Right-Wingers Balance Cutting Your Higher Education With Favors For Their Uneducated Kids

by toma

Presumably left-leaning men of meritocratic means, our billionaire captains of industry and finance, are self-made men from middle-class beginnings. But George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates are still determined to give it all away: the biggest philanthropists on the planet will donate something like $80 billion(!!) of their collective fortunes.

Meanwhile, the most politically high-profile billionaire conservatives began life quite differently. The infamous Koch brothers, who fund almost anything dedicated to extremist conservative causes, inherited their father’s massive fortune. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the world’s greatest businessman (if you ask him), started off with his millionaire father’s money and business:

One of Donald’s first projects, while he was still in college, was the revitalization of the foreclosed Swifton Village apartment complex in Cincinnati, Ohio, which his father had purchased for 5.7 million dollars in 1962. Donald became intimately involved in the project, personally flying in for a few days at a time to carry out landscaping and other low-level tasks.

With your family’s money in your pockets, life gets a lot easier.  As 18-year-olds, for example, getting into college got much, much easier. Doubtful any of them would have ended up at MIT or Wharton otherwise.

And speaking of available higher education, we have a huge problem. Without plenty of money and connections, where now can anyone go to school? If you ask that of Republican budget guru Paul Ryan, author of the radical Tea Party budget proposal, he’d just say “Who cares?”

The [Pell Grant] program, which gives grants to low-income students to help them afford college, has been “recklessly expanded” by Democrats . .

[Ryan’s] proposal calls for reducing Pell Grant spending to “pre-stimulus levels,” cutting the annual federal allocation by about half.

If Paul gets his way?

Dianne Boardley Suber, president of Saint Augustine’s College, said a cut in the maximum Pell Grant to pre-2008 levels would have a devastating impact on the students at her historically black institution in North Carolina. About 78 percent of students at Saint Augustine’s receive Pell Grants, and many of them already work long hours to supplement their financial aid money. “If they are going to get $800 less, many are going to have to stop out,” she said.

Just when a college degree has become the bare minimum for a decent-salaried job, Ryan would eject plenty of young men and women from higher education. I’m shocked — I thought going to college was the American Way, the key to a better life. No?

Today, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reveals that [Wisconsin Governor] Scott Walker is using state funds to pay more than $81,500 a year to the 26-year-old son of a major campaign donor with no college degree and two drunken-driving convictions . .

After only two months on the job, [Brian] Deschane has already received a 26 percent pay raise and a promotion.

Sooooo, no.

Many high school-educated, twentysomething mothers struggle to make ends meet and lack sufficient funds to provide for their children. This isn’t the situation for 20-year-old Bristol Palin, a Candies Foundation representative and advocate for teenage pregnancy prevention.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the Dancing With the Stars finalist cashed in $262,000 in 2009 for her role in raising awareness about ending teen pregnancy.

This would be the Republicans’ American Dream. You get paid a quarter-million dollars to tell people not to be stupid, like you. Bristol’s mom bounced between five colleges in three states.

By: toma

Foul-mouthed blogger.