education; Hess and McShane on the case against progressive education
Taxing private schools is frankly evil. People are fleeing public schools because they have no control over them like every other socialized institution, they are taken over and run for the benefit of the employees. Who will reap the benefits of such a tax.
Its also a terrible economic theory if the idea is to force the taxed to rise up, challenge bad schools, and turn them into good ones.
If that were possible, there wouldn’t be the need for hundreds of like minded parents in a give school district to pool their funds and start a new school. It would simply be cheaper to improve the existing one.
By taxing them, you’ll just destroy a free enterprise and push people back into a situation in which they have little control over their own outcomes.
I think maybe "evil" is a step too far, but I share some of these concerns. I'm not a huge fan of the logic of "spending on X is wasteful, therefore we should tax it to fund some other thing that represents a better use of the money in question." Too subjective, too many value judgements involved. As a board certified curmudgeon, probably a third or more of consumer discretionary spending appears mystifyingly wasteful to me, but that doesn't mean I think we should impose consumption taxes on it.
I say "evil" is probably not a step too far, because a cursory public choice analysis makes clear that the effect of such a policy will be the opposite of what's intended.
The stated aim is to reduce the effect of status and elite power.
The obvious effect is to concentrate it and eliminate competition.
I long for the good old days politics wasn't such an obvious effort to crush any competition.
This comment seems like a good example of the moral dyad discussed at the top of the post. You see your opponents as coldly competent, strong agents with low morals.
Not in practice. I see most groups as coalitions of "bootleggers and baptists".
True believers in what we might call "naive policy making" and cynics who think in terms of profit maximization.
In this case, a "true believer" has to be so naive, and so unwilling to even consider the second-order effects of what they're proposing as to beggar belief. That is, the kind of policy wonk who promotes these ideas has high morals and but is weak and incompetent.
The local teacher's union, on the other hand, is very competent and very strong. They'll immediately support this policy. As to morality...
... I won't say that they're "immoral", but I'd rather say that all of society has moved to a lower, more sociopathic trust state.
Amoral maybe? I think the naive see Lions and Lambs. The cynic sees Jackals and Jackals.
I am inclined to agree. I am not sure what the goal in taxing private schools, even very expensive ones would be. If parents are spending a ton on private schools as a differentiating mechanism, taxing the school tuition just moves the the spending to some other differentiating mechanism, like private tutors or camps or something.
Instead of taxing private schools we should lower the subsidies to colleges and enlarge school choice at the K-12 level. College is the big signaling split that causes problems for the poor, yet their taxes go to pay for tons of it while they are largely priced out for multiple kids, and allowing better access to quality K-12 helps their problems of basic education a great deal. In short, we should focus on spending less money and time on schooling while getting more education for the time spent in school.
This proposal would actually EXACERBATE the status seeking differentiation mechanism. The truly rich and elite will pay the tax and stay "high status". The "petit bourgeois" are the ones that will get pushed back into the crappy public schools where they have no say. They get demoted to "low status".
You may wish to look into the structure of state level taxes, the source of much university funding. Most state taxes are of the type that hits everyone, like sales tax, property tax and gasoline taxes. So while federal taxes land very lightly on the poor, state level taxes tend not to. Rich people pay more in taxes at every level, no doubt about that, but plenty of state level taxes come from the poor. Certainly it doesn't make much sense to take money from those who didn't go to college to subsidize some people going to college who will make much more money afterwards.
1 “College is the big signaling split that causes problems for the poor, yet their taxes go to pay for TONS of it...“
2 Colleges and universities have indirect benefits to all, whether a student or not. We can argue whether they are worth the cost or what govt spends but I don't think you'll convince me the poor get less than they pay in.
3 Gas taxes go toward roads, not colleges.
4 You are correct that state taxes (and SS) tend to hit the poor hardest. We can argue how much they pay in other state taxes and how much goes to colleges but given 1 and 2 above I see no point.
1: How would you like to measure the amount of college payed for by taxes that the poor pay? By pound of student, pound of administrator, or pound of coinage spent? By any measure the poor are paying for a great deal of college expense that they will never utilize themselves so that the rich can.
2: So do clothing stores, but it would be crazy to say we ought to subsidize them. Everything has potential positive and negative externalities, it is just how things are. Further, considering the horrible culture that comes out of the colleges it is as likely a net negative to the poor as a positive. I doubt that "defund the police" has really been a net benefit for them, nor the entire edifice of madness that pushed it.
4: Your assumptions in 2 are foolish, and you can't seem to wrap your head around the notion that people who don't go to college are taxed to subsidize those who do go to college, or the colleges directly, together with the fact that those who don't go to college are on the poor end of the spectrum and those who do go to college are on the rich end, along with those who run the colleges. So the poor are paying taxes so the rich can play their signaling games, at the same time putting the poor on the wrong side of the "must have a degree to apply for this job" fence.
You made the claim. You tell me your basis for saying the poor pay “tons” towards colleges.
You are correct that taxes are mostly fungible. Do you think the poor pay a larger share of taxes than the share of benefits they receive?
I agree much of public spending on colleges is less than fully effective and some is probably counter-productive. That doesn't change where I've disagreed with you.
Whatever negatives might be attributable to colleges, I disagree they are a net negative.
Whatever their net cost-benefit, colleges contribute towards the advancement of science and product development that enhances our standard of living. In what way are clothing stores comparable to this? I fail to see your analogy.
Gas tax going to trains and public transit still isn't going to colleges. Please stay on topic.
We have different assumptions. Even if we agreed on the correct assumptions, we'd still probably have different opinions. You've presented zero evidence my assumptions are wrong but feel free to call my assumptions foolish. I’m not the one who said the gas tax supports colleges, and then on top of that try to defend the claim by saying they go towards public transit.
