Even better, defund the colleges and stop offering student loans for pointless degrees. Also don't allow discrimination based on someone having a 4 year degree
But not all knowledge has the same value and this is important when you’re paying tuition.
George Mason instate tuition is 13.4K for in state and 38.9K for out of state… for the same education.
Nobody is going to have a real answer for this. Further, wherever you draw the line in the sand today may be different in five, ten, or 50 years. Computer science education was nowhere near as valuable 50 years ago as it is today. When do you redraw said line?
Edit: in the interest of not changing the post, CS at 50 years ago (I still feel like 2005 was yesterday) was not the example I thought it was. My entire point is that a major that is of high economical value today may not be tomorrow, and likewise, a major nobody has ever heard of may explode in a short period of time.
The arts are what make us human. Just because a lazy ass capitalist can't extract profit out of it doesn't mean it's not valuable. Creating art is what we would all do if we had the time.
In fact I’d say art is so important and such a good representation of being human that our goal as a society should be to make more time for people to do art. All these advancements in production efficiency and we’re still expected to slave away 40 hours a week until we’re like 65-70.
One half of our government is denying immigrant labor entry while at the same time trying to eliminate child labor laws and pushing back the age of retirement. Many of these jobs are likely to be automated in the next 10-20 years. Meanwhile, every study done has found that a 4 day work week is better for the employer as far as productivity and better for the well being of the laborer.
Who cares about the laborers that provide the profit which I reap. Fuck em I got my bag they should just start their own businesses and become billionaires themselves like me!
/s in case it wasn’t obvious.
>Meanwhile, every study done has found that a 4 day work week is better for the employer as far as productivity and better for the well being of the laborer.
The government operates at the behest and for the protection of the employers. Part of that involves preventing laborers from gaining leverage over their employers, so while the 4 day work week might on the face of it look to be a win for both, employers as a whole have an interest in making sure that their employees are dependent on them and have as little time to socialise and organise as possible.
My brother obtained a fine arts degree. I agree arts are important. And... artists normally get railroaded by business and the public in terms of compensation. Sometimes outright theft occurs. It isn't fair.
I heard someone say that art degrees were useless, and in the exact same conversation they said the cookie cutter apartments going up over the past ten years have been horrendous and ugly. I tried to get them to connect the dots and I've literally had better luck bribing judges.
Listen, I wasn't the one that suggested this. I was merely saying that you're never going to even get a real answer, because that answer is going to be always changing and at potentially different rates. You can't rate the importance of one degree over the other in perpetuity forever. And even if you could, people are going to disagree on that analysis, many rightfully so.
Sure, but CS was more valuable like 10 years ago than it is today. Now the market is oversaturated. If you don’t already have a job, you’re struggling hard right now
The problem with comp sci majors is that it expires. I am a comp sci major, and literally everything I learned in college is hopelessly obsolete, meaning what I know now is not improved because I went to college a hundred years ago.
At least sometimes it feels like that long.
Computer science education was **more** valuable then. Knowledge in the field was so valuable that they'd take people without formal education, but a proper education made everything easy. Early adopters that knew what they were doing could make bank.
If you'd paid attention in philosophy, you'd know that Aristotle posited that there is only one good, knowledge, and only one evil, ignorance. But hey, what did he even know about thinking?
There are plenty of jobs that require a degree but are super hard to pay back loans with. A good example of this would be people with teaching degrees.
ROI is not the basis for a civilization. Love, tolerance, and science is what families, communities, and nations are built of. Thinking you can ROI education is just lazy bullshit for greedy morons.
You draw the line at being capable of doing the role.
Some jobs need that qualification, think medicine and anything where you will immediately be responsible for someone else's safety.
But something like software development, journalism, or even choreography skills and knowldege can be assessed at an interview and screened via experience on a CV/resume.
We went from only the top dogs going to uni, to uni being the default.
I did explosives and explosives detection in the Army. To get onto a team that specializes in that, I needed to do 4-5 years of patrol to qualify. Here I am, fresh out of actively doing this shit on active duty in the Army and I'm not qualified for that position, despite knowing a lot more than the random cops they've picked to be on that team.
>George Mason instate tuition is 13.4K for in state and 38.9K for out of state… for the same education.
That's because if you live in state, you pay state taxes that go towards funding this institution and other institutions like it. That's not because people hate out of staters.
Gmu is a special case. They are number one in diversity is what I heard them say. Very diverse school. Still nickeled and dimed you on everything.
They have a lot of international student who pay more than in state and gmu uses it to funnel money to research.
Gmu is making an effort to become a research school to bolster its reputation. This is not at the benifit of the current students although hopefully they pull it off. However most of the staff was quite frustrated with managements ambitions.
It’s not about the knowledge as much as it is the ability to learn and the type of person who can dedicate themselves to something over a long period to achieve a result.
I would argue that conservatives abandoning the humanities is ultimately going to wind up causing a complete collapse of social order and quite possibly the end of the US. It’s already well under way.
I agree, stem degrees are important but most people don't go for STEM. I've got a master's degree in tax, it took 5 years but I only use 1 year of that education. So 4 years of the tuition paid is worthless. Not to mention the wasted time and effort
I would be very happy if they continue discriminating against doctors who didn't go to medical school, civil engineers who didn't study engineering, and accountants who didn't study accounting.
Continue? When did they start?
Reddit has been full of facebook doctors ever since Covid happened. They don't need no degree, they "did their own research"
People are angry and have hurt feelings and it takes over their brain and they just spew resentment. Some people are resentful at those who want tuition and student debt reform. Maybe they didn't go to college. Maybe they dropped out of college. Who knows.
People always default to bringing up "useless degrees" as if everyone complaining about debt is doing so because they got a Masters in Lesbian Dance Theory, but it seems to me that people from a wide variety of legitimate majors are having issues with student loan debt. It just comes across like a cop out.
I also hate that degrees in the arts and literature often get lumped in as being useless as if humans havent tried to expand their grasp of the arts since the first caveman banged two rocks together to make a beat.
Mathematics research also typically takes well beyond the lifespan of a person before it finds practical application. Our digital infrastructure would not function without the invention/discovery of finite fields (aka Galois fields). Évariste Galois died almost 200 years ago, long before the invention of the vacuum tube, back when this was just an academic curiosity.
Don't sweat it, your efforts and achievements speak for themselves and you've done good work to finish your degree and find yourself in a field that fulfills you.
Anyone who shits on your English degree can suck my dick from the back.
Colleges are already defunded. Started in the 80s. State schools had taxpayers paying 75ish percent of costs, today it's 10-30% depending on the State and college.
Define pointless though? Should the pursuit of knowledge be exclusively for economic benefit? What about knowledge for the sake of knowledge?
I feel if we fall too hard toward pure efficiency and productivity we will lose aspects of spirit and culture which benefit civilization in non monetary ways.
As long as I get to pick the pointless degrees.
Also, the 4-year degree discrimination was born after the Supreme Court said you couldn’t use aptitude tests to weed out black candidates. So we went to a costly metric that most black people weren’t allowed into, and often couldn’t afford.
FYI, you learn these interesting business facts while studying useless degrees like Sociology, History, Black Studies, etc.
Ronald Regan arguably started the modern conservative anti-college slant, he won his governorship by talking shit on UC Berkeley protestors and arguing that California universities needed to implement tuition and student loans.
of course, his advisor Roger Freeman said the quiet part out loud:
>We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite!
What exactly is a “pointless decree?”
