A Civic Take: Free College is Centrist
What do you call a policy that has broad practical benefits for most people and is supported by a supermajority of voters? Around here, we call that centrist.
And it’s hard to get more centrist than what the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are proposing around college. Most of them have come around to supporting some form of free college for everyone. It’s got broad practical benefits. The idea is immensely popular. And most of the proposals are also highly progressive by virtue of how many candidates propose to pay for it — namely, by taxing the ultra-wealthy.
It shouldn’t surprise you that so called “moderate” think-tanks are already attacking these proposals by framing this debate as a false choice: the well-off on one side, and the poor on the other. The reality? We’ll all do better if millions of Americans aren’t taking on crippling, lifelong debt to better their education.
Be careful not to listen to the self-anointed “centrists” who spend their time balancing the interests of the 1% against everyone else. This false centrism has never worked out well for the party or the country.
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