Comment by aisengard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aisengard | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed that private universities should pay better, but like in any capitalist society they will only pay as much as they need to. In this case, and especially in the absence of graduate student unions (which the GOP also seem primed to do away with), not very much.

The GOP plan does away with the student tax deduction, not to simplify matters, but to punish intellectualism since they're not voting GOP anyway. You can tell, because if they actually wanted to help people, there would have to have been long discussions with heads of universities to come up with a plan to not harm grad students. Obviously, that didn't happen.

I'm not sure universities are to blame for fudging things to, say, get better tax treatment. That's just how the laws are set up. The new plan will do nothing but harm universities, their teachers, and their students. Everyone is still completely correct to blame the GOP for screwing them in this instance.

More generally, there hasn't been time for "long discussions" of any kind, much less with heads of universities (tax legislation of this scope has typically entailed months of hearings, discussions with stakeholders and affected groups, negotiations, and overall vetting of the ideas and their implementation). There will be both intended and unintended consequences, and in the zeal to implement the very specific intended ones, there has been little incentive (and in fact a disincentive) to explore and reduce the space of the unintended ones.

> The GOP plan does away with the student tax deduction, not to simplify matters, but to punish intellectualism since they're not voting GOP anyway. You can tell, because if they actually wanted to help people, there would have to have been long discussions with heads of universities to come up with a plan to not harm grad students. Obviously, that didn't happen.

Alternatively, they didn't have much confidence that the folks who are exploiting grad students would be good consultants about grad student welfare.

And failing that, there are other hypotheses--the current GOP is incompetent when it comes to executing its own agenda. The GOP could generally want to lower/simplify taxes (and I think it does), and it is merely executing poorly.

"Alternatively, they didn't have much confidence that the folks who are exploiting grad students would be good consultants about grad student welfare."

Ok, but then who did they talk to about grad student welfare?

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