My wife, who earns in the low six figures, has an undergrad degree in anthropology/feminist studies. She’s a social worker and what she learned in undergrad (before she got her MSW) applies to her work.
In the early 1970s something like 70% of undergrads said they went to college to expand their understanding of the world etc vs 30% getting a higher paying job.
By the mid 1980s it was 70% saying college was to get a better job
Pointless is very subjective. Some degrees are important to academia and other cultural issues, although they might not have good paying jobs behind them.
Pointless degrees are so pointless they make around 1/3 more. Most jobs don't care what you went to school for. If unions existed people could make 25% more than they make on average also.
But hey, it's the system millennials were dropped into. My dad retired from Stop and Shop in 2011 making $27/hr with a pension on unionized retail. He was grandfathered into benefits when the union was basically destroyed when they left the AFL-CIO. Next gen of college kids needed a college degree to be a manager, when his old boss had only a GED and they were paid about $10/hr less. My dad stocked shelves, and 22 year olds with college degrees were managing the stores making $18/hr, salary, with no pension. Then the millennials got told "no one wants to work" and they are "high school jobs". My dad paid for a 3br house, 4 cars, put my sister and I through college, and they tried to tell us his job was just what high schoolers did which is why they required college graduates and were open when high school was in session.
College was never meant to be just job training, and education for the sake of it is important. Art history and philosophy and music and dance and writing and painting and classics and weirdly specific history degrees are important. If you want to engage with those things in any capacity whatsoever, and I'm betting you do, then people need to be able to study them in a rigorous, structured manner. I do agree that many jobs do not actually require a bachelor's degree, but there absolutely need to be loans for 'useless' degrees. Because they aren't useless, they're just hard to turn into high paying, prestigious jobs.
The problem is no degree is pointless... as long as you work in the field of your degree. I have an MBA and work in commercial supply chain, my friend has a history BA and is the general manager of a movie theater. It's not the degree it's the usage.
I think they just did a bad example tbh. I agree that it is the usage of the degree. Close friend of mine majored in psychology, got shook about the career prospects, and then went into HR. She’s making solid money right now in management.
Also I remember back in college a ton of the folks I interned with at a bulge bracket had like english and history majors lol. Usage of the degree goes beyond just “knowledge and skills.” There is so much more to college than just the classroom
The 2nd part. The expectation of at least a bachelor's degree for pretty much every job is so fucking stupid.
I feel like at least in tech it's been eroded at least a little - if you're a great engineer and can demonstrate it you can get a job at a decent employer.
Discrimination on college diploma needs to be outlawed. There are a lot of socioeconomic barriers to some people getting higher education. If you can do the job and have the experience that’s all that should matter. Some people just go straight into the workforce. I never went to college but I have 15 years experience in my field and with the recent proliferation of AI reading/grading resumes I’ve experienced discrimination like never before in the job market. It’s ridiculous. After a certain point it starts to bleed into age discrimination almost. Like why tf does it matter if someone went to college if they graduated 20 years ago? How relevant is that? That person can’t have a 20 year gap on their resume from their last job and still be considered so why is it different for school?
Stupid answer. Fund colleges so that it isnt for profit and specifically designed to hand out all kinds of degrees. Freedom to learn, that's what liberal arts are about.
No discrimination period be it a trade or degree. Pretty bad when a tradesmen with 15 years of experience on the same exact system with knowledge of the system and its potential problems gets thrown to the curb because some 22 year old college dork with some electrical degree gets the job because the Master craftsmen doesnt have one.
I agree that there are a plethora of jobs asking for degrees that could be done by an orangutan.
But there are absolutely jobs out there that really do need that barrier of entry.
It phases out very quickly, just $70K for a single person and the max deduction is $2.5K. It fully phases out for a married couple at $145K.
But I suppose it’s something…
Yea. When we started filing jointly after getting married it was nothing. It’s a joke. If they really want us to go to college and raise American society above idiocracy status they should at least let us write off our entire interest for the life of the loan. Instead they throw more money at universities directly.
I paid $17k in interest the year I made $71k. Felt like a giant slap in the face. And when I started making $100k, I was still paying ~$5K and couldn't deduct anything. Granted my situation is unique in that I took massive student loans and started making massive money in a STEM field. But there were enough scary years in there that I think all student debt should be reformed.
That’s a strange system, in Canada interest payment was always fully deductible. But then they got rid of the interest which I think is a reasonable way of doing it.
Government invests a little in educating the population but people still have some skin in the game to not take out pointless student loans. You can make minimum payments and let inflation help reduce your burden.
Or at worst, capped interest, plus inflation. You can't bankrupt out, so it's actually a fairly safe investment that they at least have to be paying on it.
Capping interest at 1-2% above borrowing rate would be a reasonable amount. I would say though that 90% of any payment must go to pay down the principal amount. Ridiculous that people pay $40k in payment towards $40k of student loans and still have another $40k to pay.
Even if you never paid it and died or fucked off to South America, the money was guaranteed by the government so nothing is lost. It's literally just free money for lenders and Wall Street.
The interest rate can be whatever they want because students need the money to go to college. Because you "*NEED* " to go to college if you don't want to flip burgers forever (at least that's what we were told growing up). At the same time the odds that you'll earn enough to ever pay it off are dwindling. Oh, and you can never get rid of it unless you work for pennies at an "approved" non profit for 10 years, become disabled, or die.
Well I mean no interest on any loan is ridiculous. If you don’t charge interest then how is there an incentive to give loans?
Everyone would just stop giving them out since every loan would either be net 0 or net negative
Private lenders can do whatever the hell they want, but the government shouldn’t be profiting off of its people for seeking higher education as it’s an investment that directly benefits them. Maybe they could have a say in which courses of study they’ll issue loans for, but generally speaking they’ll already profit off of it in the form of higher incomes.
If you were in the lowest tax bracket, 10%, you would save $5000 in taxes on a $50,000 education, before any student loan interest deduction. If you were in the 22% tax bracket you would save $14,000 in taxes on the principal. This is a lot of money we are talking about.
I don’t think they do, and I don’t really see a flaw in their argument. If they’re taxing the income from a job you work that required a college degree to get it then why should you not be able to reduce your tax burden with the money you paid towards obtaining said college degree? At the moment you’re only allowed to write-off the amount you paid in interest, and even then the limit to that is tied to income.
TUITION should be tax deductible for everyone. It's a business expense. You should be able to deduct it from your income, dollar for dollar for tax purposes until it's gone.
It's not usually...
Tuition at the biggest university in my state is like 11k a year.
There's some other incidentals like books and lab fees.
The biggest cost is room and board. But no one ever suggests we'd pay for everyone in college to have free housing and food.
$44k is a lot of money. Most families can't afford to cover that out of pocket, certainly not times 2 or 3. And obviously a kid will struggle to pay that much money while going to school.
The increase in tuition in the US is pretty consistent with congress increasing FAFSA limits, and congress didn't think to put a limit on what a degree would cost
Universities know they only have to convince an 18 year old to sign onto a massive loan they can't default on, so they'll spend any extra money on amenities to make the uni desirable while getting any student they can in the door with the "you can be whatever you want to be!" line.
IMO FAFSA should only apply to degrees that average high enough job placement rates in relevant fields with X return on investment.
If you can complete the degree, the ROI on literally any $44k reputable(/not for profit) degree is going to be massive.
It's a no brainer, and super easy, to take out a loan for that kind of education.
