leftfielder.org

The average member of the House and Senate makes $174,000. About 4 times the median income in the country. There are 535 of them. The house and senate are struggling to find ways to cut the budget. If you cut their salaries in half it saves $40,000,000. Sure, that’s chump change in regards to the billions we need to cut, but we should start somewhere, and I can’t think of a better place than from people who aren’t doing their jobs.

Other places that I’d cut, or raise funds if I had my druthers:

1) The military: 5% a year, each year for 5 years. That would save 200 billion 5 years down the line. Can’t do it all at once because of long term obligations and the chaos it would cause to the economy, but we need to start scaling military spending down. There’s no reason to have bases throughout Europe anymore – the cold war is over.

2) Farm subsidies. It’s been discussed before on leftfielder, they’re just dumb.

3) Medicare co-pays. If everybody on medicare spent $5 more per visit to the doctor, it would hardly bankrupt them, but it would bring in about a billion dollars. (You can’t do this with medicaid because it actually would bankrupt those people). Ok, a billion is about 1% of the problem, but there are a lot of government services that could start charging minimal fees, and if we can find 20 of them that raise a billion, we’re now talking a legitimate dent in the deficit

4) Raise the social security age – this is a long term solution but we might as well throw it in there. People who have been paying into the system for years are owed what they were promised. But 10 years from now, the age should go up by 1 year, and an additional 1 year, every 5 years until social security comes at 70. 65 today isn’t the same as it was back then – people are healthier and living longer, and we need the policy to reflect that.

5) Federal estate tax. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. An estate tax is the best type of tax – you can’t spend the money once you’re already dead, so its the best time to take it. And I’d rather that people be taxed on inherited money (which they did nothing to earn) than on money they worked for. We’ll have to increase taxes to deal with the budget – this is the way to do it.

I recently read an article that the military is charging three marines with fraud for setting up pretend marriages in order to collect extra benefits. What I want to know is: why being married gets somebody a housing benefit?

If the military were to offer a housing stipend for being of a particular religion, or any number of other personal choices that don’t impact one’s ability to serve effectively, people would be up in arms. But for some reason being single is a basis for being discriminated against in compensation. This isn’t just the military, of course. At my job I get compensated about 10% less than my married peers in terms of benefits, just because I’m single. Not only is it legal, but it’s actually encouraged by government tax law. It’s not that I work less – in fact, I typically work more because at the end of the day I don’t have a spouse to go home to, so people feel less guilty giving me evening or weekend assignments. And spouses can bring in twice the income already, with nowhere near twice the cost because of diminishing returns. And that’s in addition to all the other non-financial perks of being part of a couple (psychological, health related, etc.).

This is more than just a gay rights issue – although the soldiers in question in this case happened to be gay, and until gay marriage is legal this is clearly discriminatory against same-sex couples. Anybody who is single gets a government endorsed short end of the stick. The soldiers in this case committed fraud, and should be duly punished for that. But it was understandable fraud – the system is unfair. If the government thinks a housing stipend is a good way to attract top quality marines, then by all means such stipends should be offered… but EVERYBODY should have an opportunity to get one, not just people who happen to be married.

If you listen to politicians, you often hear them espouse the belief that society should educate everybody. No child left behind. And it’s hard to argue with that notion – a society as wealthy as ours ought to have 100% literacy, basic facility with numbers, etc.

But of course, ‘education’ is a tricky word. Most people agree that all children need to master reading, writing, and arithmetic. But it’s less clear that everybody needs to be able to understand quantum thermodynamics. And the definition of what it means to be educated keeps changing. There has been an increasingly prevalent notion that it used to be enough to have a high school education, but in today’s labor force a college education is more important. Hence Obama’s goal to get more people a college education than ever before. And education doesn’t stop at the Associates or Bachelor’s degree. M.A.’s, Ph.D.s, M.D.s… I know several people who have a half a dozen degrees.

So, the question “who are we trying to teach” isn’t quite so obvious as it may appear at first glance. Today, I’m going to suggest that we ought to be teaching the people who want to be learning. And while this may seem straightforward, if we actually did things this way it would be a fairly radical departure from current education practices.

I’ve recently gotten into the habit of asking students where I teach what they hoped to get out of college. The most common answer is “a degree”. They want the piece of paper, not the education. In fact, most of the freshmen have no idea what they should expect out of college or how to get it. They’re in college because that’s “what’s done”. So you get an awful lot of students who are getting a (very expensive) education, but really don’t care about learning. And at the end, they have a degree, but it doesn’t mean anything other than that they gave 4 years of tuition to a school.

The thing is, the standard model of education (from the public’s standpoint) the responsibility of the student learning is on the teacher. In reality, a good teacher can facilitate learning, but a person can’t be forced to learn. If a person doesn’t want to learn, everybody’s time and resources are wasted.

In my ideal world, we would dissociate a college degree from the signal that it supposedly offers. Right now, many employers use college as a screening tool – that’s inefficient. We could develop a test that measures readiness to enter the workforce – the equivalent of a GED for highschool. And people would only go to college if they couldn’t pass that test and thus wanted and needed to learn the material that would allow them to, or else wanted to improve their intellectual ability with additional training.

We need to move from “everybody should get an advanced degree” to “everybody should have the opportunity to get an advanced degree”. And we need to be more flexible about when people do so – some people might not benefit right out of high school, but might be more receptive to education later… hmmm… when are we trying to teach… what a delightful topic for my next post…