Not to mention the fact that the amount of money the college gets that comes from the poor is not the relevant point, but rather the amount of money taken from the poor to pay for colleges. Arguing "the idea that taxes paid by the poor is more than a negligible piece of college funding is beyond ludicrous" is like saying "Hey, the banks hardly stole any money from you compared to all the money they stole. So what are you complaining about?" The amount of the total taken isn't the point.
"If you have the choice between leaving your child a million dollars or leaving her with a good education ..."
The problem with that hypothetical is that you can't "leave your child ... a good education". A good education only happens when the child is capable of it (i.e., is smart enough) and wants it and works at it. All "good schools" turn out to be schools that have a large proportion of young people like that. All "bad schools" turn out to be schools that have a small proportion of young people like that.
This is obscured by the fact that smart parents who care about education generally live in areas that spend a lot on schools. But they also tend to have children who are smart and care about school. On the other hand, some of the "worst" school systems--like Washington, DC--spend way above the average. The difference in results is caused by the students.
"He ends with a hope that we will adopt a social norm of truth-seeking, so that the incentive to coordinate on irrational beliefs goes away. I think that is a lame and naive hope. I do not think that we can overcome irrationality at the individual level, or even at the group level. It is at the institutional level that we need to focus. There will always be groups within society that coalesce around irrational beliefs. We’re fine as long as they don’t take over important institutions. That universities have been taken over by irrationality is something a lot of us perceive and worry about, correctly. We will either fix the broken institutions, replace them, or watch them eat away at civilization."
I'm a bit confused by your reasoning here. Do you think that our epistemic behaviour - how we reason, communicate, how we form our beliefs, and so on - is insensitive to social incentives? Or just to social norms? If the latter, why do you think that? It seems like there really are important differences in the kinds of epistemic norms enforced by different communities. As I link in the paper, in some subcultures people don't feel compelled to base their beliefs on evidence at all or to respond to counter-evidence. I think many things that we (i.e, highly-educated people in 21st century Western countries) take for granted - i.e., that one should be able to provide epistemic justifications of one's beliefs, that these justifications should meet certain standards, that it is generally good to avoid being clearly partisan, etc., - are in fact the result of social-epistemic norms that are, historically speaking, very rare.
I agree about the importance of institutions. However, even here I'm a bit confused by your reasoning. One thing institutions like universities work when they work well is because of the presence of norms governing how debate should take place, encouraging a diversity of viewpoints, ensuring that people don't attack other people's character but rather address the substance of their arguments, and so on. These are all norms, no? And aren't norms an essential part of institutions? To the extent our institutions are failing to live up to such norms - and I agree - the answer is to enforce better norms.
Haven't irrational beliefs already taken over important institutions, and not just the universities? Just a few days ago you posted a link to Rob Henderson's on the divergence between elite and non-elite opinion, and most of the beliefs of the elite who control important institutions in the government and the private sector seem irrational to me. Here is a partial list of such beliefs: 1) the transgender thing -- sex is non-binary, and men can transition to women, and women to men, through hormone therapy and surgical procedures; 2) climate change - we can influence the climate in a desired direction by transitioning to renewables and a plant-based diet, modern societies that are heavily dependent on a reliable electrical grid can survive the transition to intermittent and low-density sources of energy, shifting to a plant-based diet won't result in mass starvation (unless mass starvation is the goal?), the coverage of large areas of the earth's landmass required by renewables and the mining of minerals associated with batteries won't result in massive environmental degradation, and so forth; 3) DEI - shifting from merit-based hiring and promotion to a selection system based on immutable characteristics won't result in a decline in competence; 4) foreign policy - military intervention can be used to spread liberal democracy around the world, the mere provision of weapons to Ukraine will enable them to defeat Russia and drive the Russians from Crimea and the Donbass, the Russian economy is fragile and the Russian military is stupid and incompetent.
To steelman those 4 sets of beliefs from a reality-based elite perspective:
1) Humans, as an evolved species, are not intelligently designed. There is plenty that can go wrong. The genetic program that tells you "I am a man" or "I am a woman" runs at a different time than the one that differentiates penis from clitoris, testicular sac from labia, etc. Some times the result is a mismatch. Some times the programs don't run right. A not inconsiderable number of people are born with underdeveloped sexual parts or partial male and partial female parts.
2) Plant foods generally take fewer resources, and cost less, than meat foods that are equivalent in protein, fat, and calories. Other things being equal, "shifting to a plant-based diet" would lead to less starvation. There would, of course, be an environmental cost to covering large areas with solar panels and "mining of materials associated with batteries" but the trade-off would be less cost associated with mining, processing, and using coal, natural gas, and petroleum.
3) Since no group is inherently more competent than another, forcing there to be equal "representation" of every group will not result in any long-term decline in competence. [If you want to honestly argue against this, you have to bite the bullet and argue that groups do indeed differ.]
4) Military intervention in the form of World War II brought liberal democracy to Germany and Japan (or at least it was the necessary condition for there to be liberal democracy in those places). Of course, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown us it is not so easy. It's certainly looking like Ukraine cannot take back Crimea and the Donbass but letting Putin invade with no response on our part would have been morally wrong. Russia does indeed have problems with their economy and military but at five times the population, they are not going to get pushed back any further. The problem now is to somehow find "peace with honor".
