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So make it all voluntary military, and required civilian service for everyone who does not enlist. Folks can choose how they serve, but not whether they serve.
With 1 & 2 including a one or two year civilian public service apprenticeship after graduation, waived for those who choose option 3 then do not opt to enlist.
You can glorify free college. Let the poor kids go to college.
Always kind of amazes me that people who complain about the exorbitant costs for a college education, and the crippling student loan debt that most choose to take out to go, somehow think that allowing the government to regulate it through taxes (without transparency) is the answer.
Makes you wonder where all the money goes. Must be improvements to the facilities or just more bureaucracy (like public school/high schools).
My guess is some of the higher costs and revenues are going into offshore bank accounts for our local, state, and federal politicians. If you look at the curves for increases in tuition costs over the years, you can almost always trace the starting point back to the federal government getting involved in student loans. Further, there are so many jobs where your salary wouldn’t even be enough to cover the student loan debt you’d need to take out in order to get those jobs. Now, how we can look at that and arrive at the conclusion that more government involvement/oversight over taxes to ensure that college is “free” is the way to go, is beyond me. “But we can just decrease the military budget!” Yeah, I’m sure that will happen.
Endowment funds. They own investments. It’s amazing how much real estate around Boston is owned by colleges and universities. A lot of Kendall Square is owned by BU for example. I assume Harvard and MIT own most of Cambridge. That helps infouence politicians of course.
Bunch of blame to go around. The bottom line is that higher education institutions and the federal government are two of the most wasteful “big businesses” on the planet.
The interest rates on most student loans are also far too high, which contributes greatly to the problem since the kids who are making payments are seeing little of that money going toward paying those down. Capping those at a reasonable level would be a good area to start. That way, they'd at least be able to see their payments get them paid down sooner so they can be done with them instead of having them continue for what feels like an eternity for most kids who generally take a while before they start working and earning wages where they're not quite as crippling. They'd also probably have fewer people default on them.
Not only that, but they follow you for the rest of your life, too. A loan from the private sector doesn’t do that. And the private sector wouldn’t give out loans if kids defaulted on them which would then impact the revenue the institutions make. Why would higher learning institutions lower their prices if the cash flow is basically guaranteed by the federal government? They have no incentive to do that. The current student loan structure can see your wages or SSI get garnished if you don’t pay on them. In all, it’s a complicated situation but shifting the burden to the taxpayers creates more problems than it solves. Getting the feds out of student loans would be a good starting point.
The problem with the cost of college is that the government keeps throwing more money at trying to solve the problem, but the more money they spend, the more the colleges compensate by raising prices.
www.forbes.com
I know people who have been conscripted. They say it is in essence extended baby sitting. They fired a weapon once in two years of service. The rest of the time was spent polishing the equipment (even though it was rusted through in some spots), doing guard duty, paper pushing, etc. Almost no military value, yet huge cost in housing, feeding and managing the conscripts. Lots of discipline problems given some conscripts are pretty much unmanageable, and the rest soon realize they are wasting two of the best years of their life for nothing. Another talked about how his father went through conscription and decided his sons would never do that, so he actively started creating a paper trail of their "asthma problems" from a young age using cooperative doctors. The system can and will be gamed.
I once dated a former Israeli soldier. She was a weapons specialist...
