Isn't free college already a thing?

You've gone silent on this topic, Bernie Bro. Tell me about your methodology for determining your proposed physician pay caps. How did you determine that these salary figures will draw enough people into the medical profession to care for our aging population? What are your assumptions in terms of demand for physician labor in the coming decades, elasticity of supply for physician labor, etc?

And what do these figures mean for balance of physicians between various specialties? You are proposing a single cap that applies to all non-surgical specialties and another across the board cap for surgeons. Neurosurgery has brutal training and a tougher lifestyle by far than, say, urology. Becoming an intensive care physician requires an additional 3 year fellowship after your IM residency. Can you really pay everyone the same and expect people to just end up doing fellowships and going into tougher specialties in the appropriate proportions?

Of course I don't really expect you to have answers to these questions or to be able to produce an economic model for physician supply and demand. I'm trying to illustrate the point of just how big the Dunning-Kruger effect is in political discussions. You don't really know anything about the economics of healthcare. That's fine. Most people don't. The problem arises when you try to push policy on the rest of us that is based on incomplete understanding and involves numbers that were plucked out of thin air based on some vague notion that this or that salary sounds like a lot to you. Sure, a politician might be able to get their base to all agree that $120K is "enough" for an ER doc or an anesthesiologist, but the bottom line is that the policy you propose will have adverse consequences you don't like if implemented, and will likely come with very little benefit (as I said, physician salaries are only 8% of healthcare spending as is, so if you cut them by 50% across the board, the savings will be eaten up by inflation in a matter of months and you'll end up stemming the supply of physicians for inconsequential savings).

wowza wrote:

beato wrote:

Please show me where someone who attended CC is prohibited from being on theSCOTUS.

We haven’t had a female POTUS. Do you think since there hasn’t been one that there is some provision against it?

Smh

Where did I say anything about there being a provision against it? In fact, by using the term de facto I was clearly implying that were wasn't a provision against it.

There is nothing stopping a person who went to CC from being on the SCOTUS. What part of that do you not understand?

beato wrote:

wowza wrote:

Where did I say anything about there being a provision against it? In fact, by using the term de facto I was clearly implying that were wasn't a provision against it.

There is nothing stopping a person who went to CC from being on the SCOTUS. What part of that do you not understand?

I guess the concept is just too difficult for you to comprehend.

If NBA player loses both legs they shouldn't be able to collect on insurance...because, technically, nothing is stopping you from playing in the NBA with no legs. Probably just too lazy to put the work in.

Hundreds of millions of people have gone to community college. If you can't name one that has made it to the Supreme Court, then clearly going to a community college rather than a top tier school presents a significant hindrance to making it to the Supreme Court. Is that still too nuanced for you?

It is has nothing to do with the level of the school. It has everything to do with the level of the student. A smart poor student will go free to a highly selective school. A smart rich kid will pay $75k per year to go to a highly selective school. Smart people are going to make it onto the Supreme Court. Dumb people are not.

smarter than a wrote:

It is has nothing to do with the level of the school. It has everything to do with the level of the student. A smart poor student will go free to a highly selective school. A smart rich kid will pay $75k per year to go to a highly selective school. Smart people are going to make it onto the Supreme Court. Dumb people are not.

So smart middle-class kids are weeded out. I see.

wowza wrote:

smarter than a wrote:

It is has nothing to do with the level of the school. It has everything to do with the level of the student. A smart poor student will go free to a highly selective school. A smart rich kid will pay $75k per year to go to a highly selective school. Smart people are going to make it onto the Supreme Court. Dumb people are not.

So smart middle-class kids are weeded out. I see.

That's not what he said, but you are basically conceding that you don't have a counterargument by making this response instead of addressing the actual point of the post.

You have the causation backwards regarding the lack of community college grads on the Supreme Court. It's not that community college kids can't become SC justices. It is that anyone with the intelligence and drive to make it to the SC will get into a highly selective school. There would simply have been no reason for Justice Sotomayor to turn down a full scholarship at Princeton to attend community college at home in the Bronx instead, for example.

No one is being kept off of the Supreme Court because they attended community college. But people who are capable of making it to the supreme court do not attend community college. This is the reason that we don't have SC justices with community college degrees.