In reverse order: 4) Defeating Germany and Japan militarily was a precondition for bringing liberal democracy to these countries, but some if not most of our military interventions since WWII (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan) have fallen short of this objective, we resorted to nukes to defeat Japan, and the Red Army fighting on the Eastern Front was critical to achieving military victory over Germany. "Peace with honor" was the Nixon/Kissinger formula for extricating ourselves from Vietnam. Enough said. If our foreign policy elites based their decisions on reality, they would never have intervened politically and militarily in Ukraine in the first place and thereby avoided allowing themselves to get indirectly entangled in a land-based war of attrition with the latest incarnation of the Red Army, the very kind of war that plays to Russian strengths. Don't fight unwinnable wars. 3) I phrased my statement of this belief carefully, without reference to the use of merit in combination with immutable characteristics, but if there were no differences 'on average' between different groups, elites would not have to resort to practices like lowering standards, or jettisoning the use of SAT scores and other kinds of tests designed in theory to assess merit, to achieve equal representation. This topic has been covered many times on this Substack. 2) We don't have the information necessary to assess the trade-offs you identify in your 'steelman' arguments, but my point is that, based on my experience, most of the people who believe in 'climate change' don't even recognize the existence of such trade-offs to begin with, and indeed, are completely unfamiliar with the concept of a trade-off. 1) I can't understand your word salad. Sex is binary -- men produce sperm, women produce eggs and bear children. No surgery or hormone therapy can change that reality. The state of plastic surgery is such that it is not able to produce a reasonable facsimile of male and female genitalia -- see the latest incarnation of Madonna's face. True intersex individuals are the result of relatively rare genetic anomalies. Finally, most adult males who transition do so because of a weird sexual fetish called AGP. I just want them to stay out of women's restrooms and changing rooms.
I completely agree that there are people with ridiculous ideas among the elite, however you define them. I was just trying to show that there are reasonable positions that people can hold--and that many elites do hold. The positions may be wrong but they aren't crazy.
I'm sorry you thought my comments on 1) were an incomprehensible word salad. So let me try again. Many people have an idea of sex that is binary, that there is some Platonic essence of sex, that everyone is one or the other. Alas, nature isn't so neat. Many people are XX or XY but some are XXY or have defective X. The majority of people are born with either male or female genitalia but a not inconsiderable minority are not. They simply don't fit in that binary. Statements like "everyone is either male or female" are not an accurate description of reality. That doesn't mean that male and female, men and women are not useful categories most of the time. But they do not exhaust the whole of the human population.
Many people go from words (ideas) to reality. "I know that sex is binary. Therefore, any people who don't fit that binary can't really be. Or maybe they do exist, but they don't matter. Maybe they're defective, or sick. Because they don't fit my idea and my idea must be right." I try to go from reality to words. Male and female are very useful words but they don't capture the totality of human experience. (And are also inadequate for a number of animals out there.)
These 4 sets of beliefs are also irrational in the sense that 1, 2 and 3 are in conflict with 4. The US will not be able to wield hard power effectively if its military is run incompetently and its energy system is degraded, which would compound existing problems in the procurement of weapons systems. And outside the West, most people in other countries think (2) is a sign that the West has gone crazy, making it difficult for the US to 'win hearts and minds' (exercise 'soft power'). I'm stealing here from a book review of Emmanuel Todd's The Defeat of the West, wherein he apparently argues that Putin is able to wield soft power by upholding (or at least pretending to uphold) traditional family values. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot.
My districts proposed spending per pupil will be ~$22k this year. This despite enrollment below pre-COVID. It's spending in 2019 was ~$14k.
They closed the schools for two years. They passed around a transgender rapist from school to school. The school board had the FBI investigate parents and kept a blacklist of parents they wanted persecuted. And the result is they get more money.
The private school that my oldest went to is struggling to operate at $10k a year tuition.
Education is by far my biggest issue but I see little progress on the matter. School vouchers are only happening in red states, they are usually half what the public schools get, and they are often income capped. Texas can't even pass vouchers. Florida and Arizona are the only states with "real" vouchers, and again they are still only a fraction of public spending.
I don't think taxing private school tuition, even above a cutoff, has much value. The entire purpose of the tuition at high tuition schools is to keep the poors out. Making it more expensive just does more of that.
The vast majority of private education is small religious schools trying to operate for half the per pupil spending as the local public schools. Start taxing private education and I guarantee it will end up hurting them eventually.
One could restrict luxury taxation to higher education, or to tuition at schools at younger ages only to the extent it exceeds local public school per capita budget. You could also just get rid of government student loans and tax exemptions.
Still, I am not much persuaded by the reported estimated elasticities, and it seems to me such taxes would have utterly negligible impact on rat race expenditures or fertility rates.
I noticed that they consider 20,000/student-year as excessive but when you look at the real public school cost in Ca. <https://californiapolicycenter.org/californias-k-12-spending-exceeds-20000-per-pupil/> you are above this level already. The private schools don't get to bury costs like retirements, or capital costs, or maintenance cost, etc. as other budget items in the state.
We are paying 57K/yr for two grandchildren as my son in law became unemployed. Considering that our planning horizon is a decade at maximum and that our kids and grandchildren will get out estate (if any) anyway, and that if we run out of retirement it will be at the end where the only people getting stiffed will be the medial community which gets 50% of its gross income in the last 6 mo of life. I don't want to become a cash-cow for the medical community anyway.
Your thoughts on taxing education spending remind me of two things:
1) a recent article about a college counselor who charges a fortune to help get your child into an ivy league school. One father at Trinity (a top private school in NYC) offered him $1.5 million NOT to work with any of his child’s classmates that year.
2) an old acquaintance who has made money at a hedge fund. Someone complained to him that Horace Mann (another top private school) was $60,000. He replied that he wished it was $600,000 so that it would become even more exclusive.
When I hear the proposal to tax educational all I can think of is how that sounds like preferring communism over capitalism. More specifically, let's make everyone equally poor.
And I get that only taxing over some threshold minimizes the damage but I still see more bad than good, Nevermind how in practice this would likely become a bureaucratic big government mess with all kinds of complicated, inefficient loopholes
Require all colleges getting tax exemptions to have at least 30% Republicans as professors. As staff. As decision makers on the Board of Trustees. Also 30% Democrats.
