Upper Middle Class Welfare

With Your Kind Donation, This Little Shit Can Get a Free Ride to College

Smart people are talking about issuing federal tax credits to the middle class so they can send their kids to college. In our "for-profit" public university system, the alarming rise of tuition seems to correlate directly with more federal subsidies, but I digress. Yglesias thinks more cash for middle-class families might have its pitfalls:

Third Way’s new proposal, by contrast, is a repackaging of this old idea from their outfit:

Families earning up to $200,000 should receive a generous new college tuition tax cut in the form of a $5,000 credit toward the costs of college tuition, fees and books.

Compared to proposals from Obama and from the DLC, this is more generous to relatively prosperous families, but does nothing for more economically struggling families.

The idea that families making close to $200K a year can't send their kids to college and they need a "bailout" is egregious. Maybe because I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family that understood the bullshit inherent in luxury items like fancy vacations to the Bahamas and the newest beemer. College for the kids was a more important priority than Mom getting calf implants, which I guess makes my family an anomaly in this day and age. Third Way is just cooking up political schemes to buy votes with other people's money.

One disturbing trend of Obama-mania is that, suddenly, middle-class Americans are more economically depressed than serfs living through the Bubonic Plague. Call me crazy, but public schools should be available to "the public", and there's actually some good idears being kicked around by the Washington State legislature to have a "progressive" or "sliding scale" tuition so kids from rougher neighborhoods pay less. It used to be about social programs for "the poor", but now it's all about social programs for "me". What kind of country are we becoming? With influential, Nobel-winning economists saying a $775 Billion hot cash injection to keep people in their McMansions isn't enough and that the government needs to do more, it's no wonder our Republic is on the verge of financial apocalypse.