Wealth & Money Quote by Daniel J. Evans

Evans is doing the politician's most useful magic trick: sounding reflective while quietly shifting the ground under your feet. "I might say" and "in retrospect" are cushions, not qualifiers. They let him float a hard argument - the community college system has become a fiscal problem - without owning it as an attack on public education. The softness of the phrasing makes the critique feel like an adult, responsible reckoning rather than an ideological turn.

The pivot from mission to magnitude is the engine here. He doesn't dispute community colleges as an idea; he disputes their scale. "So big, so broad" frames growth as a kind of institutional appetite, and "consuming of tax money" completes the metaphor: the system is no longer serving the public, it's feeding on it. That verb choice matters. "Consuming" suggests inevitability, waste, even threat - as if the budget isn't a set of choices but a natural disaster with a line item.

Contextually, this lands in the long American tension between expanding access and policing costs. Community colleges were sold as pragmatic, locally rooted ladders into the middle class and the workforce. Evans' warning implies that success has created a new political vulnerability: once a system becomes ubiquitous, it becomes visible in the budget, and visibility invites austerity talk. The subtext is a preemptive redefinition of "too far" - not in terms of who gets educated, but in how much the state is willing to underwrite. It's an argument for limits dressed up as late-earned wisdom.