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Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

"Free" is covered by taxes already paid. So making university "free" would be an additional tax. But instead of the attendees paying for them directly, the pay would be spread out. Also, it would change the dynamic of which school you could attend. High School is covered based on taxes in the town paid for by property owners. Some university programs are subsidized by state taxes (like SUNY for New York) and are discounted for residents of the state. This would likely just extend these kinds of programs with a higher state tax.

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We just spent $80bil on the military. Free college is estimated at $65-75bil, so we just take that money, and move it over here and blammo. Free public university for everyone. (:

One can only dream!

With that amount of money, can't you just end poverty directly? Why do so many people treat college like a terminal, intrinsic good?

How would you propose to "end poverty"? Paying all the debt of the poor? But that wouldn't solve the actual problem, only a symptom.

Some view better education as a potential solution because poverty is often directly correlated with the level of education.

To quote Dave Barry, from 1982 but still relevant:

"Now the problem poor people have is obvious: they don't have enough money. They can't afford food, housing, or medical care. The simple, obvious, efficient way for the government to help them is to give them money so they can buy these things. So that is not how the government does it."

This is basically the libertarian argument for a basic income: if we're going to have an expensive welfare state, it should be efficient and it should actually accomplish its stated goals.

poverty is often directly correlated with the level of education.

It's even more directly correlated with the level of money.

Poverty is correlated with education because education is expensive. If the causation doesn't go in the direction you expect, solving poverty with free college might be like solving poverty with free yachts and free diamonds.

>With that amount of money, can't you just end poverty directly?

Actually I don't know. If it is then that's certainly a good use of it and I agree that college is not an intrinsic good but ending poverty is. I suppose it's really a two-pronged problem. (1) We want to raise everybody up out of poverty. (2) We want people to be economically mobile, aka even in the case of UBI no-one wants to be a serf on the CEO's plot.

No, "Free" is covered by printing money which the government does all the time (where does it get money for billions of dollars in military increases? It just appears out of nowhere, handed to military contractors). Taxes are to manage the amount of US dollars in circulation and to constantly create demand for them after the services are created and money is printed.

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