Guillaume Kosmala: Sanders’ drastic plans best hope for making college affordable

This June, UCLA undergraduate students will have their first real chance in decades to radically change the political direction of this country.

The 2016 presidential primary is coming to a close with California set to be the decisive closing vote on June 7, and the demographic breakup of voters, especially on the Democratic side, means that college students will be crucial in deciding the primary’s outcome.

College affordability will be at the top of many students’ list of policy measures to consider and if you are to cast an educated ballot, it is important to understand both the ubiquitous value of a college degree and its price within the economic climate we live in.

And to the educated voter, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has the most comprehensive and ambitious plan for overhauling college tuition and debt.

Sanders has repeatedly argued on the campaign trail that a college degree is the new high school diploma, and therefore public colleges should be free, often pointing to European nations like France and Germany as examples of the feasibility of this task.

Certainly, there are costs to that. If we are to emulate European education policies, we will need to at least partially emulate their tax policies. Sanders has been forthright that his plan will be expensive, and to pay for it he plans to levy a tax on Wall Street transactions, ranging from 0.5 percent on stock trades to 0.005 percent on derivatives.

But it’s feasible. According to Sanders, more than 1,000 economists support taxing Wall Street speculation and similar taxes exist in about 40 countries worldwide including Germany, France and China.

Yet despite this, there are those even within the Democratic party that remain squeamish to the idea. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeatedly attacked Sanders’ vision of free public college, arguing that it would be unfair for people like Donald Trump’s children to attend college for free. Her plan is similar to, and cheaper than, Sanders’, except it is less ambitious in almost every way. Instead of pushing for free public college, Clinton has emphasized making it possible for students to graduate without carrying loans. Clinton’s plan would require middle- and high-income families to continue paying tuition. Her incrementalism does not bode well for a country in crisis and in desperate need of decisive decision-making.

On the other side of the political spectrum, college affordability policies seem to be absent from the Republican debate. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has proposed in his “Five For Freedom” plan to abolish five major government departments, including the Department of Education, which administers student loans and aid programs like Federal Pell Grants. In the past Gov. John Kasich has rejected President Obama’s proposal that community college be free, on the grounds that with nearly $20 trillion in federal debt, “everything can’t be free.”

This mindset is regressive insofar as it considers essential change such as free community college to be a utopic vision of the future. We live in the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind and the youngest voters have the right to expect candidates to have real ambition to improve the lives of working people.

And as per usual for Trump, the Republican frontrunner, it is incredibly difficult to ascertain anything specific. If anything, his statements do not suggest any drastic change from the status quo. Jason Bahri, a second-year mathematics/economics student who supports Trump, condones the candidate’s plan of lowering interest rates because according to him they are set artificially high by the Federal Reserve, not by the market forces of supply and demand.

Sanders’ proposals are not universally supported, nor are they perfect. For example, according to the International Business Times, the tax increase could lead to a 24 percent drop in volume of stock market trading. However when taken in context with the macro trends of the U.S. economy, it becomes evident that drastic action is needed.

Others could point to the unrealistic nature of Sanders’ plan. But this falls apart when considering that, until the 1970s, the University of California system offered free tuition at its schools.

In fact, we have ended up at a yearly in-state tuition and fees total of $12,753 at UCLA because of policy changes. To begin to reverse 30 years of unintended effects of trickle down, radical policy is needed; the moderate side of the spectrum, proposed by Clinton, is no longer good enough.

Those policy failures can be seen clearly in the status quo. If college price increases had been a result of normal market forces, the rate of increase would have roughly followed inflation, yet since 1978, tuition and fees have increased 1,225 percent whereas the Consumer Price Index, a common measure of overall inflation, has only increased 279 percent.

In those same 30 years, we have seen rampant income inequality as 59.9 percent of the income gains from 1979-2007 have gone to the top 1 percent of households while only 8.6 percent of income gains have gone to the bottom 90 percent.

Because of this divide, and despite a huge 80 percent jump in productivity, we have seen only a 10 percent increase in median hourly compensation since 1973. It is evident that such a low increase in wages cannot possibly keep up with the soaring cost of higher education. Only a drastically different political and economic direction can reverse this trend, and it is evident from the policies of the candidates that Sanders is the only one who embodies this direction.

Even if Sanders’ tax plans don’t work exactly as planned, his college affordability plan is the only one which attempts to bring our country back into the 21st century and catches us up with the rest of the developed world. Education is a public good and if we had the money to give Wall Street a $700 billion bailout and spend $80 billion a month on quantitative easing during 2013, we can afford to make public college free for all.

Between the nonexistent Republican plans, the half-hearted attempt at change from the Clinton camp and the huge amount of evidence pointing to a massive need in rebalancing our economy, it is evident that we desperately need the purposeful political action embodied by Sanders.