Posts by Idiot Savant
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XKCD, dammit. Bloody typos.
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be nice to the environment and buy that off itunes.
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Is there any major obstacle to it in principle?
The cost to the recording industry will still outweigh the cost of infriongement?
(Which suggests that enforcement is not financially worthwhile and they should just give up...)
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The threshold isn't the measure of private benefit
Maybe not in theory, but thats exactly what it is in practice. How else are we to interpret the point where we have to start paying?
Kyle: and certainly as we move even further into mass tertiary education, its a distinction we should just give up on, just as we have for secondary school.
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B Jones: According to Stuff, about 50,000 students eventually. Plus, obviously, their parents, who won't have to worry so much about supporting them, or of not getting grandkids because people have too much debt. The joy of tertiary education policy is that you get to target a lot of anxious people...
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Paul: the most practical measurement of where the government thinks the private benefit begins is the student loan repayment threshold. Currently, this is a paltry $18,148 a year. To put that in context, that's not even the median income, and a full-time (37.5 hr/week) minimum wage job earns you $23,400.
if that's their idea of a private benefit, they can shove it.
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But really, it's a bandaid until a fully workable programme on how to actually reduce mounting student debt is found.
But its a bloody good bandaid. This stops that debt from growing; after 2012, students will only be in hock for their fees and course-related costs, which means they will have much lower debt burdens. And the conversion of the loan scheme to effectively a capped graduate tax will make it much easier to bear.
The next step for the future will be to raise the repayment threshold. Currently, the government thinks the "private benefit" of tertiary education kicks in at less than the minimum wage. Which is pretty laughable when you think about it.
After that, they need to find some way to address the structural inequity caused by generation debt. There will be 20 years of students who will have been forced to borrow for their education, and whose life paths (house, children, whether they stay in the country) will have been altered because of it. But that's probably at least one or maybe two elections down the track.
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The Press had a piece about student allowance costings earlier in the year, which put it at $728 million net over 4 years, slightly lower than the current estimate of $210 million a year from 2012. The reason it seems so low is because, as Kyle pointed out, we already spend most of the money on the student loan scheme. Theoretically we get it back, but its still a cash expense to the government even while it builds up an "asset".
As for whether it can be justified, IMHO yes. The current situation, which sees students forced to borrow for food, is fundamentally unjust. Erasing that obscenity is well worth the price.
What I'm interested in seeing now though is Labour's plans to avoid that decade of deficits and pursue a better fiscal path than National's while doing all this. I can see one very obvious change they can make, which is entirely distributional, but leaves them with a hell of a lot of room to maneuvre. The question is whether they'll do it or not.
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So, are the minor parties' opening addresses on YouTube? Sadly, I missed them - which means I missed the highly amusing NWO one...
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Again, 15 year olds also have interests, and also need representation. Where do you draw the line?
As low as I can get away with. That relentless downward pressure, you see...
Austria lets 16 year olds vote. In Iran, the voting age is 12. There's no principled reason why we shouldn't do the same.