For Diversity and Inclusion!
Congressional Dems create a partisan Dem group and Reps a partisan Rep group in the Dept. of Educatiom. These groups control the Boards of the colleges getting tax breaks—voluntary, merely a requirement to get the unearned tax exemption. Those on the Board control the hiring and monitoring and affirming Republican views.
Certainly not perfect, but far better than what we have.
We need to evolve to be honest about accepting political disagreements among elites. By cutting off govt money & tax benefits from the anti-Republican orgs.
Discriminating against hiring Republicans has long been illegal, but also as common as illegally driving too fast.
“But officer, I’m sure I was less than 10 over the limit”.
I imagine such a rule here in Massachusetts. The state Republican Party is pretty small and many people would call the leaders RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Lots of not at all conservative people join the Republican Party for the job possibility. The leaders accept them and do indeed appoint many of them to their 30%.
Over time, this has the effect of pulling the Republican Party to the left. Meanwhile, these new Republicans don't act any differently than they would have if they'd stayed Democrats.
There already is in place a type of "tax the schools with high tuition and redistribute it to the poor" in the form of needs-blind admission. Tuition fees are very high at many schools, and rich parents pay the high fees. Meanwhile, this price discrimination makes it a bit easier for children from poor families to attend high-prestige colleges. These data are old, but they indicate that roughly between a quarter and a third of students pay the full price. http://www.studentaidpolicy.com/who-pays-full-sticker-price-for-a-college-education.html
A progressive consumption tax would act somewhat like the luxury tax on private tuition. [The first $X could be considered investment and only the remainder as taxed consumption.]
“...the great evil of taxation is to be found, not so much in any selection of its objects, as in the general amount of its effects taken collectively.” --David Ricardo
Ricardo’s observation might be able to be read two different ways. Taxation of education is evil, yet so is taxation of food, shelter, clothing etc. etc. When one industry is spared, others are disadvantaged. And rent-seeking is encouraged. Resources are misallocated. And the dead weight loss from taxation generally is increased. And the interest grows on the debt that otherwise might have been reduced absent the exemption from tax. And the objects of selective taxation invariably reflect the irrational signaling, hysteria and hyperbole labeling everything and anything a “negative externality” and this, consistent with Dan Williams, is what binds the establishment into a cohesive faction. Which is why I would say that “Pigouvian taxation,” as called for in the journal article to which Alice Evans refers, is evil. A constitutional amendment providing that the sole source of Federal tax revenues would be a one fixed rate sales tax across the board would be something of a marginal improvement over the current dystopian nightmare and one which a massive reduction in spending would only complement.
The Evans article is not too clear, at least to me, about whether she is talking about additional taxes strictly on the hagwon night schools or on private schools in general. Hagwons are private and for-profit and pay taxes already. The journal article to which she links makes no mention of taxes already being paid, but this is pretty much par for the course among proponents of Pigouvian taxes.
South Korea has mandatory education laws but finances both public and private schools. So substantial numbers attend private rather than public:
“About 15 percent of primary and secondary schools in Korea are private, most at the secondary school level. Private schools receive public funding. In return, they do not charge school fees for compulsory education and cannot charge higher fees for upper secondary education than public schools charge. Private schools adhere to the national curriculum, and teachers are required to meet the same standards for teacher certification as in public schools. The key difference is that teachers are employed directly by the school rather than by the Ministry, which means that they are not required to rotate among schools, as are public school teachers. In 2009, the government granted increased autonomy for curriculum and student selection to a small group of private upper secondary schools referred to as autonomous schools, which can charge higher tuition fees and do not receive government subsidies. “
In addition, per Wikipedia 83% of South Korean 5 year olds attend hagwons. South Korea also performs very well internationally on the PISA, currently ranked #5 in the world. Making education reform the panacea for fertility in one of the most densely populateduntries in the world seems like the all too typical FAFO move that we can depend upon “the experts” to generate. When China outlawed private education, it just continued underground.
Coleman Hughes writes: "They accuse white people of being competent agents of evil—of having a disposition toward moral corruption even if they are otherwise competent, unlike black people and people of color generally, who are considered morally pure."
Americans rightly honor Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson for his dissent in Korematsu v. United States, which included the following statement:
"[I]f any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable. Even if all of one's antecedents had been convicted of treason, the Constitution forbids its penalties to be visited upon him,... But here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign."
Today, the Left honors Jackson while engaging in the same racism that he denounced – the same racism that drove 120,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps.
Before we go about tinkering with taxing private schools that have very high tuitions shouldn’t we talk about the awful incentives for public education?! And consider ways of introducing more competition into the education market?!Thales Academy in North Carolina offers a top notch private school education for 6K per year! Imagine what schools would emerge if families didn’t have to pay for public school on top of their private school tuition. How can you ever expect to free poor families from public schools if they have to pay for both!!!?
Let’s start talking about the First Amendment in regard to education. What is the difference between education and religion? They are both means by which we learn. Yet, we allow Congress to respect establishments of education? This promotes secular religions like DEI!
So the South Korea taxing education idea reminds me to say how unjust it is for Americans to be respecting an establishment of religion (e.g. DEI, climate change alarmism, etc) with tax dollars. Do we not have the self-respect to stand up for ourselves and our rights?
Taxing private schools is frankly evil. People are fleeing public schools because they have no control over them like every other socialized institution, they are taken over and run for the benefit of the employees. Who will reap the benefits of such a tax.
Its also a terrible economic theory if the idea is to force the taxed to rise up, challenge bad schools, and turn them into good ones.
If that were possible, there wouldn’t be the need for hundreds of like minded parents in a give school district to pool their funds and start a new school. It would simply be cheaper to improve the existing one.
By taxing them, you’ll just destroy a free enterprise and push people back into a situation in which they have little control over their own outcomes.
