Wealth & Money Quote by Kathleen Blanco

Blanco is making a deliberately modest promise: education will not make you rich, but it will make you unpoor. That calibration matters. Politicians often oversell schooling as a lottery ticket to prosperity; she frames it as infrastructure, the reliable bridge out of the worst outcomes. The rhetorical move - "not rich, but" - preempts cynicism and narrows the claim to something defensible: education as baseline security, not glamour.

The subtext is work-first, dignity-coded policy. "Almost every educated person has a job" isn’t a statistic so much as a moral argument in economic language. It reassures taxpayers that education spending is not charity; it’s a productivity engine. It also signals a particular view of poverty: less a structural trap than a solvable deficit in skills, credentials, and access. That framing is politically useful because it turns a messy social problem into a clean intervention. Build schools, fund scholarships, train workers; watch the poverty rate fall.

Context sharpens the message. Blanco governed Louisiana, a state with entrenched poverty, big regional inequality, and a long fight over public investment. Post-Katrina recovery only intensified the need to justify rebuilding not just roads and levees but human capital. Her line reads as both persuasion and self-defense: an argument for education budgets in a political culture skeptical of government, and a way to promise uplift without committing to more polarizing remedies like redistribution, wage policy, or robust welfare expansion.

Its weakness is also its tell: "almost every" smooths over underemployment, credential inflation, and unequal school quality. Still, as political rhetoric, it works because it offers hope with guardrails.