Sunday night Ted Kennedy did a spot on Meet the Press to promote his new book.
Tim Russert asked Kennedy about policy proposals the book presents, specifically Kennedy's wanting to expand Medicare to cover all citizens, and this:
MR. RUSSERT: You also in your book say this about education, "I propose that every child in America, on reaching eighth grade, be offered a contract. Let students sign it, along with their parents and Uncle Sam. The contract will state that if you work hard, finish high school, and are accepted for college, the federal government will guarantee you the cost of earning a degree."
SEN. KENNEDY: Right. That's right.
MR. RUSSERT: Where are we going to get that money?
How sad. It reminds me of when I'd graduated high school: my father said he couldn't pay or cosign for me to go the university I'd gotten into: "Where am I going to get the money?" he'd said, eyes on the floor in front of him. After I spent two years in community college, my stepmother, who's always got something bad to tell anyone who's listening about my father, told me that when they'd gone on her company trip to Lake Tahoe the previous year my father had gone gambling crazy, taken cash advances out on all his credit cards, blew all his savings, and found other sources to manage gambling away twenty-five thousand dollars. A sum which would have easily covered the cost of my bachelor's degree (and about the same crippling amount of student loan debt I have to pay back now).
My point: Where there's monomania there's always a bankroll, as in the case of Bush, congresses' apppropriations, Kennedy's claim in the Russert interview that we're spending $10 billion dollars a month on the Iraq war.
According to the National Priorities Project's running total on the cost of the war, based on congressional appropriations, we could have provided 13,380,000 students with four-year scholarships to public universities, and the number continues to climb; in fact, on the Priorties site, it climbs right before your eyes. What will it be in 2010?
And speaking of priorities, maybe in 2008 our newly elected President will monomaniacally begin to push "The War on Ignorance," because his father had been burned by ignorance on a national scale, and because the country of Ignoraq controls two-thirds of the pencil production industry, an industry this President had dabbled in previously, though unsuccessfully, but enough to know the sheer power one has with all the pencils in the world nestled in the crook of his thumb and forefinger. Where will he get the money to educate all those students to fight his war on Ignoraq? That makes no difference, and neither does Russert's asking that question of where we'd get money to fund education. It's entirely a question of will. It has been from the beginning, which was why Russert's question left me a little awestruck. A better question might have been: "Where are we going to find someone who will make this one of their number one priorities?" And if it's too late for that financially, which it appears to be, still better, "Why didn't we find someone who was obsessed with anything, anything else other than war, in the first place?"
Answers to the former, anyone?