Month: March 2016

Canada should have free education for its citizens.  It seems like a very expensive idea, but it actually isn’t that crazy.

Ontario is the easiest place to use as an example.  It has a median family income of $76,510 per year which is almost exactly the average Canadian family income of $76,550.  Also the average university graduate in Canada earns $144 for every $100 earned by a high school grad, and the rate in Ontario is almost exactly average at $144.20.  It also has a very average income tax rate, and of course, the most people by a wide margin.  The numbers I use come from these earnings and reflect taxes paid federally and to the province of Ontario.

The fact that the university grad earns much more money also translates into that grad paying a lot more income tax.  Starting at age 22, after completing a hypothetical four year degree, the grad will be many thousands of tax dollars behind the hypothetical high school grad who began paying tax at age 18.  However, the degree holder will pass the high school grad in lifetime taxes paid when they reach age 29, and if they both continue to work until age 65, the university grad will pay an extra $365,940 in taxes.  Not bad for the $60,591 the average four year degree costs in tuition.  The government comes out $305,000 ahead on the deal.  The rate of return is about six tax dollars taken in for every dollar spent on tuition.  If an extra 1/6 of high school grads attended university because of the free tuition, the program would make the government money.

Of  course, many people are willing to go badly in debt to get an education, but there is a strong correlation between education levels and the cost of tuition.  This suggests that there are people not pursuing higher education because of the cost.  As an example, the cheapest tuition in Canada is in Quebec, which also has the highest rate of post-secondary attendance.  In Quebec, some college courses can be taken for free.  Certainly more people would choose university if it were free.  There might have to be some rules, such as it might only be free until you reach the age of 20, after which you must kick in 10% of the cost per year.  Obviously, it would not be cost effective to open free education to anyone nearing retirement age.  They also may want to limit free tuition to four years.
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The government would also gain in other ways.  The university grad would be much less likely to be unemployed during his or her working life.  Also, degree holders tend to save more for retirement meaning they are less of a burden on the national pension.  They also tend to live healthier lives, so the government spends less on their well-being throughout their lives.  This is not to mention the fact that the $60,000 they would have had to repay for their student loan now is spent in the economy.

There are other non-financial benefits to society.  Degree holders are also less likely to smoke, less likely to be involved in crime, more likely to volunteer, give blood and vote.  They are more likely to read to their children which raises them with higher cognitive skill.  The list goes on and on.

 

 

I have written a lot of essays in my time, but very little poetry.  I tried to write poems, but for the most part they are awful.  I guess I’m some kind of realist, who knows?

The best poem I was ever involved with was created with my sister in the back of a 1960 Chevy station wagon during a family vacation when we were 5 or 6 years old.  I’m not really sure any more who came up with what, but I am pretty sure we both had a hand in its creation.  We were bouncing around in the back behind the back seats, and for some reason we were talking about our mom’s friend from work, Mel.  I don’t remember ever disliking Mel, or ever questioning his personal cleanliness, but here is that little diamond of a poem we wrote about him:

If you smell a smell

That smells like hell,

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It might be Mel.

Sadly, the Nobel Prize committee that selects the Literature award were unaware of our pointy little rhyme about Mel, otherwise they surely would have given us the award for that year.  Think of all the candy we could have purchased with the prize money!

I wonder if Mel ever got wind, so to speak, of our poem.  If he did, I never heard.  My niece once put up a picture of Mel Gibson in her room with this poem, hopefully with stink lines rising from his greasy mullet.  But I shouldn’t pick on Gibson, his creative life didn’t peak at the age of 5.

It was very windy last night.  I woke up at around 3:30 to the sounds of whistling wind in the bedroom window, of branches brushing against the house, of various unsecured items tumbling around the yard and most ominously, the sound of my bag of beer cans getting scattered.  I managed to doze for another hour or so, but the power was off and I was starting to worry that I might sleep right on through the day without the alarm.  Which, in hindsight, is pretty silly because the wind was making a racket that I couldn’t sleep through already.  I was prone, and my eyes were likely shut, but I was too worried about the time and those damn beer cans to get back to sleep.

Around 5:30 I got up, fed the cat, and went out into the yard to gather beer cans.  They had gone everywhere.  They were all over the back lawn, some had rolled into the car port, some had became entangled in the wood pile, a few had crossed the yard into the neighbour’s driveway.  A few even made it all the way around the house into the front yard.  No doubt I’ll be finding beer cans for months.  I put the barbecue back on its legs, too, but the wind blew it back over again and the vinyl cover for it blew into the neighbour’s driveway where I had already gone to retreive cans.  If the neighbours were awake and watching from their darkened houses, I must have been entertaining, chasing cans around in the dark in a wind storm.
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Needless to say, I was a puffy, tired zombie at work all day.  I couldn’t even brew up a cup of coffee.  At one point, I had to find a quiet street and pass out on the seat of my work truck for half an hour to try to regain some semblance of alertness.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys lately.  When we were kids, the Beach Boys were on the record player all the time.  Cars, girls and surfing glorified in two and a half minutes of swirling harmonies.  They were songs about people in good health having fun in the sun.  Like the Robin Williams suicide, it seems way out of character that the guy writing these songs could have such a dark side.

‘Lying in bed, just like Brian Wilson did’, as the Barenaked Ladies put it.

Their music in the mid ’60s was getting more complex and adult.  The Pet Sounds album is still considered a masterpiece of arrangements.  Paul McCartney called it his favourite album and strived to match it with the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper.  “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Good Vibrations” and “God Only Knows” were cutting edge songs in their time.  Maybe the strain of hundreds of hours of recording and mixing got to him.  Certainly it brought what problems he had to the surface.  He started taking drugs and all but quit on the world to stay at home and play in the sandbox he had built in his living room.  He balooned up to 300 lbs, and says he got so lazy he was pissing in the fireplace.  Occaisonally he would turn up on stage to do a song or two with the Beach Boys or with one of his other “vampire” friends (Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, John Lennon, Mickey Dolenz), usually wearing a robe and slippers.

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For me, the glaring irony in his story, as in Robin Williams’, is how someone responsible for so much positivity and art could conceal their mental issues from the world.  And, for the most part, they led pretty public lives.   At least Brian Wilson got out of it alive.   The real cost, from a fan’s selfish point of view, is all that music that he would have written and performed during those years.  His prime years.  Like all the great fights Muhammad Ali could have had if he wasn’t stripped of his titles for draft evasion, losing his peak years between ages 25 – 29.

Looking back, the Beach Boys almost seem like a novelty act, but they were huge in their day.  They sold over 100 million albums in a time when the focus was mostly on singles.  Rolling Stone ranked them #12 on a list of the greatest rock artists, and they had 36 top 40 singles in the US, still the most by any American band.

I saw the Beach Boys in 1980, and I see that Brian Wilson is coming to Seattle and Portland in October with another Beach Boy, Al Jardine.  Both shows take place in small-ish theatres which makes it even more appealing.