Via PoliticusUSA and ABC This Week, Governor Chris Christie said that free college would simply destroy America.
Listen, it is available for all Americans, George. We have grant programs that are very broadly used. We have loan programs that are very broadly used. And by the way, my dad went for six years again night. He worked all day to help to put himself through college.
So it wasn’t that the G.I. Bill did everything for my father, it helped. It helped for certain. And we should still provide those type of benefits for folks.
But my dad also worked every day for six years to get his degree, all day and then went to school at night.
But the idea of free college for everybody, there’s nothing free in this world. We need to earn what we get.
But the problem is that Governor Christie's views are an oversimplification of how the real world operates. For instance, what if you work hard and play by the rules, but Corporate America considers you unemployable, like they do with 93 million Americans? If we do not get a handle on this problem, then we will go right back to the Great Recession or worse.
There are plenty of other questions that Governor Christie should have to answer. For instance, what about housing? The fact of the matter is that even in the part of the country where I live, where the cost of living is low, we are having increasing problems finding affordable housing. For instance:
Monthly rent bills in St. Joseph running in the $600 to $700 range can eat up a large portion of a minimum-wage salary. By the time a person adds utilities, renting becomes a luxury many can’t afford.
The Urban Institute recently released findings from its How Housing Assistance Matters Initiative study that showed the nation faces a rental housing crisis. According to the study, many people struggle to afford a decent and safe place to live.
Over the past five years, a perfect storm developed where rentals have decreased at the same time the numbers of renters who need affordable housing has increased.
By his logic, Governor Christie would say that these people are on their own because they did not earn housing.
And finally, who gets to decide whether you have earned a job, a living wage, or a salary? Christie doesn't answer that question. Is he saying that if you don't have a job or housing, that you are somehow not a good enough person because you did not work hard enough? This logic reminds one of Animal Farm, where the workhorse's response to problems on the farm is always, "I will work harder." Any problems that arose happened because he did not apply himself well enough to the job at hand.
The reality is that everyone needs a helping hand from time to time. The fact of the matter is that given that there are 93 million who are considered "unemployable" by Corporate America, the government has an obligation to step in and provide work for these 93 million. If you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps to a successful career like Governor Christie or Senator Marco Rubio did and become part of the capitalist system, great. But the free market system does not consider whether everyone has meaningful work; all it cares about is the bottom line. Therefore, the government has to step in where the free market has failed and provide equality of opportunity. Otherwise, we will not live up to our goal of liberty and justice for all. Freedom does not mean working 10-12 hours a day trying to get one's self out of the debt trap or living off food stamps and get hounded by bill collectors on a regular basis.
This is why free college is a moral imperative. More and more, jobs are requiring skills that previous generations did not have to master. And furthermore, many jobs are going extinct in a few decades; for instance, if we are able to perfect a self-driving truck, that means that hundreds of thousands of truck drivers will be out of work and deemed "unemployable" by Corporate America because they don't have the skills for another career. That means that when the technology does come, these truckers need retraining in order to live meaningful lives after their jobs come to an end for good like many people in the horse and buggy industry's jobs did in in the first few decades of the 20th century. And don't ask them to take out student loans; many either have no prior credit history and can't get loans or their credit is shot like many people experienced during the Great Recession.
Governor Christie, like most of the GOP politicians, are stuck in the politics of the past. Maybe the notion of pulling one's self up by the bootstraps was viable for most of us at one time, but it is not anymore. If someone can do it, great; but in the meantime, what about the 93 million "unemployable" Americans who are left out through no fault of their own?
His point is that if we were to provide free college, the American people have to pay in the form of more taxes. But it's better to pay more taxes than endure the kind of massive social upheaval that we experienced during the Great Depression. Secondly of all, we don't even need a tax increase; it can pay for itself if we force the Department of Defense to live within its means like every one of us is expected to. And we can always come up with ways of combating waste, fraud, and abuse within the government and come up with money that way, or broaden the tax base through legalizing pot, comprehensive immigration reform, and tax incentives to bring American jobs back home.