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Comment by Tiksi | Hacker News Reader

> If we taxed our middle class what Germany taxes its middle class, we could afford cheap tuition too.

While I'm in favor of free/cheap education, this made me think of a convincing argument for the student loan / US system. Those who benefit from the education are "taxed" for it in the form of loan payments for a few years, those who don't benefit (directly) from the education are not.

I guess ideally you could balance the benefit to society vs the benefit to the individual getting the education and subsidize it proportionally. But that's obviously not practical so we should probably push closer to the society end of the margin of error.

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I agree that it's not so simple.

> Those who benefit from the education are "taxed" for it in the form of loan payments for a few years, those who don't benefit (directly) from the education are not.

Not only that, but the benefits of free/cheap education largely accrue to the middle and upper classes whereas the lower class also has significantly higher taxes under the European system.

I'm most familiar with the UK where universities like Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Imperial, etc. are all overwhelmingly middle class. I'm sure the pattern is repeated in Europe as well.

>the lower class also has significantly higher taxes

This could be fixed by increasing the taxes on the middle class and up, leaving the lower class taxes the same.

>are all overwhelmingly middle class.

There are likely factors other than cost for people from lower classes to going to university at a lower rate, but it's the opportunity to do so that's important and cost is often the biggest impediment to it.

Yeah I definitely agree with that solution.

> This could be fixed by increasing the taxes on the middle class and up, leaving the lower class taxes the same.

How exactly would you sell that? It requires a certain amount of commitment to furthering society to ask people to pay more in taxes. And there is all this right-wing media and people who will constantly shout "Big Government is taking all your hard earned money!" argument.

Its rather amazing that Europeans have accepted high taxes on middle and upper classes as a fact of life. But then, If you look at history, it was the poor who got taxed the most in pre-revolutionary France, while the rich got away with massive tax cuts. I fear this might lead to something similar in the US in the future: push too many people into poverty and they will rise in revolution.

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