Ugh, fine. You win.

The dollar amounts are irrelevant unless you’re suggesting that once you get some sufficient amount of stuff (somewhere more than McDonalds wages but less than all the college freebies or the $800k contract) you lose the right to complain that you’d be able to earn more if the market for your skills weren’t…

But, in the context of the cost of raising a child, it isn’t enough. Pointing out that in other contexts (or without context) it may be quite a bit seems sorta pointless. If we were discussing providing $1000 to everyone for each business they started, I imagine the author wouldn’t have included that same…

You are free to charge children for the use of your lawn and/or move somewhere with fewer kids.

“They may not find as high pay as they were hoping for in the “major leagues”, but that’s a market driven equation.”

Fair enough. I misinterpreted. Strings are good when the benefit they create (here, keeping parents from spending less than $3,600/year on their kids, since money is fungible) outweighs the costs (here, the administrative costs of screening everyone’s spending, plus the inevitable unjustified denials of aid). I think…

Now I’m even more confused. Sarcasm? I’m new to the internet.

So what? Do you think, if the NCAA got out of the way, the boosters, etc. would be unwilling to pay athletes as well? Do you think they athletes, when choosing which school to attend, will care whether their pay comes from UofM or Nike?

You keep assuming the only way to cut costs is by reducing spending on non-revenue sports. That’s not the case. Football money is spent on volleyball currently not because there’s just too much to spend on football but because whoever is making those decisions thinks it’s worthwhile to do so. There’s no reason to…

“The falsest of false equivalencies.”

Not looking for an apology (facetious or otherwise), just don’t see the point of your original comment in the context of this article. Yes, $1000 is a lot of money to some (most) people. So what? And so what if it’s 5% or 50% of the cost of raising a kid? The implication I thought you were making is that folks should…

Kids are expensive. The incentive to not have kids is the extra disposable income.

The point is that it isn’t enough to raise a kid on, even in your cheap neck of the woods. So we can give parents that much (and more!) without worrying they’ll start cranking out more kids for that free government cheese.

You don’t. That’s what “no strings attached” means. But very few people are shitty enough to not spend at least $3,600 a year on their kids and people that shitty are likely to make the effort to work around whatever over-inclusive restrictions we might come up with.

Why assume schools are going to cut sports rather than, say, cut coaching salaries or invest less in new amenities for the football/basketball team? I bet when Michigan tries to kill women’s sports rather than trim Harbaugh’s salary, they’ll hear about it from the students and quickly change course.

The ability to make a choice doesn’t provide that the available choices are fair or appropriate. “Give me your wallet or your life” offers a voluntary choice too, but we still try to avoid putting people in the position where those are the choices.

You’re right, but that doesn’t really affect the thrust of the argument. The $41k is a cap on the value of the scholarship and a obvious counter to anyone suggesting an education is somehow “priceless” or at least worth more than the sticker price. In reality it’s almost certainly worth less, but that just strengthens…

Would anything prevent an elite foreign prospect from signing a very short deal (a year, or less if that’s possible) to come stateside that fits under the cap and then signing something more in line with his actual value?

Nah. I think you already know what they are.

It’s not, but that’s not anywhere in the neighborhood of all he’s done, and I think you know that.