This is how I feel. I'm taxed a lot, but I can see that money being used for things to benefit me and those around me. I appreciate that I don't have to worry about bike infrastructure, or healthcare, or education, or my coworkers being stressed out about taking time off after having a kid. If I had that money in-hand those are the same things I'd want to buy with it anyway (except then I'd have to worry about actually taking care of all the details myself whereas now I don't). At the same time I feel like I can afford what I need/want even if I take home less money than I would in parts of the US.

This is really what it comes down to.

This is also where the basic argument to "tax the rich" comes from. For the price of a yacht, you could feed and house multiple families for a year in some cities.

I was once asked how much money I could sustainably spend every single day without explicitly trying to waste money. I settled on 10,000/day (I assume big ticket items like house/car would be absorbed by that effortlessly).

Then I was asked to do the math on how long it would take to spend 1 billion - the minimum amount to qualify as a billionaire - at that rate.

IIRC, ignoring interest and inflation, it worked out to 216 years.

Now billionaires dont have a bill sitting around in liquid cash, this is just a thought experiment to try a grasp how much a billion is, but it is an effective one. (Also cool as a party trick, as people tend to always pick a power of ten, so based on their answer you can whip out 2161 years or 21.6 years or whatever)

I'm not even sure that we really get to "keep" more of our income. We have to hoard more of our income to buffer ourselves against emergencies that can drive people into bankruptcy, such as medical care. We have to save for college if we have kids. We need to cover ourselves in old age. It's "our" money, but it isn't really ours to spend.

The problem with free education is that as more people become educated, the signaling effect of education becomes diluted. So the Europeans are paying for something that decreases in real value the more that people have access to it. That's a self defeating policy, especially since it encourages people to remain in academia for significantly longer than they would otherwise, because hey, it's paid for by the taxpayer.

Someone earning a second Master's degree in Russian literature is not a productive use of taxpayer money.

In the US by contrast, people are able to make decisions for themselves about how to educate themselves because loans are widely available and are just a tax on their future income. If they want to pursue a high income career, they will take out a loan to cover educational expenses since it makes financial sense to do so. If their desired career is less lucrative, they will not take out more loans than absolutely necessary, freeing that money up to be put towards more profitable projects in the broader economy.

That's a nice economic theory you've concocted, but it seems like you're living in a bubble. The reality on the ground in the US is that college degree inflation happened every bit as much in the EU by a generation of middle-class people who saw a college education at the ticket to prosperity. Now to get any kind of decent job requires a college degree. Federal loans are handed out like candy, and people snap them up despite not having any financial basis for that decision. Because the loans are unforgivable in bankruptcy, there is much lower risk in handing them out. Because the loans are easy to get, college tuition rises higher and higher outside the realm of real market forces.

The fantasy that the US system is someone leveraging market forces to optimize efficiency is ludicrous. 18-year-old kids have no idea of the impact of 5 or 6 figure loans at various interest rates and their expected ROI. Even many of their parents, who had good post-war working class union jobs with a nice pension and affordable homes they could buy in their early 20s have a blind spot around this because all they know is that the career paths they enjoyed are dead and gone and just some vague ideal that "college-educated" is still a meaningful adjective.

Frankly, it's an embarrassment to even try to sell the idea that the US system is better. The only significant difference in outcomes is that a huge portion of young Americans are destroying their lives with unmanageable debt, where EU citizens may get an inflated degree but they won't be an indentured servant for the rest of their lives.

So essentially:

You're trying to argue that forcing the entire population to pay for college education for everyone is justifiable even when the people going to college may study subjects or intend to enter fields that have very poor financial prospects or lack productive value for the society as a whole.

As opposed to....

A system in which people have the freedom to decide for themselves how to allocate their own financial resources based on their career goals and not use other people's money to fund 4 years of useless study (if they study a useless subject)?

You have a very skewed understanding of what is fair and justifiable.

If people make poor financial and educational decisions, that's on them. Don't punish the rest of society by forcing it to foot the bill for someone else's foolishness.

The sad thing is, Europeans will be the indentured servants for the rest of their lives because of the depressed wages they'll have to endure and the high taxes they'll have to pay.

> Someone earning a second Master's degree in Russian literature is not a productive use of taxpayer money.

