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Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

Alternate plan: Raise taxes on the wealthy. Use that money to fund the University of California. Spend money on dorms that actually adhere to modern standards and are designed by actual experts and innovators in architecture.

Frustrating that universities have to rely on the whims and quirks of wealthy individuals like this.

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This place cost 1.5B. If you want to give everyone more space and windows then it’s only going to cost more, and that’s before it’s goes over schedule. This is one dorm building for one college. If you play it through, which you have never done, then you would see that even if we took every penny from the rich we wouldn’t be able to do what you said. And by the way, you are in the top 1% wealth bracket globally, so why don’t you put your money where your mouth is and empty your bank account and send it to a family in Myanmar? Then you will be living the redistribution dream you always blather about.

I am, relatively speaking, wealthy. And, yes, I do think my taxes should be higher so other Americans can have access to basic resources like food, shelter, healthcare, and education. I’m sorry this idea angers you. Nothing else in your comment makes enough sense to respond to.

This is how you get to a place where college education is triple the cost of the rest of Europe (and much worse in quality), healthcare is double the cost and much worse in quality, and housing is skyrocketing.

"But I thought subsidizing these things would make them cheaper! Here, take more of my money!!"

Here's a life pro-tip:

When you are spending too much on something, the solution is to spend less, not more.

The idea of paying taxes to help support the people around them truly drives some people nuts. It’s a shame.

The idea that a solution might not require an increase in taxes truly drives people nuts. It's a shame because it explains why the US government spends so much more on education and healthcare than other nations, yet we have such terrible outcomes. But when the only button you are willing to consider is "spend more!", then that's what you end up with -- a broken, bloated, system that is massively overfunded and that massively under-delivers.

I bet you're the type of person that sees a massive, broken software project and just declares "we need to spend more on this to deliver it ontime! Hire more people!"

But hey, maybe I'm wrong. 20% of the nation is employed in delivering healthcare, so if we increase that to 40%, maybe then we'll solve the problem. We must spend more, it's the moral thing to do! We spend triple the OECD on tertiary education, but hey, we really should bump that up to 6x and then we'll finally fix it!

Tax yourself all you want, it won’t solve the problem. The numbers simply don’t work. A wealthy man but not a learned man.

Apparently I’m not learned enough to know to avoid debating random doofuses on the internet. I’ll give you that.

Taxing people won’t make housing cheaper, it has nothing to do with the healthcare crisis and it won’t fix political corruption. Limousine liberals such as you are disconnected from reality and think that the solution to everything is to throw money at it.

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