Educational TANSTAAFL

Surprise, surprise.  This week our president came out with his latest proposal to provide himself with a shred of relevance as his second term devolves into blissful nothingness.  This latest venture into European-style socialism is to propose that the Government -- and by that we always mean the taxpayer -- should provide a two-year junior college education to everyone, paying their tuition.

Naturally, Obama's presentation was rife with allusions to "investment" in our youth, and reminding us how badly education is needed and how much it makes us better as a country.

What it lacked were two things:
(1) The legal (i.e., constitutional) grounding that justifies the Federal Government doing anything whatsoever regarding education; Federal payment for tuition logically opens the door to determination of what schools are allowed to teach when they start being paid for by the Government (meaning, the taxpayer)
(2) The economic rationale for borrowing $60 billion over the next ten years from China to pay for it -- since we don't take in enough to pay for $600-700 billion of our current spending each year, the Government would have to borrow it (China is our biggest creditor) and we taxpayers, and our children and grandchildren, would have to pay both principal and interest

Look, you and I both know that this proposal is going nowhere.  The incoming Congress is sufficiently economically sensible that a new spending program like this isn't getting out of committee.  But is this what Obama is going to keep coming up with for the remainder of his term?  Last-gasp socialistic programs to give his many allies in the media and his few allies in Congress something to talk about, lest we forget who lives in the White House?

I just find it really depressing that we have gotten so cavalier about being $18 trillion (with a "T") in debt as a nation that these programs can be tossed out with impunity without the press asking critically about where the invoice for them goes -- and let there be no doubt -- it goes to you and me.

It is depressing that people think that it is appropriate to apportion the cost of voluntary activities like college enrollment to the population as a whole, much as the cost of maternity care has been apportioned to people like me, who have already paid for our own children -- well over thirty years since -- through the abomination of Obamacare.  That is the very definition of socialism.

Back we need to go, to a concept of personal responsibility.  If you want college, then pay for it.  If you choose to take on debt to do so, then plan it, and plan how you will pay it back to those who find you an adequate risk.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch -- TANSTAAFL, as we learned many years ago.  In the case of this absurd proposal, the price -- more debt to the Chinese, more potential Federal intrusion into college course content, less personal responsibility -- is huge, beyond money.  We must not only prevent this from happening, we must explain to the American people in detail why it is a bad idea.

Now it's time for lunch which, by the way, I have indeed paid for.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton