[FRIAM] Fwd: Grad Students Would Be Hit By Massive Tax Hike Under House GOP Plan : NPR

[Pietro Terna]

     http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1985

     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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