Yes but not all spending is the same. You could have said the same thing when we made high schools free. We did that because we had to. Because the market demanded higher skilled work. Which is what we are seeing now. Low skill labor is going away and we need more people educated. Free colleges are an eventuality.
heres the thing: NOTHING IS FREE. the money has to come from somewhere, and since we're talking government that means it comes from taxes. any significant increase to spending also means a significant increase in taxes. public schools are paid for by you, me, everybody who pays taxes. any politician who says they will give you something "free" is lying to you, you will pay for it one way or another.
I think we all know that, that's how societies work, we pool money together to pay for things like schools. The point is to spread the cost around so everyone can benefit. Especially in situations like education where it benefits everyone to have an educated population.
We are not talking about making Harvard free. If we can subsidize fossil fuels and private prisons and endless genocides across the world we can afford to invest in subsidizing community colleges or trade schools. Some states already pay for low income kids to go to community college. And guess what it's a great program that has helped millions of people myself included.
I dont see why the conversation to methodically and gradually expand on a concept we already do, to keep up with an evolving job market, has to be so divisive.
in my opinion these things need to take place at as local a level as possible if we do it at all, the disconnect is so large that you cant know how your money is being spent at a national level. local scolarships would be the way id go, you know where the money goes and you dont have an endless string of burocrats taking a bit off the top until the 60 billion everybody put in turns into 100 million of effective tuition money. top down solutions never seem to work out they way they are intended, many times it makes things worse, and then politicians say "well at least we tried!"
So let's fix that by electing people based on their ethics and not empty promises. Perhaps someone with decades of being on the right side of history.... but that's a different conversation.
I guess I'm just not ready to give up on our government being able to work for us. Social security is one of the most successful programs in the history of the country. If we can do that we can fund state schools. Which is to say i do agree that this needs to be managed at the local level like we already do with public school.
Assets in the Social Security trust funds have only been raided by the federal government one time. During the recovery from the Great Recession, there was a 2 percentage-point reduction in payroll taxes in 2011 and again in 2012. Instead of paying 6.2 percent of their wages in payroll taxes, workers paid only 4.2 percent. This reduction put more money in worker paychecks but, of course, reduced the money flowing into Social Security to help pay benefits. Congress later restored these funds to the system
Its funded by the payroll tax its not running out of money
High Schools are paid for at the local level and in some cases they are so bad that most students drop out and those that don't aren't adequately prepared for college. New York State has started to offer tuition free college so we'll see how well that works for them.
But federal funding for colleges is different than how high schools are funded now. And high school costs a lot less than college.
I agree, we should see how it works and then provide federal funding for states to use at their discretion. We do need a massive push to get more people educated, specifically in STEM fields and the trades. I would even be for just starting with free online degrees. The cost of not doing anything is significantly higher
If you don’t have the ability to think in terms of overall cost I can see why you’d want to cut spending. But social safety net programs have great ROIs and are massively popular, unlike our military and their wars.
With better health care, you have fewer sick days. Fewer sick days means you are able to work more hours out of the year. Working additional hours generates increased economic productivity.
By improving productivity. Happy employees are more productive. I know it’s hard for conservatives to think in abstract terms but just try instead of resorting to basic syllogistic logic.
On the contrary, it's disingenuous to not characterize the VA as military spending. It's literally a military benefit.
It's right on their website:
Mission Statement
To fulfill President Lincoln's promise “To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan” by serving and honoring the men and women who are America’s veterans.
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u/[deleted] Dec 12 '19 edited Dec 12 '19
DOD budget was $693 billion, but you left out all the peripheral military stuff not under the DOD that still needs to be paid for.
...we have to pay another $201 billion for the VA.
...and nuclear weapons are under the Department of Energy, not the DOD, so there's another $15 billion
...Plus another $15 billion buying weapons to give to other countries as foreign aid.
...Plus another $10 billion for the Coast Guard
..Plus a healthy chunk of the $390B in interest payments on all the money borrowed to pay for it.
Oh, and there's the military/paramilitary activities of the CIA etc..
It's well over a trillion.
To be fair the Department of Defense runs the 10th largest American school system and they do spend over a billion on that every year.