“How can you argue that it’s OK for a kid to borrow to go to college but it’s not OK to borrow so that there’s a college for the kid to go to?” Harkin said. “If there’s one legitimate area where we can borrow from the future, it’s education, because what sort of jobs will we have for my grandkids and great grandkids in the future if we don’t have a well-educated group of young people today?”
I can already see this being a huge debate, with people screaming on both sides of the fence. I understand the arguments on both sides.
The question that I keep coming back to is this. Where are the kids of today going to be able to work tomorrow? Our manufacturing is going, going, gone, to places like Mexico and China. Building new homes has stalled; after the baby boomers, how many new homes are we really going to need? Manual labor kinds of jobs, jobs that used to support many families - say, garbage man - are being drastically cut because machinery makes the field less labor intensive. You need a good education to make it today because the global market is so competitive, and the kinds of jobs you can do WITHOUT an education are more and more limited. Add teachers to the people losing their jobs, and that is another level of people that can't afford to buy things to keep the economy rolling, right? And another category of jobs that kids won't be able to consider.
On the other hand, how is that money going to be more than a band-aid?
I feel like the economy is one big avalanche, picking up speed, rolling down hill. Any ideas how we survive an avalanche?
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