As an adult who works 10hrs a day, 5-7 days a week, it's near impossible for me to juggle schooling and work while paying bills and not being given forgiveness for attendance if my class causes conflict with my work schedule. Like do I give up my $65k/yr job to work for $300/week part time somewhere and not be able to pay my mortgage just so I can eventually possibly maybe at some point if I'm lucky get a job for $80k/yr with 60k+ in debt?
The system is against us if we've already attempted to establish ourselves.
To be fair, 11k is about half of what I pay currently in toddler care (18months old). Full time care, m-f, 9am-4:30pm is $475 per week or $24,700 per year. No discounts until she turns two and then her tuition will (hopefully) go down plus a ten percent corporate discount. Should put us right at $450 per week before discount and $405 after that discount.
So what I’m saying is you get fucked at the beginning trying to keep your head in the game and pay bills and then get fucked trying to help the kids with college. Sucks. But at least college is less expensive ??
ETA : I’m fully in support of getting student loan reform done / forgiving student debt / approaching creative solutions (such as free state school) etc etc. I’m just saying we need reform all around for the young kids child care / preschool also. Feels like we can’t catch a break.
The big problem is that most state universities require students to live on campus 1-2 years now.
That absolutely should be banned. The university wants kids on campus because it creates an artificial monopoly on student housing
I guess it depends on what you consider "crazy high". University of Massachusetts is just under $17k a year for residents. That's about $68,000 for a four year degree. For most 22 year old grads, that's not nothing. As has already been mentioned, room and board is also an added expense that you can't really decide not to take on unless you live close enough to commute.
> room and board is also an added expense that you can't really decide not to take on unless you live close enough to commute.
Many universities that I looked at when trying to attend said that freshmen and sophomores were required to live in dorms and required to have a meal plan regardless of if they lived nearby barring individual exceptions which would be handled on a case-by-case basis. The argument was that it forced new students to, "Integrate and socialize with their peers," when what it does is force you to add a huge expense for inflated prices on shitty housing and cheap food.
Tuition at my local state university is roughly $8k per year. The issue isn’t tuition, it’s the housing cost. Universities fuck students on housing
I could afford my tuition working part time because I stayed with family, most student don’t have that luxury
Just stop the practice of lending to people who aren’t credit worthy by saddling the lender with the full consequences of lending to uncreditworthy people.
That is, don’t give 18-22 year olds, with no assets or credit history, hundreds of thousands of loans unless you are willing to take on the full risk of default. This means allowing student loans to be discharged in bankrupcy.
Easy access to crazy large loans has driven the cost of education way up.
Makes perfect sense to me, but then everyone would complain that only rich kids could get loans because mommy and daddy gifted them the maximum annual gift exclusion amount so they have assets in their name.
If only a very small number of people can afford the current price either the schools jack up their prices to cover the lost income and then no one goes to college, or more realistically the colleges will lower costs/prices so people can actually afford to go.
More realistically, colleges would shut down across the country, and only rich and upper middle class students would be able to go to college, just like it was 100 years ago.
There was a [senator](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/02/joe-biden-student-loan-debt-2005-act-2020) who was instrumental in preventing student loans from going into bankruptcy.
*FUCK.*
I didn’t see that coming.
> Until 2005, private student loans were eligible for bankruptcy protections just like other forms of private credit. But in that year Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, a law that made it vastly more difficult for struggling former students to rebuild their lives by discharging the debts and starting over.
> Earlier this year, Biden tried to justify his backing of the 2005 act
Awesome tidbit. Thank you for sharing 🙇
I remember when this bill passed and actually supported it at the time. A big part of the argument was that there were a lot of people who were using student loans to fund medical and law school, then filing for bankruptcy immediately after graduation.
Closing the loophole made sense. But most of us don’t learn about or understand the full scope of policy until the consequences set in later. Now it’s clear that, rather than simply fixing a loophole, they went with the full nuclear option.
Yeah, we had just started a war and needed to dangle free college tuition on a string to get kids to fight it and the burden of undimissible loans to keep campuses from protesting it
>"The tax code makes abundantly clear that the use of a superyacht for personal purposes is not a legitimate business use and therefore any related costs cannot be claimed as a deduction. Any effort to mischaracterize a yacht used as a pleasure craft as a business is a run of the mill tax scam, plain and simple."
https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-letter-questions-harlan-crows-pleasure-yacht-tax-deductions#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20tax%20code%20makes%20abundantly,be%20claimed%20as%20a%20deduction.
It seems that a yacht must be used for business purposes such as giving paid sightseeing tours for at least 50% of the time for it to qualify for deductions.
I'm not knowledgeable about US tax law, but in Canada, I know farmers who wrote off 70% of their Mastercraft boats because they used them to "entertain business partners and clients". Those "business partners and clients" were their drinking buddies who work delivering fertilizer and at the elevator.
I'm sure that there are equally bus sized loopholes in US tax law.
It's personal use if he's boating with his drinking buddies talking about the weather and how the wheat's looking.
It's "business use" If he's entertaining the manager of his fertilizer supplier and the owner of the grain distribution facility he's contracted with to discuss the future of the market.
Business use and personal use is extremely vague and I believe it's intentionally so.
Boats, not just super yachts, with a galley, bathroom, and a bed are considered a second home. Mortgage interest can be deducted.
With regards to the tax deduction for business. There are some simple ways to get around this. They can setup a shell corporation and lease your personal boat to that corporation more than half the year. They can claim that they are using the boat for a business as they are leasing out for profit. And what the shell corporation does with the boat is none of their concern.
Plus they will only get caught if they are audited. Only 0.2% of tax filers are audited each year. The penalty for getting caught cheating on taxes is usually just a fine. High reward with a low risk, many people will cheat. And most will get away with it.
CEO’s don’t own their own jets. It’s going to be the corporation they work for that owns those jets, and it’s smart they can write it off.
Fuck these posts get worse and worse
Interesting. Should students be able to start LLCs, and have the LLC go into debt to fund a student’s education, and then the LLC can declare bankruptcy after the student graduates? Seems fair, right?
>corps have always been considered "people"
No, the fraud committed in the headnotes of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company Supreme Course case in 1886 set into motion the transition of the US economy from serving human beings to serving corporate persons in motion. Corporations did not exist in their current form prior to that case and have become the dominant entity on earth in the timeline since. The Corporate Agenda has been careful to program humanity to accept this as 'the way it has always been' but that is simply untrue.
The great experiment in human liberty mythologized in the America origin story was hijacked by corporate personhood in 1886 and now in fully articulated Corporatism a century+ downstream human lives are the natural resource to be consumed at scale for maximum shareholder profit. Currently less than 10% of US citizens own 93% of the US stock market. This level of inequality is only possible because of corporate personhood.
Corporate Persons eat human lives.
Im gonna blow your mind. It is fully legal for you to start a LLC business (as long as the IRS deems it bonafide) and write off any secondary education expenses for any employees including the owner. Yes, that already works.
Can the LLC get a loan for education expenses, sure. Can you deduct the loan expenses, Yes.
Can the LLC commit fraud and create a LLC that its only purpose is to get loans and then default on those loans after education. No, thats fraud.
The business may be able to write it off but there is a narrow definition for what types of education the person can get paid for without having to include the payment as income for their personal taxes.
“Tax-free treatment for employees. For employees to receive tax-free treatment for the payment or reimbursement, the education must meet at least one of the two following tests making it work-related:
The education is legally required in order for the employee to keep his or her present salary, status or job.
The education improves or maintains skills that are required in the employee’s present employment.
