Our students represent the future of our country. Yet for 40 million current and former students, their potential is shackled by crushing student debts.
It’s time to free a generation from indentured servitude to Wall Street by abolishing student debt – and making public colleges and universities tuition-free.
Will you stand with me for abolishing student debt and making higher education free?
This week I’ll be voicing these demands at the nationwide Million Student March, because I believe loading students with tens or even hundreds of thousands in debts is not only wrong, it’s bad economic policy.
Student debt prevents young people from using their ingenuity and creativity to re-imagine our economy and society, as each generation should.
We bailed out bankers who crashed the economy with $16 trillion using quantitative easing. Using quantitative easing to repay $1.3 trillion in student debt would unleash enormous productivity and creative power, providing a major boost to the real economy.
And that’s not all. Like a high school degree was in the last century, a college education has become essential for economic security. So we should provide free higher education, like many other countries have done, as a secure start in life to today’s younger generation.
We know that higher education pays for itself: when the GI Bill offered returning soldiers free college education, every taxpayer dollar invested in free higher education was returned 7 times over in increased tax revenue and other public benefits.
The only obstacle to freeing 40 million Americans – and countless more to come – from indentured servitude is Wall Street’s control of the Democratic and Republican parties.
It’s time to abolish student debt and make higher education free – sign and share if you agree!
Please help me spread the word, because if we let 40 million Americans know that they can vote themselves out of debt in November 2016… that’s enough to win a presidential election.
It’s in our hands!
Jill Stein
http://www.jill2016.com/
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-do-european-countries-afford-free-college-2015-6
There is no such thing as “free” anything and especially health care. All of the countries that offer “free” higher education also have much higher tax rates than then U.S. So while it might not cost anything to go to the doctor, just wait until the new higher tax bill rolls in and then you will realize it’s not really “free”.
How about forgiving my car payment and mortgage? The ‘children’ raised on ‘do overs’ are due to learn a life lesson. Work sucks. Suck it up and pay for what you knowingly borrowed
There’s a lot less social mobility in Europe, and less innovation, which means that over time they become poorer vis a vis other places with less red tape. And, the US spends way more on the military, including a large chunk which supposedly goes to defend Europe. That makes a big difference. Europeans tend to own a lot less land, and have smaller space housing per capita which they are more likely to rent as opposed to own. They are less likely to have their own cars and if they do have them they tend to be smaller and used less often. In some respects they are as well off or better off than Americans, in others not so much.
Andy Craig,
Your conclusions are flatly incorrect, you can’t simply look at raw income tables and declare that “Germany is poorer than 40 out of 50 states”– that’s just ridiculous. Germans for example have free health care and childcare, 6 weeks of vacation as well as free university tuition, so these are major expenses they never have to worry about, whereas Americans are constantly in fear of medical bankruptcy, and a large chunk of what they earn goes to pay health insurance premiums and deductibles. Also the USA has tens of millions of people in grinding poverty, over 50 million on food stamps– Germany does not. USA has nearly 100 million people (1/3 of population) idled and out of the labor force, Germany does not. Simply look at quality of life, and Germans have far more of it, in part because costs are lower they’re also able to afford more. (And this doesn’t even take into account that you’re failing to consider actual incomes– mean incomes are worthless because a few billionaires can totally skew the actual figures of what people in general really make).
The quality of life for people in the vast majority of European countries is much, much higher than in USA. There’s far less poverty there, far better health and they can afford far more with their money– a country with high inflation may look richer at first glance because it pushes up prices, but that just means people can’t afford as many actual goods. Look at the graphs from recent studies on US health, showing that Americans have a much higher death rate at lower ages than in any country in Europe, that medical bankruptcies in the US are rampant, that people in the US go broke from divorces which Europeans don’t– any way you look at it, Americans overall are far, far poorer, can afford far less and are in much worse health than Europeans are.
Maybe students should work part-time to help ease the burdon instead of frat parties and drinking at sporting events or ditching useless liberal arts degrees?
