Hey, it's not like all those old people on Social Security and Medicare need a tax base to pay for their tax-subsidized lifestyles, right?

They can just borrow the money from their comrades in Red China.

The UW should threaten to sell off the football team and that white elephant of a stadium. That way the knuckledraggers in Olympia will lay off the cuts.

Less education means more worker drones to serve up lattes, clerk in shcmancy grocery stores and the like. Oh wait, those people already have college degrees. So, I guess what Republicans want is more... of an unemployable uninsured underclass... First World Consumer Plantation here we come. I guess this would up enrollment in the armed forces... stupid socialized armed forces.

Of course, Goldy, we all know that people with less education tend to lean Republican and those with more lean Democrat. That has nothing to do with anything.

There's also the problem I've had: it's damn near impossible to convince someone who barely got a high school diploma that perhaps higher education just might possibly be important. You know, for having doctors and such.

@4 Yeah - just what we need, more Republicans in Washington State. Especially ones like Tim Eyman.

Fucking awesome move by Ed Murray and company to get the UW to do this. They've created real ammunition to protect higher education in the budget battle, not just hot air.

Won't matter when they reinstate slavery.

Well I certainly understand the tuition hikes. They like us being meek little debtslaves joblocked to the first corporation that deigns to give us health insurance. So many poorer countries do so much more for their students. I lay the blame at the foot of the Democrats who are too fucking cowardly/bought off to voice the clear need for free college in this country.

@ 2 - nobody would buy the team, and I doubt anyone would take the stadium.

@ 9 - yup.

@2 for the Husky win.

@10 nobody will buy your precious Cougs either.

Some point, people need to realize that a well-educated workforce is worth more to business than a friendly tax rate. It's one thing to save money on taxes; it's another to be unable to deliver a competitive product to your consumers at all. Anyone who's run a small business knows how much it's worth to be able to find employees that know how to get shit done, or to at least find ones that can be trained cheaply and quickly.

In that context, a 23-30% tuition hike is simply insane. The lost productivity such a tax could mean is simply unconscionable. And I can't imagine how these massive public layoffs are at all being justified, with the employment picture as bad as it already is. I can't believe the idiocy running rampant in these attempts to close budget deficits on spending cuts alone. With the global marketplace being what it is, we're really fucked.

Goldy lays it out well, so I don't think I really need to say much more. The increasingly desperate, self-centered, and individualistic behavior of our politics today really makes you wonder how we ever managed to land a man on the moon.

Why the hell do you keep whining about Republicans for WA not having an income tax? The Democratic Party has the governorship. It has both houses of the WA legislature, It has most of the large media outlets. It has a significant lead in voter registration.

So put in an income tax already or stop whining about it being the Republicans' fault.

There were several Op-Ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal at the start of the current Great Depression we are in (why do we insist on calling it a recession?) and several Chicago School of Economics experts claimed that the high wages Americans earn will prevent the US from being truly competitive.

So from the conservative perceptive, if you trash higher education and make K-12 as piss poor as possible you will build up a work force with a lower level of intelligence and you don't have to pay them as much.

Remember, for a capitalist the perfect labor force is cheap and uneducated (or only having the bare job skills to make the capitalist as much money as possible) ...slavery would be ideal but feudalism is pretty damn close.

The Alphas don't want to have to compete with a bunch of other Alphas. They want the vast bulk to be Deltas and Epsilons, who are content to labor endlessly for nothing more than a little extra soma. The lower classes have been conditioned from birth that they wouldn't even want to be Alphas... it's too much work and too demanding. Just do what the Alphas and Betas tell you to and they'll give you more soma.

Anybody curious where this road will lead should take a look at Ireland. The Celtic Tiger was the envy of Europe as it lured multinationals in with its educated workforce, extremely low corporate tax rates, and business-friendly regulatory environment. Once the corporations had everything the way they wanted, they wasted no time getting the word out about how every country should follow Ireland's lead if they want some of that sweet gravy. Free Market acolytes wrote volumes of glowing testimonials about how Ireland had shown the way to prosperity.

Now Ireland is a bankrupt nation engaging in austerity measures to shred the same social safety net that helped make Irish workers such a good deal for employers, and the companies that lobbied to have the tax codes rewritten to their liking are searching for the next country with an underemployed, educated workforce and amenable legislators.

Today's multinational corporations are like locusts. When the thing they want is used up, they move on. Sure an educated workforce can be a great resource for high tech employers, but the tax policy that supports education in the long run? Too expensive. Somebody else's problem.

Please Hammer, don't hurt the iSchool!

25 percent of all UW students have no idea why they are in college.

in the ideal society of our corporate kleptocratic masters, all you need is an overpowering military, police, and prison system to protect their wealth and dominion. Welcome to Egypt.