Free public tuition and proportion of young people in college are separate issues; not all people are capable or interested in tertiary education, and lecture halls do not magically increase in size as soon as tuition drops. You do expect to see some increase in people going to college, but you have to remember that most of the people who want to go to college are already going to college; they’re just accumulating a huge debt while they do it.
While we’re discussing possible side-effects of free tuition, though, here’s another one: basing college admission upon academic merit rather than ability to pay means that you get smarter, harder working students. Fewer trust-fund kids killing time before they take over the family company, more poor-but-smart kids with a burning desire to become something or other.
In turn, this means better scientists, engineers, doctors, etc etc etc. More scientific progress, fewer bridges falling down, less dead people. All because you moved towards a meritocracy and away from a financial caste system.
You forgot the Senate.
If Bernie has somehow managed to hide this based-on-nothing I’m-just-sayin’ hypothetical incompetence throughout his multi-decade career at all levels of US governance, he’s a world-class chameleon.
That’s certainly a bold attempt at turning a megabuck mass-death catastrophe into a positive. Particularly since that catastrophic decision was so obviously dumb that it caused worldwide street protests of record setting size.
Nothing about what happened in Iraq was the tiniest bit surprising to anybody who was paying attention to reality in the lead up to the war. At the time, my assumption about the Democrats who voted for war was that they were so corrupt and cowardly that they were unwilling to take the political risk of opposing it, even though they knew it was unjustified and headed for disaster.
If someone voted for that war because they genuinely believed the Bush case for war, that does absolve them of those charges of corruption and cowardice. But it also clearly marks them as a complete idiot.
