I'm probably adding gasoline to this fire... (Page 2)

I like this one. 

As someone who is involved in higher education here's my question:

Why are the majority of MS and Ph.D. students in hard science (life sciences, engineering, math, CS) graduate school programs in the US foreign born?

Because long term children + immigration pays for your growth. Like having an educated population - you don't get return on investment right away, but 20 years down the road. But that sort of future planning has been lost. 

And up here anyway, it's paid for by employment insurance (same as you get with a layoff) which all employees contribute to. So it's not the same as a welfare handout.

50% Only if you earn over 150,000GBP annually. 

40% on earnings from 35k to 150k

and 20% under 35k.

National insurance (2% to 13%)

The average income in the UK is in the 26 to 27k range which puts it in the 20% tax rate.

add the VAT at 20% (since January 2011) but that is not on everything you buy by far!

Stating UK tax at 50% plus 17.5% is a bit of a misrepresentation.

And even with the average joe paying 20% income tax, less than 10% National insurance and VAT they can still afford a great public schooling system and national health care!!

how was that for fanning those flames??

NOTE: I moved to the US, love living here, am more than happy with the (tax) system here, I pay my insurance, pay my own way etc.  paid A LOT of tax in the first 18 months of living here.  I just don't think it's right to represent the taxes as so ridiculously high in other countries as a comparison to here when they really are not in some cases.

Because of our income bracket, basically very little of what I pay for my kids' education ends up being deductible. And we work for all of our money, so none if it is coming from things taxed at more favorable rates  (like capital gains). And, as I have mentioned elsewhere, we are still paying off our own student loans, which works out to be the equivalent of a second house worth as much as our actual house. So it is important to me to see my kids start their careers without a crushing debt.

Question, not trying to be a smartass I swear,  if the education system is great as is the healthcare system there, why move here?

Exactly. By that reasoning, why should you be paying for public education, or maintenance on public playgrounds? Why should tax dollars be used to underwrite student loans? 

Because at the end of the day, (a) you are paying forward the debt you incurred getting those services when YOU were a kid, (b) you are ensuring there are workers in the future to pay into YOUR social security, and (c) you are ensuring those workers are skilled and healthy enough to pay enough into the tax base to operate the services you might like to have (police, fire, roadways...). 

Dude. Health IS rationed. You don't realize it maybe, but that is what "managed care" means. Even if your insurance personally is not a rationed managed care insurance, the way services are provided to you have been dictated by the way managed care works. I don't generally stop to think what insurance a patient has. So the path of least resistance ends up being picking meds that I know will covered by most; or to consider hospital stays in light of how much I can do within the constraints of a managed care. To me, the best part of having a patient with no insurance and no medical assistance is that at least I won't have to deal with justifying everything I do every 2-3 days.

When the HMO's opposed Clinton's plan for universal care and ran ads saying "Do you want faceless Washington bureaucrats running your healthcare?" what they REALLY meant to say was "...because that's OUR job!":. 

You saw the red font for sarcasm right?

in all honesty I never had any issues with the national health system, I know plenty of people who have horror stories but I and my family never had any negative experience with it. 

For the schools, there really isn't a great difference, I moved from a great elementary school area to another one here, it's all location location location there for schools as it seems to be here. I would have had to save to put them through college the same as here so it's kind of a wash. (my son was in the correct age/grade in the UK, he is working a grade ahead here in the US, but honestly that's a mix of starting education earlier in the UK and the principle here recognizing it - win on both sides)

why move here?  Great question.  I have traveled and lived in various cities, countries my whole life, as has my wife, military kids then both joined the military.  We enjoy new experiences, we enjoy the challenge, we enjoy the adventure.  We want to grab each opportunity we perceive as offering to advance our ability to provide education (cultural as well as scholastic), as well as the best opportunities to our kids.  The job offer that brought me here and the subsequent advances have presented what we consider the best option for the family.  

there are other factors that brought us and are keeping us here outside of education, health care and tax.  The community we live in, and many communities around, is amazing, I love the approach to work life balance I have found here (yes, I actually love the hard working culture in and around DC).  The weather, yes it's important, real seasons, with a real summer.  and the triathlon, running and riding scenes.  Diverse cultures in the US.  With all things considered, we made a decision the quality of life overall for the family was going to be improved by the move here, and it is. 

So how is that not working for you? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you are a very bright and motivated person that is very good at what you do... not just some schmuck punching a clock with a degree from the community college... not that there is anything wrong with that.

