BERNIE'S FREE COLLEGE ISN'T FREE

Yes - we can't allow facts to clutter up someone's fairy tales - it ruins the story!

Ah, the public school system. Do we really want to go there? I don't know where you live but here, in California, we are spending more on public education than any other state and seeing poorer and poorer results every year. Inasmuch as most of our funding for schools (the entire state budget for that matter) comes from federal taxes, you should be complaining too. My/Your/Our return on investment stinks. Despite all the federal taxes flowing into CA, we not only can't balance our budget, but we have unfunded liabilities (much of it in the form of public school teacher pensions) that isn't even counted in the state debt. So, no, we're not paying for public education. Our children and their children will be paying for it. So, yes, it's the very same thing. Public education is not free and we can't afford it, not any more.

California has a budget surplus. WTF is wrong with you? lol Oh you're a conservative I almost forgot. So we can't afford education so lets just close all the schools and make America dumber than it already has become. We'll give the richest folks tax breaks and maybe they'll create schools just like they're creating so many jobs. lol

Oh I dunno maybe it's the assload of news items on Cali's budget surplus. There's the whole bureaucracy thing also, so it will take several years to figure out what to do with all that surplus. As usual.
I don't recall any time in my schooling when I didn't have to buy my own paper and pencils, folders, whiteout, erasers, etc, etc.

And this surplus is recent.....looks like 2013 is the earliest mention at a glance.

One year of bailing out the banks that caused the Worldwide Fiscal Crisis put us more in debt than 10 years of Bernie's plan to educate America.

Capt Michael Greene - Capt - please start with some facts - TARP was a government mandated solution primarily intended to inject confidence and liquidity into the markets - which by the way was the exact opposite of what the government did during the Great Depression - so while we did have a very hard recession, what was adverted was much much worse.

Further - the government didn't 'give' the money to the banks - it was an equity stake - the government took stock warrants which required steep interest payments and the banks had to buy back the stock - consequently the government made a profit off the process.

The folks that got "bailed" where Fannie and Freddie Mae - and before you go off blaming the banks entirely I suggest you dig a little deeper and look at who advocated (to the point of virtually mandating) the idea of loaning money to just about anyone who wanted a home - regardless of the fact they could afford it.

Was there 'bad actors' and unsavory lenders - most certainly. Did many people manage to make foolish mistakes or let greed get the better of them and buy more house than they could afford - or try to flip houses to grow 'wealth" - you bet they did. Did the government loosen lending requirements and encourage risky loans by changing underwriting standards to 'grow homeownership' - yes they did.

So to 'blame the banks' and throw out the tired complaint they they got 'bailed out' is disingenuous and fallacy - a nice simple idea that doesn't hold up to the light of rationale analysis.

I suggest you read any number of the excellent scholarly works and first hand accounts of the financial crisis and the results. Bad decisions by lots of people - bankers, individuals, manufacturers, and the government - not only here, but internationally, led to a financial crisis - which could have been much much worse.

GySgt Carl Rumbolo - Well said. BRAVO

So the banks are not to blame? We didn't bail them out?
Tell that to all the people who are still under water or lost their houses.
Do we all agree that the richest capitalists fucked us all royally, and it took big government to bail them out?
Do we all agree that the banks that were too big to fail are now even bigger?

I found the part where Moodys and S&P were rating the MBS and CDO investments highly, while under contract to the investment banks.
More interesting stuff: The $700 Billion TARP "was dwarfed by other guarantees and lending limits; analysis by Bloomberg found the Federal Reserve had, by March 2009, committed $7.77 trillion to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year."

The whole bailout thing would have been better, I think, if AIG hadn’t spent the first $165 million on bonuses to the very executives who crashed the economy. And then sponsored 6 New Zealand football teams. In fact, didn’t AIG recently sue the government for more?

But in the final analysis, I think we all learned (or should have learned) that when Wall Street is not watched very carefully, they’ll fuck over every taxpayer and then the GOP will blame the debt and the economy on Obama.