How could you possibly know if this is a productive use of taxpayer money or not? Someone with a master's in Russian literature could potentially be very valuable as a spy, a diplomat, a business leader, etc. No matter the degree, having an educated population is incredibly valuable to society as a whole. Government should encourage education and provide it for as low a cost as possible or free. The idea that liberal arts, foreign language, fine arts, etc. majors do not contribute to society that I see mentioned often is frankly ludicrous and insulting to the people who work hard to achieve their education.

> If their desired career are less lucrative, they will not take out more loans than absolutely necessary

This is not in fact what is actually happening. Lots of people take out loans whey they are first starting college, when they are young, inexperienced and by definition uneducated. Few of them even try to calculate the expected value of college for their future income, and the ones who try don't have high quality information.

The information is available to them, they have no one to blame but themselves. It is not the duty of the taxpayer to fund poor decision making.

That's one of the major philsophical differences between the US and Europe: people must take responsibility for themselves and their own lives.

The problem with the 'personal responsibility' screed in regards to university in America is that more or less my entire generation was hoodwinked into going to college and doing anything and to totally not worry about the cost because loans are available and you'll never get a job that will amount to anything if you don't go to college. Ironically enough, a large portion of my high school class that's doing the best financially are the kids who didn't think they were smart enough for college that went into trade school or apprenticeships. When your parents, guidance counselors, and basically the entire system are yelling that you'll never do more than flip burgers if you don't rack up a lot of student debt going to school, and you're a young impressionable youth that trusts these people...well, I think you have to be somewhat willfully ignorant or just an obtuse asshole to blame those of us who took that advice and got burned.

Everything you say (except for the bit about me being willfully ignorant or an asshole) is true.

The solution to the problem is getting people to be realistic about their prospects. Guidance counselors play a role in this solution. So do parents. And the students themselves.

But the solution absolutely does not involve raising taxes to pay for everyone to go to college.

I agree that we need to get people to be realistic, but I disagree that we should just be saying "tough shit" to an entire generation that got thrown under the bus by a mixture of predatory student loan practices and well-meaning adults who did more harm than good attempting to provide guidance.

> The problem with free education is that as more people become educated, the signaling effect of education becomes diluted. So the Europeans are paying for something that decreases in real value the more that people have access to it.

This assumes that the only value of education is the signaling value. I strongly disagree with that assumption.

For most it is. For some it is not.

You seem to have a greater concern with who pays for education than you do for its macro-level effects. You simply don't think its the function of society to provide an education, even though it is society exactly that reaps benefits from it. These macro-level benefits to an education don't stop at high school graduation, even though the U.S. stops paying for it at that point. The demands on education are pretty much the same in (developed countries) worldwide, but the U.S. system of unsupported education causes overvaluation especially when student loans are government-guaranteed and so easy to get. Since the last few generations in the U.S. have been smaller due to decreased birth rates, colleges & universities have met increased competition for smaller student populations with fancier facilities and amenities. They show no concern with price sensitivity of students because demand for college education is pretty inelastic, close to that medical care and students can always get loans. Actually affording the debt service on those student loans is another subject, though.

So if education is undervalued in the European model, and overvalued in the U.S. system, perhaps it just a matter of finding out which system properly values education? Currently, the U.S. system is seeing runaway inflation in education costs, isn't it? How does it serve America to have such education this expensive? In the 1970's, its possible their model was sustainable but once demand was cut by subsequent, smaller generation size, and the supply of colleges stayed the same, its pretty easy to see how unsustainable this is. The European model simply remove education from the job qualification equation, much as the developed world has done for health care, for instance. You certainly need to be at a certain level of health if you're going to be employed, so developing countries at the start of the 20th century made great investment in public health to cut the communicability of disease with public health infrastructure around inoculations and early detection of epidemics, etc. Think of the impact of diseases such as Spanish Flu and later, polio. Much of this public health investment was done to preserve the stability of the workforce, and less so out of humanitarianism. But, of course, the workforce support society and humanity at large, too.

The only hope for many Americans paying student debt in their mid-twenties (and beyond) is the inheritance they will receive from their boomer parents. While I am not quite that young, I do know many that are factoring inheritance into their retirement planning.

>>> The problem with free education is that as more people become educated, the signaling effect of education becomes diluted.

That's only true if money is the only criteria for going to college. Just because it's free, it doesn't mean it's open for everyone.