Don’t gripe about your dim prospects after getting a degree in Russian Literature.
Hey, great, let’s have the welders and stockroom assistants and receptionists and mechanics pay more in taxes so they can retire the tuition debt of those with Masters of Puppetry degrees.
Jill, why do you hate the blue collar workers?
Nobody forced these students to attend over-priced colleges.
* Plenty of cheap, community colleges.
* Plenty of local colleges, so the student can live at home and commute to college, rather than paying for expensive dorms,
* Plenty of trade schools offering certificates after only 6 to 12 months. Probably more money in carpentry, air conditioning, or electrical skills than in sociology or gender studies.
These alleged adults voluntarily accepted the loans to attend over-priced party resorts called “colleges.” Now they should pay off the debt. If it means they can’t afford a mortgage until their 40s or 50s, so be it.
Yeah, the student loan industry is a scam. But these students were hoping to benefit from the scam. They’ve no right to stick the bill to the taxpayers.
Absent a handful of small exceptions (tax havens and oil trust-fund states), most EU nations would be, if American states, among the poorest American states. Germany would only beat America’s nine poorest states, Sweden the bottom 12. And those are two of the best examples you could pick from Europe.
The Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom all have median income levels below $23,000 and are thus below every single US state. That’s right: poorer than Mississippi.
The assumption that most of Europe and the U.S. are all interchangeably-rich “developed countries” is grossly mistaken. The differences only look small if you compare us to Namibia or Bangladesh, but Americans are still a good deal wealthier than Europeans.
https://mises.org/blog/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-states-they-would-be-among-poorest-states
Well, aside from morality issues, it actually makes everyone poorer and reduces innovation, motivation and voluntary community solutions that are much better at meeting social needs. Over time these effects reverbrate off each other and causes a poorer, more violent, less free society. By this point it has actually retarded us from the largest evolutionary step in the development of this planet.
I agree. If you think I am defending the present system you are wrong. I am most certainly not.
I did want to mention one area on US college campuses where persons are recieving enormous salaries: Sports. This was illustrated in the recent student pushed shake up of persons in power in the University of Missouri system. The President of the five (?) campus system is paid $500k per annum, the football coach at UM Columbia is paid $2 mil per annum.
And as far as taxing US based corporations causing them to move their HQ outside the US, despite the serious decline in US standard of living and overall household incomes in the US, the US is still a consumption giant. So why not tax the profits generated in the US at a rate that provides benefits to people in the US.
I think Walmart is ancexcellent example of how US consumption focused corporations make enormous profits. Employees of Walmart are ampng the highest users of food stamps in the US among US focused corporations. Food stamps allow Walmart to get away w/ paying employees poirly. Sounds like corporate-focused socialization of costs to me!
Walmart also generates lots of money in profits via selling products manufactured in countries where wages are even lower and that do not have “expensive” regs around employee safety, working hours, workplace health etc. In and on.
And these are merely adjustments to the capitalist economic system, social democracy at best!
Well, for starters, they get military protection from the US, so their military spending is pretty sane while the US spends insane amounts. For another they don’t lock up millions of Germans in prison with a drug war. However, they do put a major drag on their economy with “free” education. In the US, “free” education has resulted in a downward spiral of educational standards and wildly misplaced educational priorities. Meanwhile actual free education: https://www.khanacademy.org/
Sure, if you want the wealthy, their company HQs and nations of registration to also follow their accounts and factories to other countries.
Yes, that’s what happens when government pays most of it thru insurance or debt, rather than having customers and service providers agree on a realistic price their consumers can afford or get together through mutual aid societies to help each other with. You get a price spiral due to providers thinking they get “free” money from the “unlimited” pot of government funds. Both personal and national debt rises exponentially and here we are. Banksters and insurance companies and pharma corporations, etc., reap huge profits and grease the political skids. It all works out great, except for the rest of us that are left holding the bag.