So you put your self and your wife through school... you secured a very high paying position. You purchased a house, pay your student loans, and have enough money left over to put your kids through school and give them a debt free head start.... your school, and their school will be paid off, and you will retire to a very comfortable life that many will never see. I'm sorry, I forgot what the problem was....

1stTimeTri - 2012-06-29 6:15 PM

Its amazing, its like the bowl never empties...

Excuse my ignorance but how does one pay 50% of gross income in taxes when the highest marginal Federal rate is 35% and you live in a state with a flat tax rate of 3%. What other taxes are you paying?

Slight poetic license, but that includes also FICA, the 3% state tax, 1% local tax. My take home is around 60% of my gross each pay. I did not count my property tax or sales taxes, which also add up. 

However, after we pay for the insurance, dental care and education for the rest of the family, we get to keep about 35-40% of what we gross. Which is the larger point. Yes, we have a choice. But somehow other countries also manage to provide those services without having the citizens whine about it.

One day, Sweden is going to say "oh it's ON!".

Seriously.

Watch out.

That is the point. How is the model broke? You pay a high price to receive a high priced job, to pay off your education. You pay a large part of your salary to do so, but not so large you can't also provide your kids. How is that system broke. Those that want to go to school do, and those that don't don't. If you want to be a full time student and learn for the fun of it, that's great too. Work it out. But college has never been about "education", it has always been about securing a higher paying job field. It's a business decision.

If the cost of receiving such training is less than the field will pay, then it's a bad financial choice. If those fields can't get qualified workers to fill the positions at that pay, then they have to raise the pay.

I realize your point was that to you it would not change that much. You have prioritized what you want in life and you allocate the funds to do it. If the Feds took that money from you to do the same with it, it would not make that much difference to you. But that is your choice, not everyone else's. And you still achieve the goals you have set in life without the Federal government doing it for you. So I don't get what is broke. You can't just cut & paste something from one corner of the world into another and say it would work the same here.

Or, in the model of Scandanavian countries of paying for education beyond k-12 but with an American twist, we could make the decision as a country to offer training in the areas needed for free. If we need more people who know how to, for example, teach math to kids, then learning to be a math teacher is free. If you chose to study, say, philosophy, that would be on your own dime. Do we need more plumbers? Free. Fewer dentists? On your own. It would not be that much different from the way that we offer certain jobs in underserved areas the opportunity to pay back student loans by agreeing to work in those places, except that the debt is never set up in the first place. Or it could be done the way some people pay for med school with military service (by agreeing to serve as a doc in the military for an equal number of years). Just expanded into more areas.

I'm not going to dismiss that just for the sport of it. If there are ways to do better that's fine. What I think is legitimate about your cartoon is if we as a people want to discuss if we are spending too much on defense and law enforcement in relation to other things we want that is reasonable. We may find that we are and that we want to shift priorities. But political humor is to spotlight something... a snap shot... and taking a snap shot of why we don't do thing like another country that is vastly different from our in hundreds of ways is... well comical. there is no real basis in reality.

But once again, with this subject and others, a government agency administering a program is inherently inefficient. When we as a country decide where we spend our money, why do we need to spend money with a middle man tacking on an administration fee? Education, if it was "Free", isn't going to be any cheaper. Health care isn't going to be any cheaper by adding in a  middle man administrator.

Universities are providing a product and they will charge a price. If they price themselves out of the market, then they are pretty poorly run business. The selling point has always been that the Feds don't price control... but by doing what they do have more buying power and can get price breaks... when has that ever happened? Price has gone up because now the industry knows they have it made. They all go up, price does not fall, and all we really have is another bloated government agency administering a program that was running before, we have an additional tax to pay for the administration of that agency, and we do not have anything we did not have in the first place.

America is very diverse while some smaller countries are more homogenious.  What does that mean?  It's how people trend and think.  We are very diverse and part of ALL and I do mean part of ALL groups in this country are lazy folks.  You can give free all you want and they will complain about how they receive free whatever.  It's about effort and a lot of folks here just don't utilize their abilities or frankly give a damn.

Face it folks, I love America but Americans are soft candy azz people. 

If it were up to me EVERYONE (that physically could) would serve 2 years in the military after HS. 

Over

It does when all of your social programs are based on having a growing population as a necessary element for their solvency.    What do you think happens to SSI and Medicare when you stop adding workers to the pool to pay for the growing number of recipients?

A year of salary is a great investment to encourage someone to create another worker.