Mike Konczal | Next New Deal | Truthout | May 19, 2013
Want a way to pay for free higher education? Take a look at all the tax breaks that ease the burden of student debt.
Josh Eidelson has a great post at The Nation, “Fighting Privatization, Occupy Activists at CUNY and UC Kick Into High Gear,” that dives into the battles currently being waged against the dismantling of public higher education. One of the Occupy movement’s major objectives is combating the privatization of public higher education and its replacement with a debt-fueled economy of indenture.
While prepping an Occupy panel, Sarah Jaffe brought up how we subsidize student debt in a similar way to mortgage debt, that is, through allowing people to deduce the interest paid on this debt from taxes. According to Pew Charitable Trust’s website subsidyscope, the deductibility of student loan interest alone costs taxpayers $1.4 billion dollars. Instead of taking $1.4 billion dollars and directly making college cheaper, students take out massive amounts of student loan debt and we alter the tax code to make that debt $1.4 billion dollars cheaper.
This is an example of what Suzanne Mettler calls “the submerged state,” a pattern where the government has, as she says, “shunned the outright disbursing of benefits to individuals and families and favored instead less visible and more indirect incentives and subsidies, from tax breaks to payments for services to private companies. These submerged policies…obscure the role of government and exaggerate that of the market.” Instead of directly providing public options, we subsidize the purchasing of private goods, often using the tax code.
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