"The more money Washington puts into the hands of students only enables the colleges and universities to continue propping up the price of education"
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Kirk’s line is built like a trapdoor: it takes a compassionate impulse (help students afford school) and flips it into an indictment of the institution supposedly being helped. The verb choice does the heavy lifting. “Puts into the hands” suggests cash handed out with little scrutiny, a paternal state creating dependency. “Only enables” is the moral verdict embedded as economics: aid isn’t neutral support, it’s complicity. By the time he lands on “propping up the price,” tuition stops looking like a complex outcome of labor costs, state disinvestment, amenities, and credential inflation and becomes something closer to a rigged sticker price maintained by administrators.
The subtext is classic post-2008 conservative populism: the enemy isn’t just “big government,” it’s the government-university complex. Washington and higher ed are cast as partners in a racket, while students are positioned as the exploited middle. It’s an argument that borrows from a real phenomenon (the idea that subsidies can be absorbed by sellers via higher prices) and turns it into a cultural story about elites protecting their margins.
Context matters because “Washington” isn’t merely a budgetary actor; it’s a shorthand for distant, unaccountable power. The sentence asks you to feel that every new grant or loan is less a ladder than a fuel line feeding campus bloat. The intent is political: redirect anger about debt away from lenders, state legislatures, or wage stagnation and toward universities and federal aid itself, setting up the preferred remedy - less public spending, more market discipline, and a suspicion of higher education as an institution.
The subtext is classic post-2008 conservative populism: the enemy isn’t just “big government,” it’s the government-university complex. Washington and higher ed are cast as partners in a racket, while students are positioned as the exploited middle. It’s an argument that borrows from a real phenomenon (the idea that subsidies can be absorbed by sellers via higher prices) and turns it into a cultural story about elites protecting their margins.
Context matters because “Washington” isn’t merely a budgetary actor; it’s a shorthand for distant, unaccountable power. The sentence asks you to feel that every new grant or loan is less a ladder than a fuel line feeding campus bloat. The intent is political: redirect anger about debt away from lenders, state legislatures, or wage stagnation and toward universities and federal aid itself, setting up the preferred remedy - less public spending, more market discipline, and a suspicion of higher education as an institution.
Quote Details
| Topic | Student |
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