Newsweek’s journalism standards have never been very high (look at old Newsweek articles from the 1950’s, which, along with Time magazine, spoke often of the “red” and “communist” menace allegedly infiltrating American society), but who knew that the now digital-only magazine employs writers who probably couldn’t pass a high school graduation state assessment test?
I give you Newsweek senior writer Kurt Eichenwald, who, in a glassy-eyed, unfocused, hysterical screed excoriating Bernie Sanders, reveals that he (Eichenwald) never knew that the United States has — and has had, for quite some time — a public school system funded by many billions of taxpayer dollars:
Sanders is calling for raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations. And, as a centerpiece of his campaign, he wants to use that money for education—by giving students free college educations at state universities.
College? Seriously? How many kids stuck in the cycle of poverty because they cannot obtain a good pre-college education will be able to take advantage of Sanders’s undergraduate giveaway? How could students supposedly concerned with social justice walk happily past the local run-down high school as money is diverted so that they don’t have to take out college loans? How many of them would have been able to gain an undergraduate education, either through scholarships or by attending a community college? About 70 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree—what does this plan do for them?
If the idea is to improve education, no one who truly cared about the poor would direct money that could have gone to elementary and high schools to colleges instead. This is about doling out benefits so that the comfortable can be more comfortable, not about improving the plight of the impoverished. Which of course raises the uncomfortable question: Despite all the raging of Sanders’s college-aid supporters about their desire to help others, is their anger really just about self-centered desire to help themselves?
Have to especially laugh at/feel sorry for Eichenwald for the unintended irony of his sentence, “About 70 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree—what does this plan do for them?”