Hacker News Reader

Comment by caconym_ | Hacker News Reader

I, for one, am sick of subsidizing people who will decide to play video games and smoke weed all day with our tax dollars.

IIUC, one of the best predictors of a person's earning potential (which we can of course use as a proxy metric for their worth to the economy) is the wealth of their parents. So, why not quit funding public schools? It's two birds with one stone: only those who choose to have children will be responsible for paying for the services they receive (viz. tuition for an education), and we eliminate a subsidy for undesirables who (statistically speaking) are much more likely to become welfare leeches.

That's what I call a win-win.

edit: rather horrifyingly, this sarcasm is going over people's heads (my fault, of course). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29388282

View on HN

The sarcasm went over my head initially. Sadly, I think it is because your post is 100% something I believed I would find on HN.

I think you're forgetting that public schools serve a purpose other than enriching the wealthy. I have such a hard time with takes like these. Would you have public schools turning away children that can't pay?

It was sarcasm, intended to (at the very least) draw attention to the possibility of "throwing out the baby with the bathwater", and the perils of focusing on imaginary "welfare leeches" at the expense of general prosperity.

I almost added an /s, and perhaps I should have. haha

This is the internet, even if you were serious it wouldn't even be in the bottom quartile of dumb takes.

I hope you realize this is already the case. Property taxes are voted on locally and go to pay for local schools and there is vehement opposition towards redistributing funding for schools state wide. People move to certain cities where schools are known to be good (and no surprise, those cities also have lots of generous property tax-based and PTA-based funding for schools).

I might add that the people who can afford it move to those certain cities. But yes, you're right, we already do a great job making sure that not all children have equal opportunity.

Yeah you should have. I was about to comment on how toxic this kind of worldview is, but held back. At any rate, this kind of thinking ensures a world where opportunity is increasingly siloed such that even the best and brightest wind up losing for want of wealthy benefactors.

Thanks for clarifying, had a Poe's law moment there.

Do you want to live in a world where most people are completely uneducated?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com