I don't want to take anything away from the sciences (when I get cancer, I could fucking die anyway, research or not), it's mostly an economic issue. IF the school thinks it can attract more students/make more money through price discrimination, well, this is Slashdot, let's call that a market inefficiency being addressed.

If your friends can't hack it in their chosen fields and want to default to something else that's their problem; since they're doing well I assume they managed to motivate themselves. Maybe the idea of potentially earning several hundreds of thousands of dollars more is financial incentive enough, rather than a 20% break on your tuition.

I dropped grad school for lit because I realized it wasn't going anywhere. Then I became disabled for six years. Now I live in a small rural town of a few thousand with no opportunties because I can't afford to leave yet. I guess you're just one of those people who'll assume the worst. Christ, subcontracting for $10, you think that's my chosen career?! A job is a job when the county unemployment rate is around 13-15% depending on the season.

I was never interested in making a lot of money; everyone in the major knew it was unlikely that more than a few of us would be making six figures. But there are decent jobs - paralegaling, teaching intro to english classes at a state university (with only a Masters'), publishing, and hell, one of my friends learned how to program anyway and was working for the Smithsonian. Now he is an upper-level manager at a large power company in California. And, you know, any white-collar job that doesn't care about what degree you have, which makes a B.S. as good as a B.A. to my friend with a bio degree doing secretarial and accounting duties. It's not like the arts are for total losers; a fairly large percentage end up becoming teachers (often after not getting a break in their chosen industry, which is always a long shot). So, unless solidly middle class isn't 'decent' money anymore, you are a liar.

I honestly have no idea what the cost:earning ratio is for alumni donations, research grants, or additional funding. I'm sure that's a secret. Do STEM professors bring in more money? Undoubtedly. Is that enough to offset the cost by itself? No way. And I'm pretty sure the guys bringing in the grant money aren't actually teaching; UCSC is a pretty important astronomy, physics, and marine research university. However, at least for the university in this article, I would assume they've done the math and determined that the liberal arts just aren't as demanding of campus funds - not like they're going to just throw away money by lowering their fees while raising science students' fees, after all. There must be a supply & demand curve that makes the university more money with an influx of cheap arts students, probably because of all the non-tuition related expenses that more students bring; filling up on-campus housing and dining plans, selling more books and shit at the bookstore, maybe something like bringing in more state revenue because of the increase in the student body size.

Dude, I hardly net out to a loss; for the extra $40k tuition cost I'll make up at least a few hundred thousand even if I never get past white-collar work; I'm sure the gov will get much more than that out of my increased marginal wages, plus there's the fact that the school still made $40k off me for a much smaller investment than most students. Just because you don't get as large a return on arts students doesn't mean you don't get something - and there simply isn't enough demand (or skill, especially) to simply cast aside the softer studies and fill our colleges to the brim with arrogant STEMs.

Also, how do you know I won't improve the world? There's a lot of ways to do that besides building a new gadget or whatever (for instance, engineering for Mercedes-Benz and developing a website for a housing realtor are what my richest college friends are doing, big difference that makes to humanity).

As for useless major... that's a different argument. A lot of my lib arts friends got their training in career-type skills after they graduated, often on the job. It's the mental muscle building (and stuff like better-than-average literacy and writing skills) that is valuable later in life (and to the people that hire us), not my encyclopedic knowledge of the works of David Foster Wallace.

To clarify my point: while I was a student there, Jack Baskin Engineering 2 was built for $61 million. Two years later construction was finished on a new five-story Physical Sciences building, and just last year ground was broken on a $65 million biomedical sciences facility. You can be sure the liberal arts may have got a few million to renovate over the past decade but the sciences get orders of magnitude more funding; admittedly, there have been large alumni donations helping to fund those (a few million dollars) but it mostly comes from the state budget (you're subsidizing STEM majors as well) and tuition fees. And the literature department was the largest one at the school, with (when I was there) something 970 students out of 11,000.

