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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Bernie Sanders Wants More Free Stuff. This Time It Is A Free Education. When Will The Libs Find Out There Is An End To The Golden Goose?

U.S.
MARK WILSON / GETTY IMAGES

Bernie Sanders unveils plan for tuition-free public colleges

Presidential candidate's proposed legislation would fund free public education through tax on Wall Street transactions

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plan for making public college tuition more 
affordable is relatively straightforward: He wants the government to
 pay for it. All of it.
On Tuesday, the Democratic presidential candidate and independent
 senator from Vermont introduced legislation intended to eliminate 
tuition fees for undergraduates at all public colleges and universities. 
Annual tuition costs at those institutions add up to roughly $70 billion, 
would require the federal government to compensate for two-thirds 
of that sum, with the states making up the additional third.
“It is a national disgrace that hundreds of thousands of Americans
 today do not go to college, not because they are unqualified, but 
because they cannot afford it,” Sanders said Tuesday at a news 
conference. “This is absolutely counter-productive to our efforts 
to create a strong economy and a vibrant middle class. This 
disgrace has got to end."
College tuition costs have skyrocketed since the middle of the 
This has forced each successive generation of students to take 
on ever-increasing debt: The recently graduated college class 
highest of any time in U.S. history.
As a result, college affordability has emerged as a major policy
 issue in Washington and on the 2016 campaign trail. Hillary 
Clinton, the presumptive presidential frontrunner in the 2016 
Democratic primary, will reportedly soon announce her own 
President Barack Obama has tried to get ahead of the issue as
 well, introducing a proposal in January to offer students two
 years of free community college. Sanders described that plan 
as “an important step forward” — but not all that needs to be done.
Sanders’ proposal has little chance of succeeding in Congress, 
but it provides him with another opportunity to contrast himself 
with Clinton and potentially to exert some leftward pressure on 
her campaign platform. Since announcing his presidential run 
late last month, Sanders has also introduced legislation intended 
to break up “too big to fail” banks. “Too big to fail” is a delicate 
favored candidate in the Democratic race.
Matthew Chingos, research director at the Brookings Institution’s
 Brown Center on Education Policy, said Sanders’ proposal for 
tuition-free public colleges is “obviously a political messaging 
tactic.” Chingos questioned whether making public colleges free 
across the board was the best way to make them more accessible 
to low-income students.
“A lot of affluent families send their kids to college. A lot of 
college students are from families that can pay,” he said. “So do 
we want to make it free for everyone, to make it accessible for 
kids who can’t pay? Or do we want to have a program that’s 
more targeted, more progressive?"
The federal funding for Sanders’s proposal would come from a 
tax on financial transactions. Stock trades, bonds, and derivative
 trading would be taxed at rates of 0.5 percent, 0.1 percent, and 
0.005 percent, respectively. Supporters of the financial transaction 
tax, which they call the “Robin Hood tax,” say it is not only a 
progressive way to raise revenue but would also discourage 
dangerous levels of Wall Street speculation.
recent report from economist Joseph Stiglitz and the Roosevelt
 Institute, intended to provide a comprehensive framework for 
reworking American economic policy, endorsed a financial 
transaction tax as a way to “penalize short-term traders and
 incentivize longer holding periods, thus reducing instability and
 encouraging longer-term productive investment."

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