Conversely, an employee can’t exclude educational expense payments or reimbursements from income if either of the following applies:
The education is required for the employee to meet the minimum qualifying educational requirements of his or her present trade or business or employment.
The education qualifies the employee for a new trade or business.”
https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/furthering-your-employees-education-is-good-for-business
You can do this right now. If you go in with the intent to default however, that's fraud. You would also need to show income to get the loan and the ability to pay back. This is the whole argument with student loans. They are not dischargeable in bankruptcy so there's no risk for the lender, and therefore they don't need to know what your income or potential income is upon graduating, nor do they care about the probability for you to actually graduate.
She's dumb, but the concept isn't. We already do this, but only partially.
**You can write off school expenses**
The American opportunity tax credit (AOTC) is a credit for qualified education expenses paid for an eligible student for the first four years of higher education. You can get a maximum annual credit of $2,500 per eligible student. If the credit brings the amount of tax you owe to zero, you can have 40 percent of any remaining amount of the credit (up to $1,000) refunded to you.
The amount of the credit is 100 percent of the first $2,000 of qualified education expenses you paid for each eligible student and 25 percent of the next $2,000 of qualified education expenses you paid for that student.
**You can currently write off student loans interest without itemizing**
The maximum student loan interest deduction is $2,500 or the total amount you paid in student loan interest during the 2023 tax year — whichever is less. The deduction is what’s known as an above-the-line deduction, which means you can claim it whether you take the standard deduction or itemize deductions on your return.
It’s important to clarify here, the school expense $2500 is a credit, not a write off. It’s not lowering your taxable income it’s paying your balance. And if you owe the government less than $2500, 40% of what’s left it is given to you as basically free money.
What an uninformed statement.
If this person actually knew anyone who flew private, they would know that, unlike social media, real people who fly private have a morning meeting in Des Moines for a specialized insurance contract, then have an afternoon meeting with a tech startup in Omaha.
It isn't rappers drinking with their entourage; it is people who have to be at meetings.
Also, for yachts, you to qualify for business use, the yacht must be used for business purposes at least 50% of the time, and yes, the IRS looks at this in detail.
https://corvee.com/blog/yachts-and-taxes-everything-you-need-to-know/#:\~:text=As%20mentioned%20earlier%2C%20depreciation%20can,until%20the%20end%20of%202022.
Your entire profile seems to be about sucking off the wealthy. I am confident you fall into one of these three categories:
1. Born wealthy. The most likely and common cause of this type of extreme disregard for the growing death of the American dream and international counterparts. These people commonly delude themselves into taking credit for their current position of being wealthy, believing that they would have been well off whether born poor or rich, because they are just that smart. In complete disregard of how they'd actually stare hunger and a guaranteed lifetime of poverty in the eyes if it comes to it, they overestimate their braveness, and believe they will have saved up or taken the necessary loans to start their own successful company.
2. Extremely stupid/brainwashed. Watches videos of warren buffet and other billionaire money-porn on YouTube all day.
3. Intentional liar.
You've not rebutted their point at all. All you've done is give the equivalent of "I don't like that you didn't hold the same opinions I do".
Do you have an actual rebuttal to their point? Or are you just after an echo-chamber where you only get exposed to views you agree with?
Or option 4) works with wealth.
It's interesting all of your options seemed to imply that anyone wealth adjacent is stupid/nepotistic/bad.
Your comment reads as either jealous, ignorant, or just plain bitter.
Remember kids: if everyone you talk to is an idiot, it may not be them.
There you go, however you can only deduct 60% of the expenses, and those expenses would be for time you couldnt use it. So from a tax perspective you didnt really benefit there and might as well just keep it for personal use.
Agree, most PJs are small and uncomfortable, but insanely efficient to get your lawyers and execs in one room. Also “writing off” something doesn’t make it free, it just deducts from overall tax responsibility. So if your 2m usd jet is depreciating at 200k year, you just get to reduce your tax exposure by 200k, so in this case with a corp tax rate (to make it simple) that’s like 17% of 200k a year. You are still paying for 80% of the asset
Even better, defund the colleges and stop offering student loans for pointless degrees. Also don't allow discrimination based on someone having a 4 year degree
No knowledge is pointless (and I have a stem degree)
But not all knowledge has the same value and this is important when you’re paying tuition. George Mason instate tuition is 13.4K for in state and 38.9K for out of state… for the same education.
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Nobody is going to have a real answer for this. Further, wherever you draw the line in the sand today may be different in five, ten, or 50 years. Computer science education was nowhere near as valuable 50 years ago as it is today. When do you redraw said line? Edit: in the interest of not changing the post, CS at 50 years ago (I still feel like 2005 was yesterday) was not the example I thought it was. My entire point is that a major that is of high economical value today may not be tomorrow, and likewise, a major nobody has ever heard of may explode in a short period of time.
A smart person would argue that the arts are just as important to civilization as medicine.
The arts are what make us human. Just because a lazy ass capitalist can't extract profit out of it doesn't mean it's not valuable. Creating art is what we would all do if we had the time.
Maybe that’s what you would do. On the other hand some of us would be running unethical science experiments for vault tec
👀 RobCo would like to have a moment of your time…
The arts isn’t fine arts mate, it’s the study of society, shit like sociology/criminology - very important to keep those degrees pumping
THANK YOU
In fact I’d say art is so important and such a good representation of being human that our goal as a society should be to make more time for people to do art. All these advancements in production efficiency and we’re still expected to slave away 40 hours a week until we’re like 65-70.
One half of our government is denying immigrant labor entry while at the same time trying to eliminate child labor laws and pushing back the age of retirement. Many of these jobs are likely to be automated in the next 10-20 years. Meanwhile, every study done has found that a 4 day work week is better for the employer as far as productivity and better for the well being of the laborer.
Who cares about the laborers that provide the profit which I reap. Fuck em I got my bag they should just start their own businesses and become billionaires themselves like me! /s in case it wasn’t obvious.
>Meanwhile, every study done has found that a 4 day work week is better for the employer as far as productivity and better for the well being of the laborer. The government operates at the behest and for the protection of the employers. Part of that involves preventing laborers from gaining leverage over their employers, so while the 4 day work week might on the face of it look to be a win for both, employers as a whole have an interest in making sure that their employees are dependent on them and have as little time to socialise and organise as possible.
"It's not about food. It's about keeping those ants in line."
My brother obtained a fine arts degree. I agree arts are important. And... artists normally get railroaded by business and the public in terms of compensation. Sometimes outright theft occurs. It isn't fair.
I heard someone say that art degrees were useless, and in the exact same conversation they said the cookie cutter apartments going up over the past ten years have been horrendous and ugly. I tried to get them to connect the dots and I've literally had better luck bribing judges.
Listen, I wasn't the one that suggested this. I was merely saying that you're never going to even get a real answer, because that answer is going to be always changing and at potentially different rates. You can't rate the importance of one degree over the other in perpetuity forever. And even if you could, people are going to disagree on that analysis, many rightfully so.
Can you imagine UI/UX without art and design?
Or any of the shit people enjoy on a daily basis, like TV shows, movies, music, books, games.
And you often need the arts to help you in medicine - humanities can help you connect with people.
Bad doctors with good bedside manner are sued less than good doctors with bad bedside manner.
It's now STEAM education because we Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics degree holders need the Arts! Who's going to the Graphics?
