A friend who is a passionate, life-long Democrat notices my Bernie Sanders sticker.
“He’s great,” she says. “But I won’t vote for him. He’ll want to take all my money.”
A Democrat on Sanders
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
A friend who is a passionate, life-long Democrat notices my Bernie Sanders sticker.
“He’s great,” she says. “But I won’t vote for him. He’ll want to take all my money.”
Clarissa's Blog 
“He’s great,” she says. “But I won’t vote for him. He’ll want to take all my money.”
So, your friend must be very wealthy.
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She’s a college professor. 🙂 And her husband is a school teacher.
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So Sanders’ policies will not take any more of their money.
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Sanders says he likes the Scandinavian model, right? People like my friend pay up to 60% of their income in taxes there. Even in Canada, they pay 50%.
All of this talk about taxing the hedge fund managers and paying for huge social programs with that money is as much of a talking point as the Republican insistence that they are in favor of a small government is. We can’t take it at face value.
A Scandinavian-style social safety net means heavy taxation of the middle class. It’s up to us to decide whether these social services are worth handing over 60% of our income. Many people think it’s worth it. But the baseline is that a robust social safety net always equals very high taxes.
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The link is broken on your latest post so I”ll put this comment here.
While you’re seething about paying your medical bills upfront in spite of your university healthcare plan to which you are financially contributing, you might like to look at this report on compensation packages for Illinois university administrators. If you’re lucky to be in this category, you can look forward to such goodies as an average of $28 thousand housing stipends, free cars with paid for chauffeurs, free membership in country clubs, six figure salaries and, of course, generous severance packages.
Click to access Illinois_Higher_Ed_Comp_Report_Final.pdf
So now you know where the money is going.
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That’s exactly what I’m saying, exactly. This is all a lie about there not being enough money in the budget. The taxes are being collected, the insurance deductions are being paid to the state. What is lacking is not the money but the political will to do anything useful.
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Now that I’ve mentioned the compensation of said administrators let’s turn to their actual performance. How do they match up to other university administrators? As you might be aware, many universities are in the midst of infrastructure upgrading and this is financially supported by the issuance of bonds that use projected student tuition as collateral. In order to rank the safety i.e. “risk of failure to meet contractual financial obligations and of estimated financial loss in the event of default of the bonds”, rating agencies such as Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s issue university rankings based on such things as “full-time equivalent enrollment, net tuition revenue per student, total cash and investments, total debt, average donations per student and the ratio of debt to operating revenue.”
Of the total number of higher ed. institutions (509) that Moody’s rated in 2014, 33 were downgraded and seven of these were in Illinois.
Eastern Illinois University: A3 to Baa1
Governors State University of Illinois: A3 to Baa1
Illinois State University: A2 to A3
Northeastern Illinois University: A3 to Baa1
Southern Illinois University: A2 to A3
University of Illinois: Aa2 to Aa3
Western Illinois University: A2 to Baa1
As these university bonds slid toward non investment grade, the institutions try to increase their attractiveness to investors by including such items as termination fees and trigger events such as the failure to meet projected student tuition revenues which ‘trigger” immediate payouts. As in the case of Detroit this can cause financial collapse in the event of external factors like a recession. Of course, the leaders will have their golden parachutes while you and your fellow academics have to deal with financial wreckage.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/moodys-us-college-credit-ratings-downgrades-far-outnumber-upgrades/2014/07/11/4248f474-06c5-11e4-bbf1-cc51275e7f8f_story.html
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