Hey, to study scientific fields, you need labs and facilities costing tens of millions of dollars, upgraded every few years. At my school (UC Santa Cruz, Literature major) we read 300 year old books outside when the professor thought the day was nice enough. Why should I pay the same $40,000 to subsidize the hugely expensive and resource-intensive programs for engineers who are gonna make ten times what I make in my life? I doubt anyone is going to switch from one of the harder majors to a 'soft' liberal arts program for basically any amount of money - I have comp sci/eng friends who paid off their student loans within a *year* because of their $60,000 out-the-door starting salary. I'm a postal subcontractor making $10 an hour 4 hours a day, and none of my friends from the major have ever made more than $40,000, and we graduated almost a decade ago. Boo fucking hoo some B.A.s have to pay a couple thousand more per year for their state-of-the-art facilities while their friends in the liberal arts use the same leftover classrooms, stages, studios, rehearsal rooms, and theaters that were there 40 years ago.

Sales taxes are regressive taxes. When you're poor you pay a larger share of your income than a richer person. Say you earn $30k a year and you buy a 10k car. With a 10% sales tax (just for easy figures' sake) you pay $1000, 1/30th of your income. If you earn $60k and buy a $10k car, you're only paying 1/60th your income in taxes on it. Now if both guys spend their entire income then they're paying 10% of their wealth in taxes, but the marginal utility of their dollars are not the same. $60k gets you a lot more in terms of basic necessities than $30k does, so it is a greater burden on the poorer earner; say you have to spend $20k per year on food, rent & utilities, assorted bills like student loans and insurance, and expenses like health care. Sales taxes take up a disproportionate amount of what is left of the 30k's income, whereas the 60k guy can save, invest, or choose to spend a greater proportion of his money on taxable goods.

The more money you make, the more you benefit from government services. It's as simple as that.

For one, there's the old standard: infrastructure. Roads and stuff like the postal service. Have a business? You extract a lot more value from the highway system than the guy that drives 10 miles to work a day.

Education: unless you don't hire anything but illiterates for manual labor, nearly every worker you have has had 100k spent on their public education over at least 13 years. Oh, and your customers are educated too, allowing them to earn enough to buy (as well as being smart enough to want, in some cases) your products.

Law enforcement: criminals aren't just disruptive to individuals but to business as well. The implied threat of punishment prevents a lot of theft, vandalism, and fraud being perpetrated on you. A rich guy is a much bigger target for crime than the average worker. A subset of law enforcement is the court system and patents/copyright laws. There is a vast infrastructure set up purely to protect your assets and provide enforcement of abstract, artificial limits that you would in no way be able to enforce yourself (not talking about music and movies; think industrial patents and trade secrets). Without the threat of a lawsuit, what stops your competitors from making exact copies of your goods without spending the R&D costs, or keeps your debtors paying you?

Military: protecting shipping lanes and, abstractly, your life and goods from the threat of invasion. Opening up foreign markets through force (happened plenty of times throughout history), keeping stability in unstable regions to protect worldwide markets, and (let's get realpolitik here) keeping the price of oil low.

As a society, we all benefit from all these services to a greater or lesser degree, but who do you think uses more of these benefits proportionately, Joe Blow getting the median $21k a year, or billionaires like Bezos, who uses the hell out of the roads and postal service, whose business was set up by highly educated individuals, whose customers were literate [Amazon did start out as a book store, after all], that is well-known around here for attempted abuse of the patent system, that generally enjoys having secure facilities, pirate-free transportation, and the cheap oil necessary for a business based on transport? The wealthy get much more out of the government in invisible and implied benefits than any welfare queen ever could.

Demand creates jobs. To increase aggregate demand, we could lower taxes on the people creating that demand by taxing the suppliers at a higher rate. Suddenly, there is more money to fuel greater demand, increasing profits and creating new jobs. Providing more government services and directly stimulating the economy (subsidizing education or health care, providing unemployment benefits, hiring workers for construction/bureaucracy) also effectively puts more money in peoples' pockets. The money being taken from the rich is money that was not necessarily going to be injected back into the economy but could be saved or invested outside of the country, taking money out of the economy, at least in the short term. The less money you have, the more likely you are going to spend every dollar of it in your local economy; in effect this wealth transfer allows more money to be injected into the economy through purchase of consumer goods rather than being hoarded or gambled with through the stock market and other investments, which may not show returns at all, and probably not in the short term, which will keep money out of the economy. So yes, through wealth transfers, increasing taxes can create new jobs by shuffling funds away from higher-level investments to middle-class spending on consumer goods.