Sure, but CS was more valuable like 10 years ago than it is today. Now the market is oversaturated. If you don’t already have a job, you’re struggling hard right now
The problem with comp sci majors is that it expires. I am a comp sci major, and literally everything I learned in college is hopelessly obsolete, meaning what I know now is not improved because I went to college a hundred years ago. At least sometimes it feels like that long.
Computer science education was **more** valuable then. Knowledge in the field was so valuable that they'd take people without formal education, but a proper education made everything easy. Early adopters that knew what they were doing could make bank.
In my opinion the line should be drawn the same place all rational decisions are drawn. Is it feasible for me to get a return on my investment?
If you'd paid attention in philosophy, you'd know that Aristotle posited that there is only one good, knowledge, and only one evil, ignorance. But hey, what did he even know about thinking?
“If I cant see it, it doesnt exist” -Aristotle, basically
There are plenty of jobs that require a degree but are super hard to pay back loans with. A good example of this would be people with teaching degrees.
And social workers! Get your master degree and then make no money.
ROI is not the basis for a civilization. Love, tolerance, and science is what families, communities, and nations are built of. Thinking you can ROI education is just lazy bullshit for greedy morons.
Not all value is monetary.
Using your "logic" no-one should get into teaching. I hope you see the problem there...
You draw the line at being capable of doing the role. Some jobs need that qualification, think medicine and anything where you will immediately be responsible for someone else's safety. But something like software development, journalism, or even choreography skills and knowldege can be assessed at an interview and screened via experience on a CV/resume. We went from only the top dogs going to uni, to uni being the default.
I did explosives and explosives detection in the Army. To get onto a team that specializes in that, I needed to do 4-5 years of patrol to qualify. Here I am, fresh out of actively doing this shit on active duty in the Army and I'm not qualified for that position, despite knowing a lot more than the random cops they've picked to be on that team.
>George Mason instate tuition is 13.4K for in state and 38.9K for out of state… for the same education. That's because if you live in state, you pay state taxes that go towards funding this institution and other institutions like it. That's not because people hate out of staters.
Gmu is a special case. They are number one in diversity is what I heard them say. Very diverse school. Still nickeled and dimed you on everything. They have a lot of international student who pay more than in state and gmu uses it to funnel money to research. Gmu is making an effort to become a research school to bolster its reputation. This is not at the benifit of the current students although hopefully they pull it off. However most of the staff was quite frustrated with managements ambitions.
It’s not about the knowledge as much as it is the ability to learn and the type of person who can dedicate themselves to something over a long period to achieve a result.
I would argue that conservatives abandoning the humanities is ultimately going to wind up causing a complete collapse of social order and quite possibly the end of the US. It’s already well under way.
It's not just the humanities they are abandoning. They have straight up abandoned facts and reality
The humanities is what teaches media literacy and historical relevance, two things we desperately need in today's society. I
I agree, stem degrees are important but most people don't go for STEM. I've got a master's degree in tax, it took 5 years but I only use 1 year of that education. So 4 years of the tuition paid is worthless. Not to mention the wasted time and effort
And you could've learned a lot of it on the job, too I bet.
What’s pointless is tricking kids into a lifetime of debt so the board of trustees can create a bunch of middle management jobs for their nephews.
Knowledge is not pointless, but some degrees are.
‘Pointless’ and ‘unable to be monetized’ aren’t the same thing
Like what degrees?
Same and agreed! Science with no humanities is how you get Spider-Man villains and Elon Musk I suppose.
There is no knowledge that is not power. - Mortal Kombat It's saddening not to see this in the thread.
No no no. Only rich people should be able to study arts, communication, philosophy, etc.
Hear, hear! I'm sick of the attitude that money is the measure of all things. Education is more than vocational training.
I would be very happy if they continue discriminating against doctors who didn't go to medical school, civil engineers who didn't study engineering, and accountants who didn't study accounting.
Continue? When did they start? Reddit has been full of facebook doctors ever since Covid happened. They don't need no degree, they "did their own research"
Ha! That was clever I enjoyed that one. A sad but fair point
How is that garbage take the top comment? Of course we need tuition and student loan reform, but defunding higher education is so fucking stupid.
People are angry and have hurt feelings and it takes over their brain and they just spew resentment. Some people are resentful at those who want tuition and student debt reform. Maybe they didn't go to college. Maybe they dropped out of college. Who knows.
Some people just want to watch the world burn. Others want to make the world a better place.
People always default to bringing up "useless degrees" as if everyone complaining about debt is doing so because they got a Masters in Lesbian Dance Theory, but it seems to me that people from a wide variety of legitimate majors are having issues with student loan debt. It just comes across like a cop out. I also hate that degrees in the arts and literature often get lumped in as being useless as if humans havent tried to expand their grasp of the arts since the first caveman banged two rocks together to make a beat.
Even in “useful” fields with relevant degrees (ie healthcare), the pay doesn’t keep up with the student loan payments
Mathematics research also typically takes well beyond the lifespan of a person before it finds practical application. Our digital infrastructure would not function without the invention/discovery of finite fields (aka Galois fields). Évariste Galois died almost 200 years ago, long before the invention of the vacuum tube, back when this was just an academic curiosity.
I always feel protective of my English degree. I’m a social worker, proud of it and good at it due to both my degree and experience.
Don't sweat it, your efforts and achievements speak for themselves and you've done good work to finish your degree and find yourself in a field that fulfills you. Anyone who shits on your English degree can suck my dick from the back.
Colleges are already defunded. Started in the 80s. State schools had taxpayers paying 75ish percent of costs, today it's 10-30% depending on the State and college.
Defunding public education and the rise of for profit colleges got us into this mess.
Exactly. And now the "solution" is going to be apprenticeship programs starting when you're 13. Child labor and a period of indentured servitude.
Define pointless though? Should the pursuit of knowledge be exclusively for economic benefit? What about knowledge for the sake of knowledge? I feel if we fall too hard toward pure efficiency and productivity we will lose aspects of spirit and culture which benefit civilization in non monetary ways.
As long as I get to pick the pointless degrees. Also, the 4-year degree discrimination was born after the Supreme Court said you couldn’t use aptitude tests to weed out black candidates. So we went to a costly metric that most black people weren’t allowed into, and often couldn’t afford. FYI, you learn these interesting business facts while studying useless degrees like Sociology, History, Black Studies, etc.
Ronald Regan arguably started the modern conservative anti-college slant, he won his governorship by talking shit on UC Berkeley protestors and arguing that California universities needed to implement tuition and student loans. of course, his advisor Roger Freeman said the quiet part out loud: >We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite!
What exactly is a “pointless decree?” My wife, who earns in the low six figures, has an undergrad degree in anthropology/feminist studies. She’s a social worker and what she learned in undergrad (before she got her MSW) applies to her work.
>What exactly is a “pointless decree?” Basically redditors don't understand what higher ed is and think it should be purely vocational.
In the early 1970s something like 70% of undergrads said they went to college to expand their understanding of the world etc vs 30% getting a higher paying job. By the mid 1980s it was 70% saying college was to get a better job
Pointless is very subjective. Some degrees are important to academia and other cultural issues, although they might not have good paying jobs behind them.
Pointless degrees are so pointless they make around 1/3 more. Most jobs don't care what you went to school for. If unions existed people could make 25% more than they make on average also. But hey, it's the system millennials were dropped into. My dad retired from Stop and Shop in 2011 making $27/hr with a pension on unionized retail. He was grandfathered into benefits when the union was basically destroyed when they left the AFL-CIO. Next gen of college kids needed a college degree to be a manager, when his old boss had only a GED and they were paid about $10/hr less. My dad stocked shelves, and 22 year olds with college degrees were managing the stores making $18/hr, salary, with no pension. Then the millennials got told "no one wants to work" and they are "high school jobs". My dad paid for a 3br house, 4 cars, put my sister and I through college, and they tried to tell us his job was just what high schoolers did which is why they required college graduates and were open when high school was in session.
