The 1988 movie Scrooged is one of my absolute favorites this time of year. If you haven’t seen it, imagine Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” translated into the late 1980s, with a cynical TV executive as our Ebenezer. His “greed is good” ethos is ruthless, and, like Scrooge, he is motivated by resentments and regrets that bubble up as he makes his way down the painful road to epiphany. Twisted by unacknowledged regrets and bad choices, he can only see other people as costs, objects, or threats to his already prodigious wealth. In one scene, Frank Cross (Bill Murray) lashes out at his hardworking secretary and then taunts his brother for warning him “you know what they say about treating people badly on the way up?” Murray’s cynical TV executive replies: “yeah, you get to treat ‘em badly on the way down—you get two chances to rough ‘em up!” It takes three ghosts (stop me if you’ve heard this) to get Cross to see the light.
The Tax Bill about to enter the reconciliation process seems driven by a Scrooge-like, ruthless determination to rough up the American public as they are on the way up and again as the economy is on the way down. It’s not hard for most people to see why this bill is a bad idea. Indeed, there’s scant public support for it (29% according to Gallup and Quinnipiac), a number which suggests this is an exercise in raw political power rather than good-faith governance. There are many reasons to object to this hastily written bill, so I’ll just focus on one: graduate education. Right now, the bill would make tuition waivers taxable. This is bad news all around, but it’s devastating for graduate students just starting (or kickstarting) their adult lives. The bill would force them to pay taxes on money they never see; it’s just the on-book credit for their tuition.
It’s not just full-time graduate students who would suffer. Workers hoping to move up from that $12/hour job into a salaried position by earning a part-time graduate degree would hit new and prohibitive up-front expenses. That same tax would also apply to continuing education courses for nurses, teachers, pharmacists, or plumbers. But most full-time graduate students, even those with institutional support, would face a stark choice between more debt or quitting. At my institution, most “supported” grad students currently get by on between $8265 to $16k a year and, like Bob Cratchet, they haven’t seen even a modest raise in years. In exchange for their pittance and tuition waiver, they teach, grade, act, accompany, help run labs, and make myriad other valuable contributions while taking full course loads and engaging in their own research. Honestly, I don’t know how they do it; we recently opened a food pantry on campus to try to help them. If they had to pay taxes on their annual tuition benefit (here, it’s $28k for out of state) and the stipend, that would leave some of them as little as $4000 a year to live on. Consider that some of them are also paying on student loans with no grace period, and the interest for all student loans would no longer be deductible. It’s absurd. Universities across the country could cut the number of graduate fellowships to try to make up the balance, but God only knows where we’d find enough nurses and doctors to meet the looming health care crisis, enough engineers and material scientists to tackle our energy and infrastructure problems, or enough teachers and social workers to meet our needs. Vet school is even more expensive, so I hope you don’t have pets.
33% of R&D and 55% of all basic research in this country is done in universities, even as state and federal funding grows more scarce. Why in the world, then, would you ruthlessly attack your already-subsidized tech and innovation incubators? Perhaps it’s because FOX, Breitbart, and opportunistic politicians routinely stoke resentments that go back to the civil rights movement with sensational stories about a few activists at left-leaning schools like Berkeley, Reid, or Middlebury to denounce the whole enterprise. Higher education has been so effectively demonized by these outlets that you’ll hear nary a good word about it from the right, even though it’s still the most effective means for economic development, upward mobility, and access to good jobs. But these attempts at political punishment can no longer hide a deeper anxiety that’s becoming more obvious by the minute: well-educated citizens tend to make more prudent electoral choices, choices that would throw the Tea-Party flavored republicans and their 1% puppetmasters out of power. So, like Frank Cross, they terrify and manipulate their audiences with stories of manufactured outrage to keep those eyes on the screen.
These curated narratives provide some cover for Republicans and their propaganda wing to gut graduate education out of resentment for the “liberal elites.” But here’s the thing; the “elites,” both the liberal and the conservative ones, will still be able to access higher and graduate education. Those who can pay will get to play. The people we’re really talking about here are those first-generation students who want to be nurses, professors, or engineers. The people congress is screwing are the middle, working, and lower class Americans, most of whom are already being crushed by the for-profit student loans supported by the DeVos Ministry of Education, which actually stopped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from rooting out dodgy lenders who prey on student victims.
Universities and their students are being roughed up by their government through a tax bill that downsizes our future middle class just as they are getting started. All this appears to be for the short-term gain of the wealthiest. Resentments about those labeled “liberal elites” (an ideological flourish meant to distract from the real man behind the curtain) and misplaced beliefs in disproven trickle-down economics may lull some conservative lawmakers into believing they should have no regrets, that they are right to help corporations over citizens, that greed is good, and that people who aren’t already millionaires are just bad apples, spending their money on “movies or booze or women.” But the truth is getting quite clear to the rest of us: they’re doing what they have to do to please the rich donors and PACs who keep them in power. We’ve seen their nobler aspirations fall off, one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses them. Let’s hope that the ghost of Christmas Future arrives soon, with a clarifying vision of what kind of world subsidized greed and impoverished educational opportunities would bring. If they don’t snap out of it soon, we’re all Scrooged.