He could have spent more to help students become academically ready for college, which is the biggest barrier to graduation.
.. But in 2016 Bernie Sanders made a big splash on the campaign trail with a plan to make college “free.”
.. If he runs for president, this will be an outstanding talking point. Unfortunately, the law will hurt actual New Yorkers.
.. First, the law is regressive. It does nothing to help students from families earning less than $50,000 a year. Their tuition is already covered by other programs. But it does pay for tuition for New Yorkers who make double the state’s median income. The higher up the income scale you go, until the ceiling, the more you benefit.
.. Second, it doesn’t make a dent in reducing the nontuition fees, like living expenses, textbooks and travel, which for many students are far more onerous than tuition.
Third, it doesn’t cover students who don’t go to school full time and don’t complete in four years. In 2017 this is the vast, vast majority of all students, especially poorer students.
Why Don’t Wealthy Conservatives Who Promote Marriage Marry the Poor?
the argument that declining economic prospects for men near the bottom and improved economic prospects for women across the board has facilitated more relationship quits than before.
.. If the best arrangement you can put together says the 25th percentile broke even in a period where the economy more than doubled (which based on my series would suggest that below-25th percentile saw declines), it’s still clear that the economy left these men behind, which is perfectly adequate for the declining-attractiveness theory since mate attractiveness is relative to the society you find yourself
.. All of which is to say: Behind the veil, you’d prefer an institutional regime that didn’t effectively imprison you in bad relationships, lest you find yourself in one as a child or adult.
.. Douthat’s paragraph speaks of marriage and relationships in general terms, but in fact they are very specific things that contain within them very different people. Of late, conservatives have rallied behind the pithy line that people need to “preach what they practice” regarding marriage. But, in fact, people of Douthat’s ilk do not practice what they preach. They preach the importance of marrying poor and working class people, but they don’t actually marry any of these people.
They certainly could marry someone from those classes. Many a person would take up a spouse who makes six figures banging out a few blog posts each week. But they choose not to.After rigging the institutions to capture the majority of the national income and basically all of the national wealth, segregating themselves residentially, intermarrying almost solely in their rich enclaves, and even sealing off their schools from being accessed by the unwashed masses, these rich social conservatives turn around and implore others to marry people that they wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, people they can’t even bring themselves to make even the most minimal of community with.If this all was really that important to them (the most pressing issue in the entire country by their accounts), why don’t they marry any of these people? What is it about them that they find too unattractive to couple with? One really has to wonder.
1992 | Gwen Ifill’s Cleareyed Coverage of Bill Clinton
“The Democratic candidates for President, anxious to woo back the disaffected middle class, have all but abandoned their traditional role as champions of the disenfranchised,” Ms. Ifill wrote in January 1992.
“It is almost an oversight, this eerie silence on the campaign trail about issues that affect the poor. But it is a telling omission for the party that had traditionally spoken for the disadvantaged …”
“Instead, wooing the middle class has become all the rage. They are angry and they vote. What Presidential candidate could resist?”
.. She noted the criticism among Democrats, including followers of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, that Mr. Clinton, by now the Democratic nominee, had “decided to sacrifice black voters’ support in exchange for winning back the Democrats — most of them white — who voted for Ronald Reagan and George Bush.”
“Politicians call it taking the base for granted, a tactic that is the opposite of the one Republicans chose at their national convention to woo their base of evangelicals, conservatives and bedrock Republicans.”
.. Gov. Bill Clinton’s voice has been hoarse and strained for months, but it was not until he won the New York primary that he had the political luxury of taking the advice any good doctor would have been giving him for months: Shut up.”
Things Are About to Get Much Worse for Poor Americans
They didn’t vote for this. Richer Americans did.
President Obama’s anti-inequality crusade has had three main pillars. First, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, brought the percentage of uninsured down from 16 percent in 2010 to 9 percent, the lowest in U.S. history. Second, tax benefits passed in the 2009 stimulus, and extended throughout the last seven years, raised the overall income of millions of poor Americans. Third, the administration went beyond the tax code to increase anti-poverty spending, like food stamps and long-term unemployment benefits, and to support the national movement for a higher minimum wage. Together, these measures helped to reduce after-tax inequality more than any administration on record
.. In the last six years, the number of uninsured families living around the poverty line fell by almost 50 percent. Those gains would be reversed, and more than 20 million people, many of them just above the poverty line, could suddenly lose access to health care.
.. the massive size of the proposed Trump tax is significant, because House Republicans are also calling for a balanced budget. Mathematically that means that the GOP will be on the lookout for $6 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. And Trump has essentially declared more than half the budget off-limits for cuts, since he wants to grow the military and preserve Social Security and Medicare.
.. With protective collars around defense and spending on the elderly, the rest of government spending would have to be bulldozed. This remainder is dominated by assistance for the young and poor. Medicaid would shrink, as might the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Food stamps would be cut. Federal unemployment insurance spending would fall, as would housing and energy assistance for the poor. The Department of Education would have to be gutted, taking federal student loans with it.
.. cutting welfare and health insurance payments to the poor in order to balance the budget while financing a historic tax cut for the wealthy
.. Presidents cannot slide the economy to 4 percent growth, as if GDP were a thermostat bar. But the government has great control over how growth is shared.
.. the Obama doctrine has put sharing at the heart of economic policy with a progressive plan to redistribute the country’s prodigious wealth to help low-income Americans of all ethnicities stay afloat in a period of severe inequality.
.. Hillary Clinton won by double digits among voters making less than $50,000. Trump won among all richer groups
.. his coalition seems to be living in a world ever so slightly detached from that described by national statistics. More than half of Republicans think that unemployment has increased under Obama. It has in fact fallen from 10 percent in 2010 to below 5 percent today.