Student Loans & Bankruptcies (was Re: creative financing)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Kelley, you're raising key questions about the means test as an
>institutionalized practice, and, by implication, the question of 
>whether or not
>benefits and services are universal or residual.
>
>It is true that any society will have to have criteria of eligibility for any
>benefit. However, the situation is quite different when the criteria 
>are broad,
>general and give presumptive eligibility to large categories of people. For
>example, even in the stingy USA children are presumed to be eligible for
>schooling, and proving eligibility is mostly a matter of providing names,
>addresses, documented dates of birth, etc.
>
>By contrast, there is a strict means test for public assistance, and a lot of
>expensive effort goes into keeping people out. This has many secondary
>consequences that lead to creative use of loopholes of the sort you describe.
>Everyone has at least one story, or two. As in the examples you offer.
>Sometimes these are urban legends, sometimes they aren't, but mostly 
>they go to
>show how the attempt at austerity in awarding benefits leads to other than
>straightforward expenses and consequences.
>
>If we want to briefly revive the functionalism debate we could discuss what
>their function(s) could be.
>
>Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

The degree of means-testing is determined by (1) whether or not the 
working class are mobilized -- via spontaneous riots or organized 
political actions -- to demand entitlements; & (2) whether or not 
profit rates are sagging & must be restored by austerity policies 
that instill labor discipline & rein in inflation, among other 
things, I think.  Neoliberalism -- which has made means-testing 
harsher & forced the working class to bear a larger part of the costs 
of social reproduction than before -- is capital's effort to restore 
profit rates by austerity which also demobilizes the working class.

Yoshie