I deally, and that is what is being talked about here, a state monopoly on something like education can be controlled by democratic institutions. I realize that the major capitalist corporations do control much of what we call democracy in the US.
And if successful capitalist states like Germany can have free higher education I can not see how the US could not accomplish such a thing, even while retaining capitalist economics. A great deal of such things could easily be carried aout via higher taxes on the 1% of wealth holders in the US, taxes on equity and debt trades, and forcing US corporations to pay taxes on moneies they are hoarding “offshore”. There is far more money being hoaded than people generally think. As these are all Naderish, neokeynesian approaches that don’t require overthrowing capitalism.
And as far as professors living large off huge salaries, this is utter nonsense, most teaching these days in colleges is done by low paid “adjuncts”. I think the commentor is confusing CEOs etc with progessors. And yet tuition goes up and student debt goes up. Hmmm.
Yep, and the market can meet it.
No, you don’t, since what are they going to do about things like yelp and trip advisor and many others? And if you did your worst case scenario is that they would create a monopoly, so instead you want to keep a monopoly in place?
Which the US already had before things like the AMA cartel got government to enforce their rules, broke up mutual aid societies on the pretext that they were pushing doctors out of the field by driving prices way down (imagine that), limited women and non-whites from offering medical care, later tied medical insurance to employment and made routine care paid by insurance creating a price spiral, exacerbated the price spiral with direct government spending, etc.
“Get rid of government enforcement of their licensing requirements”
The thing is, there is market demand for licensing requirements. If you leave that wholly to that “market”, you run the risk.of market entities (backed in our case by capital behind the curtain) colluding as a monopoly and acting like a state, which brings us back to the conditions of the status quo. Tuition-free education funded by communities is a manifestation of communities asserting their right to self-determination and self-actualization. In this case, they are taking action to guarantee the right to access medical care free of unjust and unfair monopoly interference. In modern times, of course, tuition-free medical training and the social goal of universal health care (as a goal likely to have good consequences for all of society, not just beneficiaries) are closely entwined..
“Allow self-help associations, alternative healing methods, professional and user-based rating and review systems of professional services to flourish.”
All that depends on ending monopoly ownership of healthcare enterprises and creating a system of free competition. In single-payer healthcare systems, the healthcare consumer has the ability to choose their doctor and where they will spend their money. It’s pretty obvious why the corporate health care system is hostile to this idea–the dominant trusts want to control healthcare decision-making in the interest of larger profits for themselves.
Stop pumping government money into it. Cut the red tape. Allow self-help associations, alternative healing methods, professional and user-based rating and review systems of professional services to flourish.
But wait, why stop there? Wouldn’t it be great if legal help and medical care was free too? Throw in housing, food, transportation, clothes, internet, lap tops, cell phones, rainbows and unicorns?
Get rid of government enforcement of their licensing requirements. Stop pumping government money into it. Cut the red tape. Allow self-help associations, alternative healing methods, professional and user-based rating and review systems of professional services to flourish.
Correct, education is tuition-free. Of course, austerity is gradually changing the situation. But even nations at the head of austerity like Germany continue to have tuition-free or near tuition-free higher education.
Imagine how much our medical and legal costs might come down if our lawyers and doctors had tuition-free education like it is in Germany? Wouldn’t this allow more ordinary people to aspire to these professions? Wouldn’t this help break up the monopolistic behavior (AMA, etc) that mars professional life in these professions?
I wonder if Greece has free tuition?
“If tuition is made free; just who is going to pay for all those expensive professors and their administrators? It won’t be me.
This is preposterous on the face of it.”
How can tuition-free higher education be “preposterous on the face of it” when this is the norm in most industrialized western nations? It’s only unbelievable to those people who know nothing of life outside the US.
If tuition is made free; just who is going to pay for all those expensive professors and their administrators? It won’t be me.
This is preposterous on the face of it.
Wow! How about making the banksters pay back their ill gotten gains rather than creating even more unsustainable debt?