The Biden administration is providing more Pell Grants for incarcerated people’s education so they can get a college degree. That is a good thing. You educate incarcerated people, and the chances of them going out and having a successful life increase greatly.
For the folks who mention that they have student debt, educating incarcerated people is a good thing. It’s also good to educate everybody who wants a higher education. We are so used to this poverty mentality around higher education that we fight each other. Instead, we must turn our anger at the politicians prioritizing everything else.
There’s plenty of money. This is a rich country. We can afford to educate the incarcerated and everybody struggling to pay their student loans. We’re choosing not to.
What We’re Choosing
- We’re choosing to give the Pentagon hundreds of billions of dollars that they are turning around and losing or putting in the pockets of defense contractors.
- We’re choosing not to tax billionaires anywhere near the rates we’re taxing everybody else.
- We’re choosing to subsidize oil and gas companies at massive rates.
What we’re not choosing to do is focus on higher education in America.
In Finland, Germany, and Norway, you can go and get a college education for free. Anyone who wants to. They know that higher education pays for itself in spades and more.
Ronald Reagan
This is a political choice that people in the Republican Party are making. We used to focus on paying for higher education.
When Ronald Reagan got into office, he started his whole thing of cutting taxes and slashing programs that helped Americans. And the Republican party has stayed with it ever since, even though it has done nothing but destroy our economy, add debt, and create income inequality. And Republicans right now are proposing another massive tax cut for corporations.
We need to elect politicians who care and want to promote higher education funding so that we’re not fighting each other for scraps. We can have the whole meal. We’ve got to start believing that that’s possible because it is. And the people who are telling us that it’s not are doing it to serve themselves.
Please remember that when you vote.