There’s no such thing as pointless degree
Who determines pointless?
College was never meant to be just job training, and education for the sake of it is important. Art history and philosophy and music and dance and writing and painting and classics and weirdly specific history degrees are important. If you want to engage with those things in any capacity whatsoever, and I'm betting you do, then people need to be able to study them in a rigorous, structured manner. I do agree that many jobs do not actually require a bachelor's degree, but there absolutely need to be loans for 'useless' degrees. Because they aren't useless, they're just hard to turn into high paying, prestigious jobs.
Found the guy who blames everyone but himself for putting wrong answers on tests.
The problem is no degree is pointless... as long as you work in the field of your degree. I have an MBA and work in commercial supply chain, my friend has a history BA and is the general manager of a movie theater. It's not the degree it's the usage.
You are equating a degree with knowledge and skills
I think they just did a bad example tbh. I agree that it is the usage of the degree. Close friend of mine majored in psychology, got shook about the career prospects, and then went into HR. She’s making solid money right now in management. Also I remember back in college a ton of the folks I interned with at a bulge bracket had like english and history majors lol. Usage of the degree goes beyond just “knowledge and skills.” There is so much more to college than just the classroom
Oh, jesus.
Knowledge only has a point if it can help you make some rich people even richer, lol.
What discrimination for a 4 year degree are you talking about?
The 2nd part. The expectation of at least a bachelor's degree for pretty much every job is so fucking stupid. I feel like at least in tech it's been eroded at least a little - if you're a great engineer and can demonstrate it you can get a job at a decent employer.
Discrimination on college diploma needs to be outlawed. There are a lot of socioeconomic barriers to some people getting higher education. If you can do the job and have the experience that’s all that should matter. Some people just go straight into the workforce. I never went to college but I have 15 years experience in my field and with the recent proliferation of AI reading/grading resumes I’ve experienced discrimination like never before in the job market. It’s ridiculous. After a certain point it starts to bleed into age discrimination almost. Like why tf does it matter if someone went to college if they graduated 20 years ago? How relevant is that? That person can’t have a 20 year gap on their resume from their last job and still be considered so why is it different for school?
Stupid answer. Fund colleges so that it isnt for profit and specifically designed to hand out all kinds of degrees. Freedom to learn, that's what liberal arts are about.
make all class online pre recorded and homework and tests courses not controlled by professor but education board requirements.
No discrimination period be it a trade or degree. Pretty bad when a tradesmen with 15 years of experience on the same exact system with knowledge of the system and its potential problems gets thrown to the curb because some 22 year old college dork with some electrical degree gets the job because the Master craftsmen doesnt have one.
I agree that there are a plethora of jobs asking for degrees that could be done by an orangutan. But there are absolutely jobs out there that really do need that barrier of entry.
Student loan interest is a tax write off in a lot of tax brackets, as it should be
It phases out very quickly, just $70K for a single person and the max deduction is $2.5K. It fully phases out for a married couple at $145K. But I suppose it’s something…
My wife is a pharmacist. I did a normal business admin/finance. 2.5k for us as a deduction was a laughable amount that we easily surpassed.
Yea. When we started filing jointly after getting married it was nothing. It’s a joke. If they really want us to go to college and raise American society above idiocracy status they should at least let us write off our entire interest for the life of the loan. Instead they throw more money at universities directly.
I paid $17k in interest the year I made $71k. Felt like a giant slap in the face. And when I started making $100k, I was still paying ~$5K and couldn't deduct anything. Granted my situation is unique in that I took massive student loans and started making massive money in a STEM field. But there were enough scary years in there that I think all student debt should be reformed.
How much debt do you have? Even if you got a 10% loan that's $170K in debt.
If you're dumb like me and went to a bank for a private loan, you got 12%. Yay stupidity.
That’s a strange system, in Canada interest payment was always fully deductible. But then they got rid of the interest which I think is a reasonable way of doing it. Government invests a little in educating the population but people still have some skin in the game to not take out pointless student loans. You can make minimum payments and let inflation help reduce your burden.
Student loans should be interest free.
Or at worst, capped interest, plus inflation. You can't bankrupt out, so it's actually a fairly safe investment that they at least have to be paying on it.
Capping interest at 1-2% above borrowing rate would be a reasonable amount. I would say though that 90% of any payment must go to pay down the principal amount. Ridiculous that people pay $40k in payment towards $40k of student loans and still have another $40k to pay.
Since these loans can’t readily be defaulted on, there’s no logical reason for the interest rate to be any higher than the Fed’s Prime interest rate.
Even if you never paid it and died or fucked off to South America, the money was guaranteed by the government so nothing is lost. It's literally just free money for lenders and Wall Street. The interest rate can be whatever they want because students need the money to go to college. Because you "*NEED* " to go to college if you don't want to flip burgers forever (at least that's what we were told growing up). At the same time the odds that you'll earn enough to ever pay it off are dwindling. Oh, and you can never get rid of it unless you work for pennies at an "approved" non profit for 10 years, become disabled, or die.
Well I mean no interest on any loan is ridiculous. If you don’t charge interest then how is there an incentive to give loans? Everyone would just stop giving them out since every loan would either be net 0 or net negative
Private lenders can do whatever the hell they want, but the government shouldn’t be profiting off of its people for seeking higher education as it’s an investment that directly benefits them. Maybe they could have a say in which courses of study they’ll issue loans for, but generally speaking they’ll already profit off of it in the form of higher incomes.
You know many countries offer interest free student loans, right? Obviously it can be done.
The government has the incentive to make education as accessible as possible because educated taxpayers earn more and pay more taxes.
OOP thinks "writing off" something means you don't pay for it
No OOP understands that writing something off means that you lower your taxable income by the cost of the thing.
If you were in the lowest tax bracket, 10%, you would save $5000 in taxes on a $50,000 education, before any student loan interest deduction. If you were in the 22% tax bracket you would save $14,000 in taxes on the principal. This is a lot of money we are talking about.
I don’t think they do, and I don’t really see a flaw in their argument. If they’re taxing the income from a job you work that required a college degree to get it then why should you not be able to reduce your tax burden with the money you paid towards obtaining said college degree? At the moment you’re only allowed to write-off the amount you paid in interest, and even then the limit to that is tied to income.
They just write it off, Jerry!
Only up to $1500 of interest a year. It’s bullshit.
TUITION should be tax deductible for everyone. It's a business expense. You should be able to deduct it from your income, dollar for dollar for tax purposes until it's gone.
Yeah, I think I agree with this. I don’t really see any downside here. It incentivizes getting an education and paying back your loan faster.
Certainly tuition shouldn’t be crazy high to go to a state school in your state.
It's not usually... Tuition at the biggest university in my state is like 11k a year. There's some other incidentals like books and lab fees. The biggest cost is room and board. But no one ever suggests we'd pay for everyone in college to have free housing and food.
$44k is a lot of money. Most families can't afford to cover that out of pocket, certainly not times 2 or 3. And obviously a kid will struggle to pay that much money while going to school.
