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Every hour, taxpayers in the United States are paying $32.08 million toward the Total Cost of Wars Since 2001.
Nobody ran on a platform to pay this. Nobody got your permission to do this. And nobody asks “how are we going to pay for this.” We just do.
And yet, when we suggest education for everyone, not only do people get stuck in this question, “How do we pay for it,” ignoring the huge economic impact of education, their closet elitism shows its face:
“What if my tax money goes to pay for someone to get an Art degree and they become a barista.” ignoring, completely, how insulting and dismissive this is to both artists and baristas.
This is just a variation on the “freeloader” problem that fiscal conservatives are obsessed with. “What if some people benefit more than they give back?”
When you consider people to be the end goal, not just a means to an end, the freeloader problem goes away.
What if some people DO benefit more than they give back?
They will. It will happen. Some people’s lives will just get better and they will be happier, better educated, more interesting at parties, have more opportunities. And even if they don’t take those opportunities, that’s ok. Because millions more will take them, millions more will invent, create, do, explore, expand, and add to the economy.
America’s welfare program has a stunningly small incident of fraud. But it does have freeloaders. People whose lives are made easier by programs like SNAP who still don’t give back to the expected degree.
And I don’t care. Because for every “freeloader” there are a ton of children who have a chance that wouldn’t have had one.
I hope we have the chance, over the next 8 years, to talk about the true cost of war and the true benefits of education. A real one.
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