I think maybe "evil" is a step too far, but I share some of these concerns. I'm not a huge fan of the logic of "spending on X is wasteful, therefore we should tax it to fund some other thing that represents a better use of the money in question." Too subjective, too many value judgements involved. As a board certified curmudgeon, probably a third or more of consumer discretionary spending appears mystifyingly wasteful to me, but that doesn't mean I think we should impose consumption taxes on it.
I say "evil" is probably not a step too far, because a cursory public choice analysis makes clear that the effect of such a policy will be the opposite of what's intended.
The stated aim is to reduce the effect of status and elite power.
The obvious effect is to concentrate it and eliminate competition.
I long for the good old days politics wasn't such an obvious effort to crush any competition.
This comment seems like a good example of the moral dyad discussed at the top of the post. You see your opponents as coldly competent, strong agents with low morals.
Not in practice. I see most groups as coalitions of "bootleggers and baptists".
True believers in what we might call "naive policy making" and cynics who think in terms of profit maximization.
In this case, a "true believer" has to be so naive, and so unwilling to even consider the second-order effects of what they're proposing as to beggar belief. That is, the kind of policy wonk who promotes these ideas has high morals and but is weak and incompetent.
The local teacher's union, on the other hand, is very competent and very strong. They'll immediately support this policy. As to morality...
... I won't say that they're "immoral", but I'd rather say that all of society has moved to a lower, more sociopathic trust state.
Amoral maybe? I think the naive see Lions and Lambs. The cynic sees Jackals and Jackals.
I am inclined to agree. I am not sure what the goal in taxing private schools, even very expensive ones would be. If parents are spending a ton on private schools as a differentiating mechanism, taxing the school tuition just moves the the spending to some other differentiating mechanism, like private tutors or camps or something.
Instead of taxing private schools we should lower the subsidies to colleges and enlarge school choice at the K-12 level. College is the big signaling split that causes problems for the poor, yet their taxes go to pay for tons of it while they are largely priced out for multiple kids, and allowing better access to quality K-12 helps their problems of basic education a great deal. In short, we should focus on spending less money and time on schooling while getting more education for the time spent in school.
Yep.
This proposal would actually EXACERBATE the status seeking differentiation mechanism. The truly rich and elite will pay the tax and stay "high status". The "petit bourgeois" are the ones that will get pushed back into the crappy public schools where they have no say. They get demoted to "low status".
I'm not sure agree with any of that but the idea that taxes paid by the poor is more than a negligible piece of college funding is beyond ludicrous.
Ok, I totally agree it will shift some spending to related education enhancements.
You may wish to look into the structure of state level taxes, the source of much university funding. Most state taxes are of the type that hits everyone, like sales tax, property tax and gasoline taxes. So while federal taxes land very lightly on the poor, state level taxes tend not to. Rich people pay more in taxes at every level, no doubt about that, but plenty of state level taxes come from the poor. Certainly it doesn't make much sense to take money from those who didn't go to college to subsidize some people going to college who will make much more money afterwards.
1 “College is the big signaling split that causes problems for the poor, yet their taxes go to pay for TONS of it...“
2 Colleges and universities have indirect benefits to all, whether a student or not. We can argue whether they are worth the cost or what govt spends but I don't think you'll convince me the poor get less than they pay in.
3 Gas taxes go toward roads, not colleges.
4 You are correct that state taxes (and SS) tend to hit the poor hardest. We can argue how much they pay in other state taxes and how much goes to colleges but given 1 and 2 above I see no point.
1: How would you like to measure the amount of college payed for by taxes that the poor pay? By pound of student, pound of administrator, or pound of coinage spent? By any measure the poor are paying for a great deal of college expense that they will never utilize themselves so that the rich can.
2: So do clothing stores, but it would be crazy to say we ought to subsidize them. Everything has potential positive and negative externalities, it is just how things are. Further, considering the horrible culture that comes out of the colleges it is as likely a net negative to the poor as a positive. I doubt that "defund the police" has really been a net benefit for them, nor the entire edifice of madness that pushed it.
3: No, they don't. Firstly, money is fungible. Secondly, gas taxes get put to all manner of nonsense, such as trains or public transit, money that should have been coming out of the general budget. For instance: https://reason.org/policy-brief/how-much-gas-tax-money-states-divert-away-from-roads/
4: Your assumptions in 2 are foolish, and you can't seem to wrap your head around the notion that people who don't go to college are taxed to subsidize those who do go to college, or the colleges directly, together with the fact that those who don't go to college are on the poor end of the spectrum and those who do go to college are on the rich end, along with those who run the colleges. So the poor are paying taxes so the rich can play their signaling games, at the same time putting the poor on the wrong side of the "must have a degree to apply for this job" fence.
You made the claim. You tell me your basis for saying the poor pay “tons” towards colleges.
You are correct that taxes are mostly fungible. Do you think the poor pay a larger share of taxes than the share of benefits they receive?
I agree much of public spending on colleges is less than fully effective and some is probably counter-productive. That doesn't change where I've disagreed with you.
Whatever negatives might be attributable to colleges, I disagree they are a net negative.
Whatever their net cost-benefit, colleges contribute towards the advancement of science and product development that enhances our standard of living. In what way are clothing stores comparable to this? I fail to see your analogy.
Gas tax going to trains and public transit still isn't going to colleges. Please stay on topic.
We have different assumptions. Even if we agreed on the correct assumptions, we'd still probably have different opinions. You've presented zero evidence my assumptions are wrong but feel free to call my assumptions foolish. I’m not the one who said the gas tax supports colleges, and then on top of that try to defend the claim by saying they go towards public transit.
