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H.I.F.

A reader sent this to me last summer: Colleges' Stealth Tax on Family Savings. It points out that colleges punish harshly families that save for education. Excerpt (he's comparing two students with identical grades/test scores and from families with identical income earning capacities over the past 18 years):

The student from the free-spending family will get a tuition discount of perhaps $25,000, while Student A [from the frugal family] will get only $10,000. Because that will probably apply for four years, Student A will end up paying $60,000 more than Student B -- solely because of the $100,000 in accumulated savings. The college is imposing the equivalent of a 60 percent tax on the income saved for college.

It is, of course, an outrage, but it's merely one more sign of a problem that is killing our society: incentives have been turned upside down. Our government (mostly the federal, but often the state) provides big incentives not to work and not to save. Whether it's Obamacare, nursing home care, food, education. If you work and save, you are, at some level, a fool.

At some point, it must come crashing down, but the government will perpetuate it as long as it can. It would prefer to perpetuate it on the backs of non-citizen poor people (exploiting illegal aliens, spreading empire into third world countries), but it all ultimately falls on the backs of the middle class. It always does, just as it falls on the middle classes' backs already . . . and will fall even more harshly in the years to come (Exhibit A: The Plausible Future Confiscation of Retirement Accounts).

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