The Politics Of "Free" Education

The White House has announced a new initiative to have the Federal government pay for two years of community college for all Americans. Of course, this is being sold as "free" community college. It is nothing of the sort. It is probably not going to happen. And, it wasn't designed to happen. Let's take each of those in turn.

First, it should go without saying, but nothing the government provides is free. Someone has to pay for it. We either pay for through revenue generation or resource re-allocation. Although exact numbers have not been provided, using information from the White House it is possible to arrive at a base cost of 34 billion dollars. Given how government programs tend to work, one can assume the actual number can only be higher. So, the Federal government either needs to raise taxes/tariffs/user fees, it has to borrow money or it has to take money from existing programs and move those funds into the new program. In what way is this free? It is to the average Obama supporter, I guess; but that only shows how lacking they are in critical reasoning. When the White House and its supporters say this is free, they are lying and they are assuming enough people are too ill-informed to understand this.

Those who are a bit more sophisticated will respond by saying "let's get the rich to pay for it." This response is more sophisticated in that it acknowledges that the notion of free is silly, but is so mired in classism that it fails to realize that there are limits to what the "rich" (however you define that; as a poor writer, that means to me anyone with more money than I have) can pay. Currently, the top 5% pay almost 60% of all income tax revenue. This is a huge amount of money taken out of the economy and filtered through the government, which is not an efficient way of generating economic activity. The "soak the rich" people have little understanding of the damage that can do to the overall economic health of the country nor do they seem to have a firm grasp of just how large that particular pot of money is. I think they have a vision of Scrooge McDuck rolling around on a pile of gold.

How the Left envisions the 1%. Yes, as ducks.

I think we can agree that there is no free lunch. There are limits to how much revenue you can raise through additional taxes. To make this "free" means borrowing money or moving funds from other programs. We'll have to see more details of the proposed program for an idea of how they address this.

Of course, that assumes that the White House actually thinks this program has a chance of being implemented. Which leads to my other two points, that it is not going to happen and was not designed to happen. It is unlikely that the Republican Congress, which would have to construct the legislation and approve the method of funding, is going to add billions to the deficit or enact massive new taxes. Not impossible, of course; but unlikely. They seem to have a few shreds of fiscal sanity left and this kind of program is not supportable, unless some other program is killed. I doubt that the White House would sign-off on legislation that closed down programs like the National Endowment for the Arts ($146 million) in order to help fund community college.

Which gets us to the real point of this proposal. He could have made it in 2009, when the Democrats controlled Congress. He could have made it in 2012, when the Democrats still held the Senate. He could have made it at any time before now. Why didn't he? Because he is counting on the GOP-controlled Congress not approving this program. He is looking for issues to galvanize the Democrat base and try to get the target audience for this proposal - young, not-too-bright people - out to vote for the Dems in 2016. Because, he knows that if the GOP keeps the Hill and gets the White House in 2016, they'll dismantle much of what he has done. As a diehard Leftist, the President is concerned that the expansion of government he has overseen might be rolled back. As unlikely as this is - the GOP is fairly statist as well - he's not taking chances.

He is putting something forward that will cost tens of billions every year under the assumption that it will never get through Congress. In 2016, he and the Dems can then blather about how Republicans hate education, community colleges, young people, etc. and get the drones to turn out on election day. It's a clever ruse, in that demonstrates a knowledge of what motivates the less thoughtful members of the electorate.

UPDATE: It was pointed out that I misspelled...education. In the title. Sigh. Maybe I should head back to school...