Not to mention the fact that the amount of money the college gets that comes from the poor is not the relevant point, but rather the amount of money taken from the poor to pay for colleges. Arguing "the idea that taxes paid by the poor is more than a negligible piece of college funding is beyond ludicrous" is like saying "Hey, the banks hardly stole any money from you compared to all the money they stole. So what are you complaining about?" The amount of the total taken isn't the point.
"If you have the choice between leaving your child a million dollars or leaving her with a good education ..."
The problem with that hypothetical is that you can't "leave your child ... a good education". A good education only happens when the child is capable of it (i.e., is smart enough) and wants it and works at it. All "good schools" turn out to be schools that have a large proportion of young people like that. All "bad schools" turn out to be schools that have a small proportion of young people like that.
This is obscured by the fact that smart parents who care about education generally live in areas that spend a lot on schools. But they also tend to have children who are smart and care about school. On the other hand, some of the "worst" school systems--like Washington, DC--spend way above the average. The difference in results is caused by the students.
Thanks for this, Arnold. You write:
"He ends with a hope that we will adopt a social norm of truth-seeking, so that the incentive to coordinate on irrational beliefs goes away. I think that is a lame and naive hope. I do not think that we can overcome irrationality at the individual level, or even at the group level. It is at the institutional level that we need to focus. There will always be groups within society that coalesce around irrational beliefs. We’re fine as long as they don’t take over important institutions. That universities have been taken over by irrationality is something a lot of us perceive and worry about, correctly. We will either fix the broken institutions, replace them, or watch them eat away at civilization."
I'm a bit confused by your reasoning here. Do you think that our epistemic behaviour - how we reason, communicate, how we form our beliefs, and so on - is insensitive to social incentives? Or just to social norms? If the latter, why do you think that? It seems like there really are important differences in the kinds of epistemic norms enforced by different communities. As I link in the paper, in some subcultures people don't feel compelled to base their beliefs on evidence at all or to respond to counter-evidence. I think many things that we (i.e, highly-educated people in 21st century Western countries) take for granted - i.e., that one should be able to provide epistemic justifications of one's beliefs, that these justifications should meet certain standards, that it is generally good to avoid being clearly partisan, etc., - are in fact the result of social-epistemic norms that are, historically speaking, very rare.
I agree about the importance of institutions. However, even here I'm a bit confused by your reasoning. One thing institutions like universities work when they work well is because of the presence of norms governing how debate should take place, encouraging a diversity of viewpoints, ensuring that people don't attack other people's character but rather address the substance of their arguments, and so on. These are all norms, no? And aren't norms an essential part of institutions? To the extent our institutions are failing to live up to such norms - and I agree - the answer is to enforce better norms.
In any case, thanks for linking to my piece.
Haven't irrational beliefs already taken over important institutions, and not just the universities? Just a few days ago you posted a link to Rob Henderson's on the divergence between elite and non-elite opinion, and most of the beliefs of the elite who control important institutions in the government and the private sector seem irrational to me. Here is a partial list of such beliefs: 1) the transgender thing -- sex is non-binary, and men can transition to women, and women to men, through hormone therapy and surgical procedures; 2) climate change - we can influence the climate in a desired direction by transitioning to renewables and a plant-based diet, modern societies that are heavily dependent on a reliable electrical grid can survive the transition to intermittent and low-density sources of energy, shifting to a plant-based diet won't result in mass starvation (unless mass starvation is the goal?), the coverage of large areas of the earth's landmass required by renewables and the mining of minerals associated with batteries won't result in massive environmental degradation, and so forth; 3) DEI - shifting from merit-based hiring and promotion to a selection system based on immutable characteristics won't result in a decline in competence; 4) foreign policy - military intervention can be used to spread liberal democracy around the world, the mere provision of weapons to Ukraine will enable them to defeat Russia and drive the Russians from Crimea and the Donbass, the Russian economy is fragile and the Russian military is stupid and incompetent.
To steelman those 4 sets of beliefs from a reality-based elite perspective:
1) Humans, as an evolved species, are not intelligently designed. There is plenty that can go wrong. The genetic program that tells you "I am a man" or "I am a woman" runs at a different time than the one that differentiates penis from clitoris, testicular sac from labia, etc. Some times the result is a mismatch. Some times the programs don't run right. A not inconsiderable number of people are born with underdeveloped sexual parts or partial male and partial female parts.
2) Plant foods generally take fewer resources, and cost less, than meat foods that are equivalent in protein, fat, and calories. Other things being equal, "shifting to a plant-based diet" would lead to less starvation. There would, of course, be an environmental cost to covering large areas with solar panels and "mining of materials associated with batteries" but the trade-off would be less cost associated with mining, processing, and using coal, natural gas, and petroleum.
3) Since no group is inherently more competent than another, forcing there to be equal "representation" of every group will not result in any long-term decline in competence. [If you want to honestly argue against this, you have to bite the bullet and argue that groups do indeed differ.]
4) Military intervention in the form of World War II brought liberal democracy to Germany and Japan (or at least it was the necessary condition for there to be liberal democracy in those places). Of course, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown us it is not so easy. It's certainly looking like Ukraine cannot take back Crimea and the Donbass but letting Putin invade with no response on our part would have been morally wrong. Russia does indeed have problems with their economy and military but at five times the population, they are not going to get pushed back any further. The problem now is to somehow find "peace with honor".
