On the one hand, I heard a debate on KCRW's To The Point a while back about college costs. One of the guests was a college administrator who said the same thing - he said that the biggest cost of his small school was faculty wages, and the price of faculty was staying high while some of the other costs were decreasing.

On the other hand, while Googling a relevant link for this topic, I looked into faculty costs a little, and I found a number of links suggesting that professor salaries have essentially stayed the same over the years, rising about the same as inflation. So I'm not sure exactly how true that is.

And for anyone with a few minutes to spare, you can listen to the whole Planet Money podcast on this topic: (Link)

Why is it the market? Because we say it's the market! Don't bother investigating or ask colleges why they raised tuitions! Just assume it's the market! MARKET! The link in the OP is, predictably, an opinion piece and not any sort of survey or discussion with actual educators.

This link leads to a study by a nonprofit group that had some different answers:

The main reason tuition has been rising faster than college costs is that colleges had to make up for reductions in the per-student subsidy state taxpayers sent colleges. In 2006, the last year for which Wellman had data, state taxpayers sent $7,078 per student to the big public research universities. That's $1,270 less (after accounting for inflation) than they sent in 2002.

Public universities have been reining in overall spending per student in recent years. Flagship public universities' spending per student has risen from about $12,400 in 1995 to $13,800 in 2006 after accounting for inflation. But since 2002, spending at public colleges has generally not exceeded inflation.

Increases in spending were driven mostly by higher administration, maintenance, and student services costs. Public universities spent almost $4,000 per student per year on administration, support, and maintenance in 2006, up more than 13 percent, in real terms over 1995. And they spent another $1,200 a year on services such as counseling, which was up 23 percent. Meanwhile, they spent about $8,700 a year on classroom instruction for each student, up about 9 percent.

Big private universities, powered by tuition and endowment increases, have increased spending dramatically while public schools have languished. Total educational spending per student at private research universities has jumped by almost 10 percent since 2002 to more than $33,000. During that same period, public university total spending was comparatively flat and totaled less than $14,000 a year.

There's got to be some sort of internet law about how impossible it is to have a discussion about D&D without talking about how other systems are better.

Could Ron Paul not have made similar arrangements?

No, because that would've implied the two political parties coming to a gentlemanly agreement. This sort of thing has died over the past three decades over here.

Last year I became a truck driver when I needed a career change. I'm told that the industry has a dearth of over-the-road (OTR) truck drivers. Most guys don't want to spend their entire day on the road, not getting home every night (or even every week), not seeing their families or having a social life. OTR is the position that newbies get dumped into, it's just what they have to take to get a foothold into the profession, but a lot of them end up pulling regional or local work as soon as they can get a year's experience under their belts.

Having said all of that, I've also read trucker forums where some guys say they wish new OTR drivers would stop joining the profession, because then maybe the pay would finally go up. The average OTR company driver is making $40k-$50k depending on their experience levels, and what's more, it's entirely dependent on how much work you get since you're usually paid by the mile rather than hourly or salary. You run all day and don't get home much, but you have to fight for that middle-class salary.

This is something that I've heard across various professions, that wages are just not going up even when there's demand. I suspect the "real problem" here is actually not that companies want to secretly give all the jobs to foreigners. I think the problem is that the American economy no longer correctly pays for employment in accordance with demand. As other people have said about the way managers get paid more, we have some long-ingrained ideas about who is supposed to get paid what in this country, and it's hard as fuck-all to get anyone to change their minds on that, even when they aren't attracting anyone at that price.

Over the past three decades, the masses have had declining wages. The masses have seen fewer employers offering health and retirement benefits. The masses have seen explosive growth in the cost of education, which was supposed to be the method by which they bettered themselves. The masses suffered unemployment and foreclosure as the result of the last economic collapse.

I think a lot of the masses, which have already lost quite a bit, are starting to ask, "When are the controllers going to start sacrificing as much as we have?"

You said, "...not one single President or politician has asked *any* American to sacrifice *anything* in over 40 years." Obama suggested that the tax rates for the top earners go back to the place where they were ten years ago, and he was branded a job-killer and capitalism-hater. Maybe it's not the masses that are your problem here.

Your music has long occupied a sort of middle ground between "real" pop rock and the kind of music you used to hear on Dr. Demento. These days, the Internet has sort of lead a revolution in novelty-type music, from flash cartoon showtunes to YouTube remixes to rappers who write rhymes for a deliberately nerdy audience. I'm sure you're at least familiar with part of this phenomenon due to your recent tour with Jonathan Coulton. What's your observation on the future of the silly song?

I'm assuming it's a sort of projectionism. Many on the far right lionize Ronald Reagan and Bill O'Reilly to such a degree that they assume that the left must have golden calves of their own that they absolutely worship.

I watched the stream from the Day9 site the other night. Best line of the night, while playing the witch doctor:

"OH ****, KILL IT WITH FROGS"

Initially a money sink, expected to be profitable five years down the road... Wasn't that the same thing that happened to the original XBox?

The other problem with labels like class warfare is how much they miss the point of what actual class warfare is.

You're giving the phrase too much credit. The term "class warfare" is just an advertising slogan. It's what conservatives say in response to any program which might raise revenues on the upper class. It's not something that can be torn apart and dissected - it's just a phrase meant to evoke a gut response and get people to vote the other way. History means nothing to a slogan.

The standard libertarian assumption is that government stands in the way of the free market, and that if the government would just get out of the way, then the market would flourish and make all the right decisions. It is an argument that the government should be drownable in a bathtub in order to make a better system. When you ask a libertarian what recourse someone would have in this system if they are abused by a private business, they say they such businesses that abuse their customers will eventually die out. People will stop patronizing businesses that do wrong, or customers will band together to form boycotts.

Thus the idea that business will be stronger than government but weaker than individuals - though granted, weaker than individuals acting deliberately or otherwise in tandem. What's wrong about that? How does that not represent the libertarian ideal? After all, if government would just get out of the way, then things would be better, right? Individuals don't need the government to deal with large businesses that harm them, right?

"the unchallenged assumption that government has to be more powerful than the individual." My ideal system is one in which the individual, the government, and private businesses all have checks on each other of about equal power. Say, for example, when many individuals are wronged by a company in a small amount, they should have the right to file class action claims to settle those disputes. In the realm in which a large employer does wrong with its employees, those employees should be able to unionize to represent their interests. If a government does wrong with its constituents, there should be sunshine policies to ensure that the public knows what's going on so that they can make informed decisions at the voting booth. I don't see how my sig has anything against that.

"By entering this metal detector, you have agreed to the EULA of this airport's security measures, including the clause that all disputes with this security checkpoint will be resolved through binding arbitration..."