Tag Archives: free college

‘No’ on tuition-free college

That ol’ trick knee of mine is telling me something I hope is true, but something I cannot predict will happen.

It’s telling me that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are negotiating an exit from the 2020 Democratic Party primary campaign for Sen. Sanders.

The way this deal might play out is that Sanders might seek to demand certain elements of his campaign end up as part of the Biden campaign going forward. I want to express my extreme displeasure with one element of the Sanders Mantra: the one that seeks to make public college and university education free for every American student.

No can do! Nor should it happen. It’s a budget-buster for the national treasury not to mention for colleges and universities that depend on students’ tuition and assorted lab and book fees to stay afloat.

Former Vice President Biden has broken the Democratic primary for the presidency wide open. The nomination is now his to lose, to borrow the cliché. Sanders, though, isn’t likely to bow out quietly without making some demands on the nominee-to-be.

Sanders isn’t even an actual Democrat; he represents Vermont in the Senate as an independent. He is a “democratic socialist.” To be honest, I don’t quite grasp the “democratic” element in that label as it applies to granting free college education.

The free college plank has been critical to the support Sanders has enjoyed among young voters. How does Biden mine that support for himself? He could call for dramatic restructuring of student loans, making them easier to pay off. I didn’t accrue a lot of student debt while I attended college in the 1970s; I had the GI Bill to help me out. As a parent of college students, though, we were saddled with “parent loans” that took a long time to retire. There must be a better way to structure those loans.

Making public colleges and universities free, though, is a non-starter. Is it a deal-breaker if Joe Biden adopts it as part of his platform? Would that compel me to vote — gulp, snort, gasp! — for Donald Trump? Not a bleeping chance.

The former VP must not be bullied into embracing the free college idea as his own.

UT takes huge step toward granting free tuition

I am quite surprised this bit of news hasn’t gained much traction in national media outlets, but get a load of this flash.

The University of Texas has just announced that any student who enrolls at the system’s flagship campus in Austin gets his or her tuition paid in full if the student comes from a family earning $65,000 or less annually.

This a huge! The UT System Board of Regents voted to spring $160 million from the system’s endowment to help cover the cost of tuition for about 8,600 undergraduate students at UT-Austin.

While many Democratic primary presidential candidates have talked about making public college education free for all students, the University of Texas System is moving ahead with a bold initiative of its own toward that end.

The Texas Tribune reports: “Our main focus at the UT system is our students. That’s it, that’s what we’re in the business for is to provide an affordable, accessible education for our students,” board chair Kevin Eltife said … after the vote. “We all know the struggles that hardworking families are having putting  their kids through school. What we’ve done here is repurposed an endowment into another endowment that will provide tuition assistance to a lot of the working families of Texas.”

This is huge news coming from one of the country’s most well-known, highly regarded and wealthiest public universities.

I am quite certain a lot of families throughout the state are full of smiling faces as their young people prepare for the upcoming academic year.

The endowment funds won’t pay for all students, to be sure. It merely helps those students whose parents need a hand.

Well done, UT regents.

Sanders yet to explain how ‘free college’ works

Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt,  and his wave Jane acknowledge the crowd as he arrives for his caucus night rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Monday, Feb. 2, 2016.  (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

I’ve had a busy day, which is rather strange, given that I’m supposed to be “semi-retired.”

Still, I’m winding ‘er down tonight and am listening to some cable news discussion of the day’s political events.

I heard the following: U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders held a rally in Salem, Ore., in which he said that it’s time to provide free college education for every American who wants to get one.

I keep coming back to this question: How in the world are we going to pay for this?

Sanders’ pledge to provide free college education has helped him draw big support among young voters, who’ve added huge numbers to the rallies to which he’s been speaking.

Free college is a noble goal.

It’s also utterly unrealistic.

I have plenty of friends who are backing Sanders. Some of them are old folks … like me.