In reverse order: 4) Defeating Germany and Japan militarily was a precondition for bringing liberal democracy to these countries, but some if not most of our military interventions since WWII (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan) have fallen short of this objective, we resorted to nukes to defeat Japan, and the Red Army fighting on the Eastern Front was critical to achieving military victory over Germany. "Peace with honor" was the Nixon/Kissinger formula for extricating ourselves from Vietnam. Enough said. If our foreign policy elites based their decisions on reality, they would never have intervened politically and militarily in Ukraine in the first place and thereby avoided allowing themselves to get indirectly entangled in a land-based war of attrition with the latest incarnation of the Red Army, the very kind of war that plays to Russian strengths. Don't fight unwinnable wars. 3) I phrased my statement of this belief carefully, without reference to the use of merit in combination with immutable characteristics, but if there were no differences 'on average' between different groups, elites would not have to resort to practices like lowering standards, or jettisoning the use of SAT scores and other kinds of tests designed in theory to assess merit, to achieve equal representation. This topic has been covered many times on this Substack. 2) We don't have the information necessary to assess the trade-offs you identify in your 'steelman' arguments, but my point is that, based on my experience, most of the people who believe in 'climate change' don't even recognize the existence of such trade-offs to begin with, and indeed, are completely unfamiliar with the concept of a trade-off. 1) I can't understand your word salad. Sex is binary -- men produce sperm, women produce eggs and bear children. No surgery or hormone therapy can change that reality. The state of plastic surgery is such that it is not able to produce a reasonable facsimile of male and female genitalia -- see the latest incarnation of Madonna's face. True intersex individuals are the result of relatively rare genetic anomalies. Finally, most adult males who transition do so because of a weird sexual fetish called AGP. I just want them to stay out of women's restrooms and changing rooms.
I completely agree that there are people with ridiculous ideas among the elite, however you define them. I was just trying to show that there are reasonable positions that people can hold--and that many elites do hold. The positions may be wrong but they aren't crazy.
I'm sorry you thought my comments on 1) were an incomprehensible word salad. So let me try again. Many people have an idea of sex that is binary, that there is some Platonic essence of sex, that everyone is one or the other. Alas, nature isn't so neat. Many people are XX or XY but some are XXY or have defective X. The majority of people are born with either male or female genitalia but a not inconsiderable minority are not. They simply don't fit in that binary. Statements like "everyone is either male or female" are not an accurate description of reality. That doesn't mean that male and female, men and women are not useful categories most of the time. But they do not exhaust the whole of the human population.
Many people go from words (ideas) to reality. "I know that sex is binary. Therefore, any people who don't fit that binary can't really be. Or maybe they do exist, but they don't matter. Maybe they're defective, or sick. Because they don't fit my idea and my idea must be right." I try to go from reality to words. Male and female are very useful words but they don't capture the totality of human experience. (And are also inadequate for a number of animals out there.)
These 4 sets of beliefs are also irrational in the sense that 1, 2 and 3 are in conflict with 4. The US will not be able to wield hard power effectively if its military is run incompetently and its energy system is degraded, which would compound existing problems in the procurement of weapons systems. And outside the West, most people in other countries think (2) is a sign that the West has gone crazy, making it difficult for the US to 'win hearts and minds' (exercise 'soft power'). I'm stealing here from a book review of Emmanuel Todd's The Defeat of the West, wherein he apparently argues that Putin is able to wield soft power by upholding (or at least pretending to uphold) traditional family values. Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot.
The (2) in the should be a third sentence should be a (1), obviously.
My districts proposed spending per pupil will be ~$22k this year. This despite enrollment below pre-COVID. It's spending in 2019 was ~$14k.
They closed the schools for two years. They passed around a transgender rapist from school to school. The school board had the FBI investigate parents and kept a blacklist of parents they wanted persecuted. And the result is they get more money.
The private school that my oldest went to is struggling to operate at $10k a year tuition.
Education is by far my biggest issue but I see little progress on the matter. School vouchers are only happening in red states, they are usually half what the public schools get, and they are often income capped. Texas can't even pass vouchers. Florida and Arizona are the only states with "real" vouchers, and again they are still only a fraction of public spending.
I don't think taxing private school tuition, even above a cutoff, has much value. The entire purpose of the tuition at high tuition schools is to keep the poors out. Making it more expensive just does more of that.
The vast majority of private education is small religious schools trying to operate for half the per pupil spending as the local public schools. Start taxing private education and I guarantee it will end up hurting them eventually.
One could restrict luxury taxation to higher education, or to tuition at schools at younger ages only to the extent it exceeds local public school per capita budget. You could also just get rid of government student loans and tax exemptions.
Still, I am not much persuaded by the reported estimated elasticities, and it seems to me such taxes would have utterly negligible impact on rat race expenditures or fertility rates.
Taxing private schools?
I noticed that they consider 20,000/student-year as excessive but when you look at the real public school cost in Ca. <https://californiapolicycenter.org/californias-k-12-spending-exceeds-20000-per-pupil/> you are above this level already. The private schools don't get to bury costs like retirements, or capital costs, or maintenance cost, etc. as other budget items in the state.
We are paying 57K/yr for two grandchildren as my son in law became unemployed. Considering that our planning horizon is a decade at maximum and that our kids and grandchildren will get out estate (if any) anyway, and that if we run out of retirement it will be at the end where the only people getting stiffed will be the medial community which gets 50% of its gross income in the last 6 mo of life. I don't want to become a cash-cow for the medical community anyway.
Your thoughts on taxing education spending remind me of two things:
1) a recent article about a college counselor who charges a fortune to help get your child into an ivy league school. One father at Trinity (a top private school in NYC) offered him $1.5 million NOT to work with any of his child’s classmates that year.
2) an old acquaintance who has made money at a hedge fund. Someone complained to him that Horace Mann (another top private school) was $60,000. He replied that he wished it was $600,000 so that it would become even more exclusive.
When I hear the proposal to tax educational all I can think of is how that sounds like preferring communism over capitalism. More specifically, let's make everyone equally poor.
And I get that only taxing over some threshold minimizes the damage but I still see more bad than good, Nevermind how in practice this would likely become a bureaucratic big government mess with all kinds of complicated, inefficient loopholes
Require all colleges getting tax exemptions to have at least 30% Republicans as professors. As staff. As decision makers on the Board of Trustees. Also 30% Democrats.
