New Mexico Gonna Do Free Child Care, Just Like A Civilized Place!
If you want a vision of a possible future, maybe stop imagining George Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face, forever," and instead imagine a preschool class full of squirmy youngsters, learning and playing and generally being wonderful and sometimes a pain in the ass, as small children can also be.
What can I say? I love the pessimistic old English socialist who rightly feared the totalitarian impulse, but sometimes I end up feeling far more hopeful, like when I read about New Mexico's new initiative to completely cover childcare costs for most residents of the state for a year (free link to Washington Post). I can be a sap that way. I'm also the guy who tears up when Tom Joad tells his mother he'll be there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready.
Starting May 1 and running through June 2023, the state will cover child care for families earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, which ought to cover most New Mexico families. It's easily the broadest state child care benefit in the USA, and the first state benefit to cover such a wide range of incomes. It'll be available to a family of four making up to $110,000 annually, as the Washington Post 'splains:
The state recently expanded a federal child-care subsidy to middle-class families. On Thursday, Lujan Grisham said it would eliminate co-pays for them, too. Officials estimate both changes will make child care free for a total of 30,000 families.
This is pretty freaking wonderful; Lujan Grisham announced the expanded benefit yesterday on her website and at a child care center in Albuquerque, and the video is worth skimming through, if only for the occasional shots of a tiny little girl doing her level best to show interest in all these grownups talking about policy.
Mitt Romney Paid For College By Selling Off A Few Stocks, So Why Don't You?
As anyone knows, cynical cash giveaways to political supporters are meant to result in massive tax cuts for the rich, not debt relief for millions of Americans. Don't forget, the hot new Republican plan this year is to raise taxes on low-income folks.
Besides, Mitt Romney knows how people should pay for college. The could follow his example, as Ann Romney lovingly recalled in a 1994 Boston Globe interview, which people very ungraciously kept bringing up when ordinary guy Mitt was running for president in 2012.
Recalling her early years with Mitt, when they were young and having to scrape by, Ann remembered how they scrimped and saved, like any young married college couple in Utah in 1969:
They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income. It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting.
But by golly, they had each other, and they had their carpet samples, and they had love. It was a little bit like those idealistic bohemian dreamers in Rent, but without the Broadway production values or the AIDS.
Oh, and they had a little something else:
We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.
Oh, yes, the stocks were probably some help, come to think of it. She went on to explain that
The stock came from Mitt’s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year—it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.
As UCLA political science prof Andrew Sabl pointed out in 2012, that little bit of American Motors stock, having increased in value by a factor of 16 from an initial investment of "a few thousand" dollars, would conservatively have been worth about $60,000 in 1969, or in 2012 dollars, roughly $377,000. ($60K in 1969 dollars would come to a hair over $470,000 today.)
Somehow, they scraped by — you don't even want to think about the cost of carpet remnants these days! — and eventually Mitt, entirely through his own hard work and grit, managed to become America's richest senator today, with a net worth of about $450 million. So you can see why he doesn't see why anyone should have their student debts forgiven. Couldn't they just sell off a little of the stock their dads gave them?
In conclusion, Mitt Romney truly is a man of the people, as long as you remember that corporations are people, my friend.
And that's all we have for you today in terms of Rich People Talking Out They Asses About Student Debt ... or it was, until we saw this tweet from Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham (net worth a mere $40 million), who wants you freeloaders to make your moms work as waitresses to pay off your student loans.
My mom worked as a waitress until she was 73 to help pay for our college, even helped with loan repayment. Loan forgiveness just another insult to those who play by the rules.
Also, I never should have benefited from being vaccinated and boosted when I caught COVID-19, or from the antiviral treatment that also may have helped me stay out of the hospital, because isn't that an insult to all the people who died before those options became available?
[Mitt Romney on Twitter / Slate / Andrew Sabl blog (archived) / Photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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