To be honest, I haven’t crossed paths with too many college-age students who are backing Sanders because of this pie-in-the-sky promise. I’ll need to catch up with some of them to get a better grip on how this free college pledge is resonating.

From my standpoint, though, a promise made from the campaign stump quite often doesn’t translate to responsible public policy.

Let’s de-construct the Sanders ‘revolution’

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I hope my friend Jon Talton has a stout spine, as I want to piggyback on an excellent blog he has written about U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

He poses questions for the man who’s battling Hillary Rodham Clinton for the party nomination. Talton covers a lot of ground, noting that Sanders has lied about Clinton’s alleged statements, oversold his Senate record, has failed to develop any foreign-policy platform.

I want to add another critical point regarding the Sanders candidacy.

Talton compares Sanders to the “gadfly” who gripes at city council meetings. I believe he’s worse than that. His one-note chorus about “income inequality” is bordering on demagoguery.

The dictionary defines a demagogue as one who “obtains power by appealing to the emotions and prejudices of the populace.” That term clearly applies to the leading Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump and to Texas U.S. Sen. Rafael Edward Cruz.

For months on end, Sanders has taken his “message” of income inequality around the country. He lays all the blame for whatever ails the nation on the “top 1 percent” who are acquiring virtually all the nation’s wealth at the expense of the other 99 percent.

The way I see it, Sanders is appealing to people’s “emotions” and “prejudices.”

What’s more, he isn’t offering substantive proposals for how to attack what he says are the nation’s most critical problems. He recently was pressed about how he would close the “big banks.” Sen. Sanders’ mumbled and bumbled his way through a virtually incomprehensible response.

I’m still waiting to hear how he intends to provide free college education for every student in the nation — without bankrupting the federal Treasury. Is there any surprise, then, that Sanders is wiping Clinton out among college-age voters?

One of the more fascinating arguments Talton makes in his blog deals with the reason why Republicans haven’t yet taken aim at him in the primary. It’s because the GOP wants to run against him in the fall. They are expending all their ammo during this primary season trying to take down Clinton.

Suppose lightning strikes and Sanders does win the Democratic nomination … is ol’ Bern ready for the onslaught that is sure to come?

Gosh, and to think I once lamented why only the Republicans were having all the fun during this nominating season. The Democrats have joined them.

I don’t know where to turn.

Still waiting for answers from Bernie

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Some of us might recall a quip made famous by former Vice President Walter Mondale as he competed for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984.

His chief foe that year was U.S. Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado. The two of them squared off in a debate and Mondale turned to Hart and asked him: Where’s the beef?

The question has become something of a punch line.

I think it’s fair ask another challenger for the Democratic nomination essentially the same question. It ought to go to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Where is the beef, Bernie? Where are your constructive solutions to what you say ails the country?

I’m not hearing them.

Sanders captured two Democratic caucuses today, in Washington and Alaska. The frontrunner for the party’s nomination remains Hillary Clinton.

I listened last night to quite a bit of Sanders’s rally in Seattle. He stood at a lecturn in the middle of Safeco Field and kept saying what he’s been saying all along.

The campaign system is corrupt and he wants to bring public financing to presidential elections; the top 1 percent are getting richer while the rest of America is suffering; he wants to provide free college education for every student in America; he says every American is entitled to “universal health care.”

OK. Fair enough. I get the message.

The question: How are you going to make any — let alone all of it — a reality?

It occurred to me this afternoon while visiting with a friend: Sanders sounds a little like Donald J. Trump. Yes, he’s tapping into voters’ anxiety, anger, fear and frustration, just like Trump.

The difference, though, lies in the tone and tenor of his remarks … not to mention the tone and tenor of his response to criticism.

As I listen to Sanders, though, I keep hearing the same refrain.

Wall Street is bad. The political system is corrupt. Wages are unequal.

What is the candidate going to do — precisely, I must ask — to fix it?

Where, Sen. Sanders, is the beef?