About the Most Equal Comrade's latest ploy to play Santa Claus with phantom money

The federal government is over $18 million in debt, but that's not stopping the MEC from proposing a federal-state arrangement with a 75 - 25 ratio for providing "free" community college education to students who maintain a C average.

Along with the fact that it would be paid for with play-like dollars (the regime admits upfront that the cost would be "significant"), several problems arise:

Just 20 percent of community college first-years complete their program within 150 percent of the standard time, according to the U.S. Department of Education. And, as the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey found:

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, only 20 percent of community college students transfer to four-year schools, and only 72 percent of those will have finished or remained enrolled four years later. So, from what we can tell, we are looking at completion for just around 34 percent of community college students.

And what is to prevent community colleges from escalating tuition and fees once the federal government – via taxpayers – begins paying the tab? The White House says the federal government will pay three-quarters of the costs of “average” tuition at community colleges, but we’ll most certainly see the cost of “average” increase in the years to come thanks to this new federal largesse.

Then there is the impact on the K-12 system. More than one-third of students have to take remedial courses when they enter college, as they leave high school unprepared for university-level work. Free community college would put even less pressure on high schools to produce graduates who are prepared for college-level work, as they could expect the new free community colleges to fill-in what the high schools are failing to do. The proposal is more likely to produce a six-year high school system than a two-year gratis workforce preparation experience. 

As Lindsey Burke of heritage points out, this is a piece in the regime's overall plan to get Leviathan's claws around the skulls of the cattle-masses from infancy through adulthood.

It's also a piece in the Cloward-Piven strategy to overload the system with obligations that are impossible to meet, at which point collapse, followed by revolution, occurs.

We shall see how vigorously the regime pushes this with a Congress that is the least inclined of any in decades to even glancingly entertain it.