Income taxes, probably not. Sales taxes, payroll taxes, government fees, sin taxes like alcohol and cigarettes, yes. To a disproportionate amount, considering that when you're poor you generally don't have any savings or investment.

Not even close. A substantial portion of the country is in favor of some combination of the parts of the bill, and even the bill as a whole was polling at least 40%. How popular and effective it will ultimately be remains to be seen, and isn't something we can truly judge for years... but to compare a controversial bill that you may not politically agree with, either on principle (no expansion of government) or because it may lead to increased taxes or a lower average quality of care, to a staggering amount of incompetence that cost billions of dollars, a large loss of life (I can't put a figure on the death toll caused by incompetence rather than act of god, but suffice it to say that many people needlessly died) and nearly destroyed an iconic American city is nonsense. There are politically unpopular decisions, there are random disasters that happen during a presidential term, and then there's a massive botch attributable to a person, on national television, "heckuva job, Brownie" as we see live feeds of tens of thousands of people huddled in filth in a stadium. There's a human element of suffering on a massive scale (by Americans, which automatically means more to us than seeing Haitians or Asians suffering after a disaster), and a level of sheer personal failure, that you can't simply attach to the successful passage of a bill no matter how much you disagree with it.

The whole 'Obama's Katrina' meme isn't new. For most of the past year, various right-wing/right-leaning publications and personalities have tried sticking that phrase to a variety of events, from the Underwear Bomber and the Fort Hood shooter to H1N1 and the GM bailout. It has nothing to do with death toll, environmental impact, or anything sane, it is just a method of trying to associate Obama with the same kind of image that Bush had in response to the Katrina disaster - a connotation of incompetence above and beyond the normal standard we expect from politicians, an event that permanently soured the electorate on him. Proof: http://mediamatters.org/research/201004300043

The fact that you saw "Obama's Katrina?" on MSNBC seems a little disingenuous, although I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you just don't watch a lot of TV news. The fact that there's a question mark means it was probably a story about this very topic, with the left-leaning MSNBC trying to discredit such a claim. A little searching finds a clip from The Ed Show on MSNBC doing exactly that.

It's going to take quite a while for the consequences of Bush's decisions to be completely filtered out of the government. There are a lot of appointed positions such as Federal judges that you can't just throw out. There's the trillions of dollars of debt from his tax cuts, Medicare part D, and two wars that are going to shape tax and budget policy for at least the next decade. There's inherent structural things like the impact of No Child Left Behind that aren't fundamentally reshaped by Presidential fiat or congressional committee composition, and as things like the BP oil spill and stuff like the subprime/CDO meltdown (much of which could be traced back to decisions made in the Clinton era like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act) show, unintended consequences of the previous administration's actions can pop up years into even a second term. It isn't necessarily purely partisan to pin stuff on the Bush administration, it's just plain cause and effect. No politician inherits a blank slate, and political/economic forces move at a pace measured in years. Issues like the struggling economy and national debt may be 'Obama's problem' to deal with, but not everything is his fault, and which topics you attribute to either category probably depend on your political agenda.

If you only have a few hundred a month to spend on necessities after rent and the bills, that 8% (here in California sales taxes range from 8 to 9.5%)really hurts, especially if you don't have the option of saving any money because expenses like food and gas are equal to or greater than income. The family with a few thousand can afford to save, and has more discretionary income after necessities are accounted for, so they can better afford to take the hit. It's basically a function of marginal utility - to a guy with $500 a month to feed his family, those $60 taxed dollars hurt a lot more than the guy with $2000 paying the same amount but having $1500 left, and take up a larger effective percentage of his income as he has no choice but to spend most or all of his money just to get by, whereas the better-off guy can save or invest, notwithstanding the fact that he can just spend more before the tax becomes onerous. Hence sales tax being a regressive form of taxation.

Didn't see this until days later, but in case you ever check: here in Monterey Co, CA, which has one of the highest per capita illegal populations in the state, we pay an 8.25% sales tax, already higher than Texas.