Much is being made of the compromise reached by President Barack Obama and Congressional Republicans last week that continued the Bush tax cuts for two more years, extended unemployment benefits for 13 months and reduced the payroll tax for a year. The deal proved that Obama and the Republicans can get along. That it is possible to govern the country, it was said.
Last week’s compromise amounted to about $850 billion in additional spending, all of which will go onto the national debt. The sacrificing will be done by another generation, not this one.
Tougher tests lie just ahead.
Next year, Republicans say, real spending cuts will come.
An opportunity will arise when they tackle the Pell grant program. Pell grants are the primary way our government helps poor students get through college. But the program will be short $5.7 billion in 2011 and $8 billion in 2012. Congress must decide whether to cut the grants to individual students, increase deficit spending to keep the program on track or raise the additional revenue needed.
On this one, the president is very likely to demand full funding. Republicans will then be faced with the choice of helping poor students get an education which will give them a chance to escape poverty or keeping their pledge to cut spending.
What they should do, of course, is to fund the program fully and consider increasing it. The maximum Pell grant is $5,550. That is not enough to pay for a year’s higher education. It costs about $10,000 a year to go through a Kansas Regents university. Today’s Pell grant students must also have help from home, earn money working after classes or take out a student loan, if they can qualify. To meet actual costs, Pell grants should be larger, not smaller.
Because it has been demonstrated beyond argument that education pays for itself and that those who complete college or higher levels of technical education earn much more during the lives than those with a high school education, or less, do, subsidizing higher education for students from low-income families is a long-term investment in the nation’s economic growth that always has paid big dividends.
Past and current GI Bills of Rights which paid much of the cost of a college education for veterans have clearly demonstrated that the investment more than pays for itself.
But the upfront cost is significant.
And therein lies the challenge to the administration, the Congress and, for that matter, all Americans.
We can provide the money needed to strengthen America by subsidizing higher education for the millions — there will be 8.7 million Pell recipients next year — who cannot afford it or we can turn our backs on those kids, and weaken the nation in the process.
America remains a very rich nation. It can afford effective, wise government. It is also a nation that is very deeply in debt because it has refused to raise the money that it spends. Let us hope that the next great compromises that are reached between Democrats and Re-publicans in 2011 are agreements to match income with outgo without destroying much that is valuable in our society.
As citizens, Americans should let their leaders and their representatives know that they want wise, problem-solving government and are willing to pay for it.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