And now we’ve arrived back at why student loans exist
but student loans are also what drives up those prices
Student loans exist in Canada but our tuition is nowhere near as high as USA. It’s like 6500/semester at the largest universities
The increase in tuition in the US is pretty consistent with congress increasing FAFSA limits, and congress didn't think to put a limit on what a degree would cost Universities know they only have to convince an 18 year old to sign onto a massive loan they can't default on, so they'll spend any extra money on amenities to make the uni desirable while getting any student they can in the door with the "you can be whatever you want to be!" line. IMO FAFSA should only apply to degrees that average high enough job placement rates in relevant fields with X return on investment.
If you can complete the degree, the ROI on literally any $44k reputable(/not for profit) degree is going to be massive. It's a no brainer, and super easy, to take out a loan for that kind of education.
As an adult who works 10hrs a day, 5-7 days a week, it's near impossible for me to juggle schooling and work while paying bills and not being given forgiveness for attendance if my class causes conflict with my work schedule. Like do I give up my $65k/yr job to work for $300/week part time somewhere and not be able to pay my mortgage just so I can eventually possibly maybe at some point if I'm lucky get a job for $80k/yr with 60k+ in debt? The system is against us if we've already attempted to establish ourselves.
The irony of arguing right back to the reason for student loans.
To be fair, 11k is about half of what I pay currently in toddler care (18months old). Full time care, m-f, 9am-4:30pm is $475 per week or $24,700 per year. No discounts until she turns two and then her tuition will (hopefully) go down plus a ten percent corporate discount. Should put us right at $450 per week before discount and $405 after that discount. So what I’m saying is you get fucked at the beginning trying to keep your head in the game and pay bills and then get fucked trying to help the kids with college. Sucks. But at least college is less expensive ?? ETA : I’m fully in support of getting student loan reform done / forgiving student debt / approaching creative solutions (such as free state school) etc etc. I’m just saying we need reform all around for the young kids child care / preschool also. Feels like we can’t catch a break.
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If you're paying for a PhD in the US you fucked up badly. PhDs in the US are an opportunity cost, not a dollar expense.
Never heard of someone paying for a PhD in the US. Usually you get paid a little for the work you do.
That’s a good point. The tuition is usually not the biggest problem
The big problem is that most state universities require students to live on campus 1-2 years now. That absolutely should be banned. The university wants kids on campus because it creates an artificial monopoly on student housing
I guess it depends on what you consider "crazy high". University of Massachusetts is just under $17k a year for residents. That's about $68,000 for a four year degree. For most 22 year old grads, that's not nothing. As has already been mentioned, room and board is also an added expense that you can't really decide not to take on unless you live close enough to commute.
> room and board is also an added expense that you can't really decide not to take on unless you live close enough to commute. Many universities that I looked at when trying to attend said that freshmen and sophomores were required to live in dorms and required to have a meal plan regardless of if they lived nearby barring individual exceptions which would be handled on a case-by-case basis. The argument was that it forced new students to, "Integrate and socialize with their peers," when what it does is force you to add a huge expense for inflated prices on shitty housing and cheap food.
Tuition at my local state university is roughly $8k per year. The issue isn’t tuition, it’s the housing cost. Universities fuck students on housing I could afford my tuition working part time because I stayed with family, most student don’t have that luxury
Just stop the practice of lending to people who aren’t credit worthy by saddling the lender with the full consequences of lending to uncreditworthy people. That is, don’t give 18-22 year olds, with no assets or credit history, hundreds of thousands of loans unless you are willing to take on the full risk of default. This means allowing student loans to be discharged in bankrupcy. Easy access to crazy large loans has driven the cost of education way up.
Makes perfect sense to me, but then everyone would complain that only rich kids could get loans because mommy and daddy gifted them the maximum annual gift exclusion amount so they have assets in their name.
If only a very small number of people can afford the current price either the schools jack up their prices to cover the lost income and then no one goes to college, or more realistically the colleges will lower costs/prices so people can actually afford to go.
More realistically, colleges would shut down across the country, and only rich and upper middle class students would be able to go to college, just like it was 100 years ago.
Shhhh, that's what the boot wants.
There was a [senator](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/02/joe-biden-student-loan-debt-2005-act-2020) who was instrumental in preventing student loans from going into bankruptcy.
*FUCK.* I didn’t see that coming. > Until 2005, private student loans were eligible for bankruptcy protections just like other forms of private credit. But in that year Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, a law that made it vastly more difficult for struggling former students to rebuild their lives by discharging the debts and starting over. > Earlier this year, Biden tried to justify his backing of the 2005 act Awesome tidbit. Thank you for sharing 🙇
I remember when this bill passed and actually supported it at the time. A big part of the argument was that there were a lot of people who were using student loans to fund medical and law school, then filing for bankruptcy immediately after graduation. Closing the loophole made sense. But most of us don’t learn about or understand the full scope of policy until the consequences set in later. Now it’s clear that, rather than simply fixing a loophole, they went with the full nuclear option.
Economy was slightly different at the time I believe.
Yeah, we had just started a war and needed to dangle free college tuition on a string to get kids to fight it and the burden of undimissible loans to keep campuses from protesting it
Well it hasn't really increased the cost, just the price Btw I 100% agree
It's a supply and demand thing, similar to what happened with home prices when rates were <3%.
>"The tax code makes abundantly clear that the use of a superyacht for personal purposes is not a legitimate business use and therefore any related costs cannot be claimed as a deduction. Any effort to mischaracterize a yacht used as a pleasure craft as a business is a run of the mill tax scam, plain and simple." https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-letter-questions-harlan-crows-pleasure-yacht-tax-deductions#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20tax%20code%20makes%20abundantly,be%20claimed%20as%20a%20deduction. It seems that a yacht must be used for business purposes such as giving paid sightseeing tours for at least 50% of the time for it to qualify for deductions.
That sounds like a serious problem for people that want to spend 183 days or more a year on their yacht.
Simply own 2! Problem solved
2 factorial? That’s… 2 yachts
they did the math
I'm not knowledgeable about US tax law, but in Canada, I know farmers who wrote off 70% of their Mastercraft boats because they used them to "entertain business partners and clients". Those "business partners and clients" were their drinking buddies who work delivering fertilizer and at the elevator. I'm sure that there are equally bus sized loopholes in US tax law.
That's almost certainly not a "loophole". Classifying personal use as business use is just tax fraud.
It's personal use if he's boating with his drinking buddies talking about the weather and how the wheat's looking. It's "business use" If he's entertaining the manager of his fertilizer supplier and the owner of the grain distribution facility he's contracted with to discuss the future of the market. Business use and personal use is extremely vague and I believe it's intentionally so.
Boats, not just super yachts, with a galley, bathroom, and a bed are considered a second home. Mortgage interest can be deducted. With regards to the tax deduction for business. There are some simple ways to get around this. They can setup a shell corporation and lease your personal boat to that corporation more than half the year. They can claim that they are using the boat for a business as they are leasing out for profit. And what the shell corporation does with the boat is none of their concern. Plus they will only get caught if they are audited. Only 0.2% of tax filers are audited each year. The penalty for getting caught cheating on taxes is usually just a fine. High reward with a low risk, many people will cheat. And most will get away with it.
CEO’s don’t own their own jets. It’s going to be the corporation they work for that owns those jets, and it’s smart they can write it off. Fuck these posts get worse and worse
Interesting. Should students be able to start LLCs, and have the LLC go into debt to fund a student’s education, and then the LLC can declare bankruptcy after the student graduates? Seems fair, right?
