How many on the progressive wing of the Democratic party were duped by Putin?.

[JHan]

273. and maybe we could have substantive discussions instead..

....carpet statements about democrats deliberately blocking progressive legislation? or whatever

Yeah, Scotland "Cut some programs" - Free college subsidies aren't exactly cheap. With concerns about the debt, of course there were cuts. Students who can afford to take on college debt , don't and with a deluge of applications it's also getting harder for Scots to win a place in universities, on top of the cap by their Government to control costs. In policy considerations, emphasis matters. With free college you have increased applications and heavier administrative costs- it stands to reason the added focus would result in cuts in other areas - in their case schools and colleges.

And I made a bunch of other points re college which you ignored, which is why more discussion about it the idea is necessary instead of blind acceptance that "Free college" is some magical solution to tuition costs. You'll also find a lot has changed since the 80's. Any policy which ignores why tuition costs are high, and thinks "free college" would be a fixall is going to be bad policy.

And re wages:

I'd recommend you read:

From Income Inequality and Education Richard Breen,Inkwan Chung ( University of Oxford & Yale University ) https://www.sociologicalscience.com/download/volume-2/august/SocSci_v2_454to477.pdf

" Many commentators have seen the growing gap in earnings and income between those with a college education and those without as a major cause of increasing inequality in the United States and elsewhere. In this article we investigate the extent to which increasing the educational attainment of the US population might ameliorate inequality. We use data from NLSY79 and carry out a three-level decomposition of total inequality into within-person, between-person and between- education parts. We find that the between-education contribution to inequality is small, even when we consider only adjusted inequality that omits the within-person component. We carry out a number of simulations to gauge the likely impact on inequality of changes in the distribution of education and of a narrowing of the differences in average incomes between those with different levels of education. We find that any feasible educational policy is likely to have only a minor impact on income inequality."

and figure 3 on page 13

Figure 3 illustrates why education accounts for relatively little inequality. These kernel density plots show the distributions of respondents’ mean income (aver- aged over the entire period of roughly 20 years) according to education. While it is immediately evident that the densities for higher educational categories lie further to the right, it is equally apparent that there is substantial overlap between categories. In the older cohort, for example, almost 23 percent of respondents in the college category have an average income less than the median for respondents in the high school category. In the younger cohort the figure is 13 percent, reflecting the impression in Figure 3 that the overlap in income is less among those born 1962–4.

It might be objected that education explains only a small share of inequality because the educational groupings we are using are not sufficiently discriminating: the category “college” for example, puts together graduates from different colleges and from different majors and also includes people with post-graduate degrees. Perhaps if we had a finer categorization of education we could explain more; some of the within-education inequality would then become between-education inequality. We repeated our analyses with six categories of education: “less than high school” “GED” “high school diploma” “some college” “completed college” and “advanced degree (MA, PhD or professional qualification)” This had little impact on the share of inequality explained by education.

For example, if we consider only the results for the entire period, the original four categories of education accounted for 0.044/(0.044 + 0.122) = 26.5 percent of total adjusted (for within-person volatility) inequality in the older cohort and 27.4 percent in the younger cohort. Using the six categories these percentages change to 27 percent and 27.8 percent. The additional contributions from the use of the finer categorization to between-group inequality in each of the sub-periods are similarly very small."

Which is why I questioned the sense of a high school graduate taking themselves out of the market for 4 years, to pursue an unproductive degree according to market demands, for the purpose of netting an above-median wage only to then be disappointed.

And my focus on k-12 is the direct link it has on generational wealth: poor education in formative years puts you out of the loop permanently. Literacy and numeracy rates are alarming enough in a country that is the richest and most powerful in the world.

So yeah, instead of "free college" aimed at roping in millennials, I'd rather focus on formative education.

The funding for Medicare for all question is dishonest. Would people keep paying for private insurance once they got Medicare? No.

No it's not "dishonest" . How it's paid for, whether it will repeal hyde, are important questions.

And I'm not the only one unimpressed and wanting more fleshed out details. This article lays out ( better than I could) how Medicare For All might might compromise attaining universal healthcare, and explains how other countries do it better.

https://www.thenation.com/article/medicare-for-all-isnt-the-solution-for-universal-health-care/