www.forbes.com: For millions of young people, the American dream is to study the thing you're most passionate about at the highest levels possible, and then use those skills and that knowledge to build a life you'll be fulfilled with. For some of us, the American dream includes many years of graduate school and extremely frugal living along the journey to a Ph.D. Traditionally, in a great many fields (such as biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics), the only way this has been possible is through teaching and/or research assistantships, which grant graduate students with a small stipend (in the ~$20K-$30K/year range) to live off of.
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This creates a system in which only the already wealthy, or the children of the already wealthy, can pursue advanced education and have a higher chance of pursuing higher paying jobs. The priorities of the writers of this tax plan are crystal clear. They want to generate more wealth for corporations and those corporation’s shareholders and are willing to make up for that loss by penalizing individuals seeking to improve their lives through continuing education. They want to line their own pockets and don’t care who gets trampled. “Trickle down economics” has been proven false time and time again. In other words, the wealthy will get wealthier and the struggling will struggle more. Economic class will become even more stratified and upward mobility even more difficult.
It’s also hard not to view this as a targeted attack on institutions of higher learning – not only are universities, quite rightly, bastions of liberal thought, but education is the greatest threat to oligarchic tendencies.
Rachel pretty much hit the nail on the head with the comment above, that it is so very clear in this tax plan the our current administration does not care about education or about the non wealthy. This tax plan would ensure that people who don't come from very well off family's would have a very hard time paying for more education, and that larger cooperations and people who hold much of the wealth in this country will continue to make more money. What is so crazy about this tax plan and about many of the policies of this administration is that there is no empathy in what it outputs. Education is a huge part of what makes countries successful and what allows countries to evolve with the world around them. As soon as we start to limit education we begin to set ourselves up for considerate failure in comparison with the rest of the world. Right now what I fear more than anything else is that the world is going to leave the U.S. behind and give up on us, and then it will take decades to gain the trust back of the other world leaders. I hope that this plan is adjusted or doesn't pass, or that someone can build me a time machine and take me to 2020 when this idiot is not our president anymore.
In a country where an undergraduate degree is essentially a high school diploma and graduate school is essential to getting a job that pays above the minimum wage, graduate school is no longer optional. Even with two minimum wage jobs, unless you have a partner to help share the financial burden, you can't even afford a single bedroom apartment or even a studio on your own and this is just how the system is currently. This plan would make the lives of every American student exponentially worse. It will deter underprivileged and poor students from even beginning a graduate career and condemn those in the middle class to carrying such an enormous debt that any hope of upward mobility or even an eventual debt free life in this society is structured to be unattainable. It is a disgusting punishment of any member of the lower classes who seeks to better themselves or gods forbid find a job that they are actually passionate about that will pay them a living wage.
This is absolutely disgusting. The GOP is simply seeking out ways to increase taxes on a variety of different groups for the sake of providing tax cuts to the rich. The line in the article that really got me was actually the caption underneath the photo of Trump and DeVos, which states that they would both pay a lower percentage in taxes than average American graduate students. As higher education continues to become more and more common and pervasive in American culture, it's important that we support our graduate students and provide incentives for them to go to grad school in the first place. We are growing to a place where everything we study is highly technical and specialized, and so it's more and more important the graduate education is available to students. Employers will increasingly expect graduate degrees, which will mean that America's high paying jobs will only go to those who have the ability to afford graduate education.
When thinking about taxes it is important to think not only in terms of the amount of money increase but also in the percentage of your income that is, the article shows a few examples with first University of Florida (in-state) which is 6.2% currentlyand would change to 17.6% under the new plan. Than you look at the same
University of Florida but for out-of-state student and taxes were 6.2% currently but grow drastically to 33.1% under the new plan. And now for the real punch in the face let's look at a private school such as Princeton University which is 8.8% currently but under ther new lovely screw the grad students tax plan 41.9% and that as most people can see is absurd to have someone have to already be living frugaly than get screwed to point where they pay taxes equal to almost half there income but eh millionaires and billionaires they most definitely shouldn't see that much taxes cause that would be unfair.
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