Alex87 wrote:

You have the causation backwards regarding the lack of community college grads on the Supreme Court. It's not that community college kids can't become SC justices. It is that anyone with the intelligence and drive to make it to the SC will get into a highly selective school. There would simply have been no reason for Justice Sotomayor to turn down a full scholarship at Princeton to attend community college at home in the Bronx instead, for example.

No one is being kept off of the Supreme Court because they attended community college. But people who are capable of making it to the supreme court do not attend community college. This is the reason that we don't have SC justices with community college degrees.

Oh c'mon. there have to be some uncovered gems in the community college with abilities equal to those of people that have made it to the SC. Some hardworking frugal person who is taking advantage of the lower costs of community college.

If not, then your implied premise that free community college equals an acceptable free university system completely falls apart. If community college is just a collection of lower-tier students, then it is clearly an inferior learning environment. Do we really want to sperate our university students by wealth?

Pretending like affordable community college is the same as a free higher education system is a sham.

Riiiight so rich people are smart and poor people are dumb. I wonder who you vote for.

Rich kids go to expensive schools, receive better tuition, get better grades and go to Ivy League or whatever. Poorer kids go to schools that are less well resourced, and face a FAR harder battle.

This really isn't rocket science.

charli3 wrote:

Riiiight so rich people are smart and poor people are dumb. I wonder who you vote for.

Rich kids go to expensive schools, receive better tuition, get better grades and go to Ivy League or whatever. Poorer kids go to schools that are less well resourced, and face a FAR harder battle.

This really isn't rocket science.

Yup. Swing by one low-income school and tell me we give kiddos a fighting chance to meet their potential.

Start with universal pre-k. This has been proven to drop crime rates significantly. See why below...

Invest in equitable k-12 so that low-income students aren’t reading at levels significantly lower than they should be. It’s unreal how many 8th graders read at a 3rd grade level. Those students are something like 40% more likely to go to prison. Start educating early and these gaps won’t occur.

Then, show students what they’re working for. A large part of dropouts give up because they don’t believe they have a chance to go to college. Either invest significantly in marketing programs for low-income students or make college free.

The drop in arrests and prison inmates alone would pay for these investments ten fold.

An inmate costs 31,000$ per year on average. I’d rather invest that money in our future.

These are simple and basically unarguable points. It’s only the people who had things spoon fed to them in suburbia that don’t understand how inequitable our education system is.

Are you assuming that separating good students from bad is equivalent to separating students by wealth? This is your assumption, not mine. I have no prejudice that poor kids can't be smart and hard working. Maybe you do. The example I provided within my post above is a kid from the South Bronx born to immigrant parents who earned a full ride to Princeton en route to the Supreme Court. Not exactly an example of wealth determining school tier.

When you talk about SC justices, you are basically talking about people who are the Tom Bradys and Drew Breeses of the legal world. Is it surprising that the very best NFL players tend to be guys who were scholarship players at Power 5 schools and not kids who played DIII ball? It really shouldn't be. Same applies to the SC discussion. We're talking about incredibly talented people. The next SC justice being a community college kid is about as likely as the next Saquon Barkley coming out of some random DIII football program. It isn't unlikely because there is some prohibition on NFL players becoming great NFL players. It is unlikely because Saquon Barkley level talent doesn't get ignored by colleges. Nor does SC level talent.

Your entire premise rests on the idea that every smart student is either rich or qualifies for free education at a high-quality school suitable to their ability level. This is not the case.

Why do we make some of our smartest students choose between going into crippling debt or to a bottom-rung school?

Why would they have to take on crippling debt when most state schools cost $25k? And if the student is smart, they won't pay anywhere near that amount at a state school or private school.

wowza wrote:

Your entire premise rests on the idea that every smart student is either rich or qualifies for free education at a high-quality school suitable to their ability level. This is not the case.

Why do we make some of our smartest students choose between going into crippling debt or to a bottom-rung school?

No one turns down an Ivy League education due to cost. The financial aid there is so good that nobody graduates with crippling debt. The people with the largest debt are middle class people who go to mid-tier private colleges and select worthless majors.

I had 2 kids turn down Ivy offers after receiving their financial aid packages. Due to a lifetime of scrimping and saving. Amazingly, several neighbors saved nothing and off their kids went to Brown, Northwestern, and Stanford.