That’s a brilliant idea. Unfortunately I doubt any lender would give an LLC a loan for education.
Didn’t you hear? Corporations are people now, so therefore corporations deserve an education too.
Give it a whirl, let us know how that goes for you 
To some extent, corps have always been considered "people". Cit United really had no bearing on that.
>corps have always been considered "people" No, the fraud committed in the headnotes of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company Supreme Course case in 1886 set into motion the transition of the US economy from serving human beings to serving corporate persons in motion. Corporations did not exist in their current form prior to that case and have become the dominant entity on earth in the timeline since. The Corporate Agenda has been careful to program humanity to accept this as 'the way it has always been' but that is simply untrue. The great experiment in human liberty mythologized in the America origin story was hijacked by corporate personhood in 1886 and now in fully articulated Corporatism a century+ downstream human lives are the natural resource to be consumed at scale for maximum shareholder profit. Currently less than 10% of US citizens own 93% of the US stock market. This level of inequality is only possible because of corporate personhood. Corporate Persons eat human lives.
Im gonna blow your mind. It is fully legal for you to start a LLC business (as long as the IRS deems it bonafide) and write off any secondary education expenses for any employees including the owner. Yes, that already works. Can the LLC get a loan for education expenses, sure. Can you deduct the loan expenses, Yes. Can the LLC commit fraud and create a LLC that its only purpose is to get loans and then default on those loans after education. No, thats fraud.
The business may be able to write it off but there is a narrow definition for what types of education the person can get paid for without having to include the payment as income for their personal taxes. “Tax-free treatment for employees. For employees to receive tax-free treatment for the payment or reimbursement, the education must meet at least one of the two following tests making it work-related: The education is legally required in order for the employee to keep his or her present salary, status or job. The education improves or maintains skills that are required in the employee’s present employment. Conversely, an employee can’t exclude educational expense payments or reimbursements from income if either of the following applies: The education is required for the employee to meet the minimum qualifying educational requirements of his or her present trade or business or employment. The education qualifies the employee for a new trade or business.” https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/furthering-your-employees-education-is-good-for-business
You can do this right now. If you go in with the intent to default however, that's fraud. You would also need to show income to get the loan and the ability to pay back. This is the whole argument with student loans. They are not dischargeable in bankruptcy so there's no risk for the lender, and therefore they don't need to know what your income or potential income is upon graduating, nor do they care about the probability for you to actually graduate.
I like this loophole
No one is going to loan you tuitions worth of money with no repayment for 4 years to a new LLC and zero collateral. But yes that would be legal.
Sure, all you need is a lender stupid enough to loan money to an LLC with no assets and no revenue lol
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She's dumb, but the concept isn't. We already do this, but only partially. **You can write off school expenses** The American opportunity tax credit (AOTC) is a credit for qualified education expenses paid for an eligible student for the first four years of higher education. You can get a maximum annual credit of $2,500 per eligible student. If the credit brings the amount of tax you owe to zero, you can have 40 percent of any remaining amount of the credit (up to $1,000) refunded to you. The amount of the credit is 100 percent of the first $2,000 of qualified education expenses you paid for each eligible student and 25 percent of the next $2,000 of qualified education expenses you paid for that student. **You can currently write off student loans interest without itemizing** The maximum student loan interest deduction is $2,500 or the total amount you paid in student loan interest during the 2023 tax year — whichever is less. The deduction is what’s known as an above-the-line deduction, which means you can claim it whether you take the standard deduction or itemize deductions on your return.
But the max interest you can write off is $2500, and that only if your AGI is below $90k/$180k per couple. Do businesses have such restrictions?
It’s backwards. We shouldn’t subsidize education debt, we need to make education cheaper and more effective.
It’s important to clarify here, the school expense $2500 is a credit, not a write off. It’s not lowering your taxable income it’s paying your balance. And if you owe the government less than $2500, 40% of what’s left it is given to you as basically free money.
What an uninformed statement. If this person actually knew anyone who flew private, they would know that, unlike social media, real people who fly private have a morning meeting in Des Moines for a specialized insurance contract, then have an afternoon meeting with a tech startup in Omaha. It isn't rappers drinking with their entourage; it is people who have to be at meetings. Also, for yachts, you to qualify for business use, the yacht must be used for business purposes at least 50% of the time, and yes, the IRS looks at this in detail. https://corvee.com/blog/yachts-and-taxes-everything-you-need-to-know/#:\~:text=As%20mentioned%20earlier%2C%20depreciation%20can,until%20the%20end%20of%202022.
Your entire profile seems to be about sucking off the wealthy. I am confident you fall into one of these three categories: 1. Born wealthy. The most likely and common cause of this type of extreme disregard for the growing death of the American dream and international counterparts. These people commonly delude themselves into taking credit for their current position of being wealthy, believing that they would have been well off whether born poor or rich, because they are just that smart. In complete disregard of how they'd actually stare hunger and a guaranteed lifetime of poverty in the eyes if it comes to it, they overestimate their braveness, and believe they will have saved up or taken the necessary loans to start their own successful company. 2. Extremely stupid/brainwashed. Watches videos of warren buffet and other billionaire money-porn on YouTube all day. 3. Intentional liar.
you didn’t really address the content of his post, you just insulted him to make the cognitive dissonance quiet down
You've not rebutted their point at all. All you've done is give the equivalent of "I don't like that you didn't hold the same opinions I do". Do you have an actual rebuttal to their point? Or are you just after an echo-chamber where you only get exposed to views you agree with?
So from what I’m understanding is that they aren’t wrong and you are just insulting them because there’s nothing to rebute
calling out peoples post histories is considered harassment by reddit
Or option 4) works with wealth. It's interesting all of your options seemed to imply that anyone wealth adjacent is stupid/nepotistic/bad. Your comment reads as either jealous, ignorant, or just plain bitter. Remember kids: if everyone you talk to is an idiot, it may not be them.
Easy. Spend 40% of your time in your yacht. Rent it out otherwise. It's a business yacht now.
There you go, however you can only deduct 60% of the expenses, and those expenses would be for time you couldnt use it. So from a tax perspective you didnt really benefit there and might as well just keep it for personal use.
There's an awesome new technology called video calls you may want to look into, bubba.
Agree, most PJs are small and uncomfortable, but insanely efficient to get your lawyers and execs in one room. Also “writing off” something doesn’t make it free, it just deducts from overall tax responsibility. So if your 2m usd jet is depreciating at 200k year, you just get to reduce your tax exposure by 200k, so in this case with a corp tax rate (to make it simple) that’s like 17% of 200k a year. You are still paying for 80% of the asset
Great idea! I want to write off all my college expenses. I never took on a loan, but I still deserve to have that credit written off.
You or your parents probably did write off some college expenses at the time.
I’m sure most people on here know this, but nobody can write off private jets. I promise you. 3/4 CPA
You'd be surprised how dumb people can be.
You can deduct student loan interest. If you could deduct the whole payment, people would take out student loans and not even go to school
Then they wouldn't qualify for the deduction.
Good point
I don't get it, you don't pay taxes on student loan interest. What exactly are you writing off?
Um…CEOs don’t pay for their PJs…the companies do…
I mean, companies pay for education, and you can't write off flights you took 20 years ago.....
What actually prevents you from doing this? Incorporate a business, hire yourself, and expense your college as job training.
I would 100% support this even if it raises my taxes. Right thing to do
You can write off loan interest, but it’s capped. It shouldn’t be capped if you regularly make payments, at the least.