For Diversity and Inclusion!
Congressional Dems create a partisan Dem group and Reps a partisan Rep group in the Dept. of Educatiom. These groups control the Boards of the colleges getting tax breaks—voluntary, merely a requirement to get the unearned tax exemption. Those on the Board control the hiring and monitoring and affirming Republican views.
Certainly not perfect, but far better than what we have.
We need to evolve to be honest about accepting political disagreements among elites. By cutting off govt money & tax benefits from the anti-Republican orgs.
Discriminating against hiring Republicans has long been illegal, but also as common as illegally driving too fast.
“But officer, I’m sure I was less than 10 over the limit”.
All rules are tested.
Real rules are enforced.
I imagine such a rule here in Massachusetts. The state Republican Party is pretty small and many people would call the leaders RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Lots of not at all conservative people join the Republican Party for the job possibility. The leaders accept them and do indeed appoint many of them to their 30%.
Over time, this has the effect of pulling the Republican Party to the left. Meanwhile, these new Republicans don't act any differently than they would have if they'd stayed Democrats.
There already is in place a type of "tax the schools with high tuition and redistribute it to the poor" in the form of needs-blind admission. Tuition fees are very high at many schools, and rich parents pay the high fees. Meanwhile, this price discrimination makes it a bit easier for children from poor families to attend high-prestige colleges. These data are old, but they indicate that roughly between a quarter and a third of students pay the full price. http://www.studentaidpolicy.com/who-pays-full-sticker-price-for-a-college-education.html
A progressive consumption tax would act somewhat like the luxury tax on private tuition. [The first $X could be considered investment and only the remainder as taxed consumption.]
“...the great evil of taxation is to be found, not so much in any selection of its objects, as in the general amount of its effects taken collectively.” --David Ricardo
Ricardo’s observation might be able to be read two different ways. Taxation of education is evil, yet so is taxation of food, shelter, clothing etc. etc. When one industry is spared, others are disadvantaged. And rent-seeking is encouraged. Resources are misallocated. And the dead weight loss from taxation generally is increased. And the interest grows on the debt that otherwise might have been reduced absent the exemption from tax. And the objects of selective taxation invariably reflect the irrational signaling, hysteria and hyperbole labeling everything and anything a “negative externality” and this, consistent with Dan Williams, is what binds the establishment into a cohesive faction. Which is why I would say that “Pigouvian taxation,” as called for in the journal article to which Alice Evans refers, is evil. A constitutional amendment providing that the sole source of Federal tax revenues would be a one fixed rate sales tax across the board would be something of a marginal improvement over the current dystopian nightmare and one which a massive reduction in spending would only complement.
The Evans article is not too clear, at least to me, about whether she is talking about additional taxes strictly on the hagwon night schools or on private schools in general. Hagwons are private and for-profit and pay taxes already. The journal article to which she links makes no mention of taxes already being paid, but this is pretty much par for the course among proponents of Pigouvian taxes.
South Korea has mandatory education laws but finances both public and private schools. So substantial numbers attend private rather than public:
“About 15 percent of primary and secondary schools in Korea are private, most at the secondary school level. Private schools receive public funding. In return, they do not charge school fees for compulsory education and cannot charge higher fees for upper secondary education than public schools charge. Private schools adhere to the national curriculum, and teachers are required to meet the same standards for teacher certification as in public schools. The key difference is that teachers are employed directly by the school rather than by the Ministry, which means that they are not required to rotate among schools, as are public school teachers. In 2009, the government granted increased autonomy for curriculum and student selection to a small group of private upper secondary schools referred to as autonomous schools, which can charge higher tuition fees and do not receive government subsidies. “
(https://ncee.org/country/korea/ )
In addition, per Wikipedia 83% of South Korean 5 year olds attend hagwons. South Korea also performs very well internationally on the PISA, currently ranked #5 in the world. Making education reform the panacea for fertility in one of the most densely populateduntries in the world seems like the all too typical FAFO move that we can depend upon “the experts” to generate. When China outlawed private education, it just continued underground.
Coleman Hughes writes: "They accuse white people of being competent agents of evil—of having a disposition toward moral corruption even if they are otherwise competent, unlike black people and people of color generally, who are considered morally pure."
Americans rightly honor Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson for his dissent in Korematsu v. United States, which included the following statement:
"[I]f any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable. Even if all of one's antecedents had been convicted of treason, the Constitution forbids its penalties to be visited upon him,... But here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign."
Today, the Left honors Jackson while engaging in the same racism that he denounced – the same racism that drove 120,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps.
Before we go about tinkering with taxing private schools that have very high tuitions shouldn’t we talk about the awful incentives for public education?! And consider ways of introducing more competition into the education market?!Thales Academy in North Carolina offers a top notch private school education for 6K per year! Imagine what schools would emerge if families didn’t have to pay for public school on top of their private school tuition. How can you ever expect to free poor families from public schools if they have to pay for both!!!?
Let’s start talking about the First Amendment in regard to education. What is the difference between education and religion? They are both means by which we learn. Yet, we allow Congress to respect establishments of education? This promotes secular religions like DEI!
Woul
d these be fair to characterize as irrational beliefs that, if you hold them, you benefit from a community?
- A human, Adam, was "created" before any other animals, who were then paraded before him for him to choose?
- A human, Noah, lives to the age of 500
- Rivers may be turned to blood, seas may be parted, water turned to wine
- When the infant Krishna opens his mouth, you see the entire universe inside
- A prophet flew to heaven on a winged horse
And countless others.
So the South Korea taxing education idea reminds me to say how unjust it is for Americans to be respecting an establishment of religion (e.g. DEI, climate change alarmism, etc) with tax dollars. Do we not have the self-respect to stand up for ourselves and our rights?