Poll: Where do you stand on free tuition to state colleges and universities

[JDPriestly]

18. I'm sure they said that when the idea of free high school was introduced.

Oh, and Social Security. To say nothing of Medicare.

It is not a matter of whether we can afford it. It is a matter of whether we want to. It is not a matter of whether we can afford it because we already have student loans. Funding education and single payer insurance is just a matter of whether we pay for it by forcing those who don't have rich parents to borrow the money and then pay it back with interest (our current method for paying for tuition at colleges and universities) or we allow students to to go to college without borrowing and then take it out of their investment money if they do speculative trading later one.

The tuition is not "free" in the sense that it is paid by the blue sky. It is free in the sense that the individual, the poorer student is not stuck with paying the entire bill with interest while a richer kid is without debt because his/her parents foot the tuition bill.

I think that the form of paying for state school tuition by placing a tax on speculative trades on Wall Street (the fast ones, for example) would help society a great deal, help to give kids who want to work hard but don't have money entry into the middle class. That would especially help immigrant kids but also students of minorities of all kinds. It would also help people 40 and over whose jobs have gone the way of better technology or simply outsourcing or exporting. I went back to school at the age of 50. I made sure I chose a field in which I was likely to earn enough to repay my loans. But I was lucky to qualify for a field of that kind.

If we can afford student loans, we can afford free tuition. It's just a matter of when the money is paid and who pays the greater part of it.

Right now, kids have to delay their child-bearing years until they get student loans repaid. Or if they don't delay, they end up paying for childcare (an expensive proposition if you want safe daycare in California where I live), student loans, the medical costs for small children, etc. and cannot do the things that used to be part of living in our society like buying a house. The fact of the burden of student loans and the extremely high tuition our children now face when they want an education is increasing the income inequality in our society and doing a lot of damage.

And as I said, it is not a matter of affording or not affording free tuition. It is a matter of how that tuition is to be paid. It is a matter of who bears the burden for our maintaining our first-world status in the world. Because if we don't educate our children to the best of their abilities, we will continue to sink in terms of our economic role in the world.