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From Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer:<br>
<br>
...It would not be hard at all to make higher education completely
free in the USA ... It’s less than four months of what we waste on
administrative costs by not having a single-payer health care
finance system...<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/College.html">http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/College.html</a><br>
<br>
In a recent talk he gave in Canada ("Public Education Under Massive
Corporate Assault"), Noam Chomsky cites my LBO piece on the costs of
college, and how easy it would be to make higher ed free in the USA:<br>
<br>
"Now that’s one important way to implement the policy of
indoctrination of the young. People who are in a debt trap have very
few options. Now that is true of social control generally; that is
also a regular feature of international policy — those of you who
study the IMF and the World Bank and others are well aware. As the
Mexico-California example illustrates, <u>the reasons for conscious
destruction of the greatest public education system in the world
are not economic. </u>Economist Doug Henwood points out that it
would be quite easy to make higher education completely free. In the
U.S., it accounts for less than 2 percent of gross domestic product.
The personal share of about 1 percent of gross domestic product is a
third of the income of the richest 10,000 households. That’s the
same as three months of Pentagon spending. It’s less than four
months of wasted administrative costs of the privatized healthcare
system, which is an international scandal.<br>
<br>
"[The U.S. healthcare system is] about twice the per capita cost of
comparable countries, has some of the worst outcomes, and in fact
it’s the basis for the famous deficit. If the U.S. had the same kind
of healthcare system as other industrial countries, not only would
there be no deficit, but there would be a surplus. However, to
introduce these facts into an electoral campaign would be suicidally
insane, Henwood points out. Now he’s correct. In a democracy where
elections are essentially bought by concentrations of private
capital, it doesn’t matter what the public wants. The public has
actually been in favor of that for a long of time, but they are
irrelevant in a properly run democracy..."<br>
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