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Best, Pietro (Italian silent friend)
Il 21/11/17 13:38, Eric Smith ha scritto:
Piece in NPR that somebody else forwarded to me:
https://www.npr.org/2017/11/14/563879136/house-gop-tax-plan-would-hit-grad-students-with-massive-tax-hike
I have to wonder, contra my own screed a couple of days ago (which on
one hand I still believe), whether this was put into the house bill as
a poison pill to help mobilize a sector of resistance. The NPR
article says that 145.000 people received tuition waivers in 2011-2012
(I don’t know if that means, in aggregate, or per year). TImes
50k/year times 15%, that would be a billion dollars. If it were 25%,
that would be larger, but not everybody’s tuition waiver is an MIT
50k. Against deficit changes on the order of trillions, I’m not sure
that number is large enough to even make a difference in procedural
rules for passage of any final 2-house bill. That’s not to mention
that, since most grad students couldn’t pay the extra tax at all, they
would drop out and only a part of the accounted amount would ever be
collected.
In poking a beehive of higher education (sadly, too low-budget to
qualify as a hornet’s nest), though, they would be sure to provoke a
set of people who have a certain amount of discretionary time and
enough of a habit of organizing to be willing to put some of that time
into communication. Many of them can also spell, more or less, and
compose a grammatical sentence. If it were mainly about the money,
surely the house could have found some other group to steal a billion
dollars from who are too overworked, underpaid, and isolated to have
time or community structure to organize against them.
I wonder if the relevant committees, too cowardly to fight t in the
open, are looking for small proxy wars that would absolve them of the
responsibility for being associated with a tax plan even they don’t
think they could get away with indefinitely through the next several
election cycles. After all, they are mean, and in many fundamental
things profoundly stupid, but in terms of infighting tactics and
evading responsibility they are quite sophisticated.
I guess that question turns on whether the elimintation of this one
item would have any significant effect on the form or passage of the
rest of the package.
Shame I have no professional knowledge in this sphere. I don’t even
know enough about the ones drafting the bill to have a sense of
whether meanness, or cowardly shrewdness, are more plausible motives
for their choices.
Eric
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