Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Mikulski

“American dream” is doing heavy rhetorical lifting here: it’s not just aspiration, it’s a civic promise. Mikulski yokes college to that promise, then pivots to the uglier punchline - “financial nightmare” - to frame tuition and debt not as private misfortune but as a public failure. The line works because it doesn’t argue about whether higher education is valuable; it treats that question as settled and moves straight to the betrayal: a pathway marketed as mobility has been booby-trapped by costs that can sink a family’s balance sheet for decades.

Her intent is legislative as much as moral. Mikulski, a long-serving Democratic senator, spent years in the trenches of budget fights where education funding gets carved up and repackaged as “personal responsibility.” By speaking in the language of family anxiety rather than policy minutiae, she’s recruiting voters who may not track Pell Grants or interest rates but know the sick feeling of FAFSA season. “Shouldn’t” signals norms, not just preferences: this is the government’s job to correct.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of an economy that forces middle-class households to take on risk that institutions and states have offloaded. It also widens the target beyond low-income students; “families” implies the squeeze hits the broad center, a strategic choice in American politics where universality sells. The sentence is built like a campaign ad, but it’s also a cultural critique: we’ve kept the dream as branding while pricing it like a luxury good.