Students should pay for the entire cost of education — later
Saturday, April 21st, 2012
Apr 20, 2012
… it’s cash flow that’s the issue, not the amount. So: What if, instead of paying tuition now, students could pay it later? That is, what if they were staked all or most of the money up front, and repaid it over the course of their working life? Only what if, instead of repaying principal plus interest in fixed amounts, as with conventional loans, they paid a share of their earnings? As they earned more, they’d pay more; as they earned less, they’d pay less. The model is not new. It’s sometimes called an income contingent loan, or a graduate tax. But in reality, it’s not a loan or a tax. It’s an investment.
Tags: budget, ideology, standard of living, youth
Posted in Education Delivery System | No Comments »
Stephen Harper’s long overdue talk about Canada’s pension crisis
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
Jan 30, 2012
We can try to offset the demographic arithmetic directly, whether through increased immigration, longer working lives, or even — to the extent policy can — encouraging people to have more children. And certainly there is much room for improvement in our anemic national productivity performance: just a half-a-percentage point faster growth in productivity, compounding year after year, would make the next generations wealthy enough to bear those projected higher costs without having to endure the implied rise in taxes.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, pensions, standard of living, tax
Posted in Social Security Debates | No Comments »
A know-nothing strain of conservatism
Saturday, August 21st, 2010
August 17, 2010
It isn’t just that the Tories habitually ignore the expert consensus on a wide range of issues—crime, taxes, climate change—it’s that they want to be seen to be ignoring it. It’s the overt antagonism to experts, and by extension the educated classes, that marks the Tory style. In its own way, it’s a form of class war. You can see it in the sneering references to Michael Ignatieff’s Harvard tenure, in the repeated denunciations of “elites” and “intellectuals.” In the partial dismantling of the census, we reach the final stage: not just hostile to experts, but to knowledge. It’s an old game, in some respects… But there’s something different going on here… Harper Conservatives are just as hostile to the interventions of experts on what one might suppose to be their own side… The result is a uniquely nasty, know-nothing strain of conservatism.
Tags: featured, ideology
Posted in Governance Debates | No Comments »
Those budget cuts, in full
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
March 6, 2010
My fellow pundits seem greatly impressed by the budget’s “austerity,” to judge by the headlines and commentary that appeared afterward. Here, then, in graphic form, is just how austere it was…
…spending in this “austerity” budget totals nearly $28-billion more over three years than in last year’s “stimulus” budget. Strange but true…
Posted in Governance Debates | 1 Comment »
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