Education Costs, Health Care Will Likely Sway Youth Vote
Monday, December 5, 2011 at 5:55PMBy Adrianna McGinley
Youth leaders and policy experts cited rising costs in education, health care, child care, and housing as key issues for winning the young vote in 2012.
The discussion at the Center for American Progress was based on a recent report from the think tank Demos and the Young Invincibles entitled “The State of Young America”.
Heather McGhee, Demos’ Washington office Director, noted the report shows that while college tuition has tripled over the last few decades, federal aid has been cut in half. A maximum pell grant that she said covered 69 percent of costs in 1980, today only covers 34 percent. She added that in 2010 the amount of student debt surpassed that of credit card debt and 76 percent of participants in the study reported it has become harder in the last five years to afford college.
McGhee said these numbers make young people “more oriented towards public solutions, more willing to pay higher taxes for higher degrees of service from the government than any generation since the depression generation.”
Aaron Smith, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Young Invincibles, said Congress has the power to help youth but only if they make their voices heard. Smith cited Obama’s Affordable Care Act as “an example of how Congress can really step up to the plate and address one of these big long-term challenges,” and added it would be a grave mistake for Congress to repeal it in 2012.
“Going backwards is obviously, I think, exactly the wrong move…we’re going to be doing more work in the Fall to educate young people about what the health care law actually means for them,” Smith said. “Once you have the education I think then you’re prepared to sort of become an advocate, to tell your story, to explain ‘yes…I’m a young person, but healthcare really does matter to my life,’ and we found that when those stories are told, it can be quite powerful and change the political debate.”
The panel also touched on immigration issues.
Eduardo Garcia, Advocacy Associate for Campus Progress, said the 2012 election will depend on how the administration continues to deal with the undocumented population.
“Young people are very much feeling the impacts of some of the harmful deportation policies that the administration has adopted, and I think that it’s especially hurtful because many of those folks turned out in 2008 to get this president elected.”
The panel cited immigration reform as a possible key to economic recovery as well, saying that while 54 percent of all young adults have or want to start a business, that rate for minority youth is over 60 percent.
Ronnie Cho, White House Liaison to Young Americans and Associate Director of the Office of Public Engagement, said it is up to youth to make their voices heard.
“It is incumbent upon ourselves to really assert ourselves, not ask for an invitation to be a part of the discussion, because that’s simply not going to happen and it hasn’t happened…that’s why the discussion hasn’t been around how this affects young people,” Cho said. “It is our time to emerge as this force to be reckoned with.”
McGhee added that while young voters need to stand up, the federal government must continue to protect voters rights, citing that in 2010, 31 states passed voter ID laws that could inhibit youth from voting since over a third of 18 year olds do not have a federally issued ID.
Obama Invokes Teddy, Pushes Congress To Pursue Fairness
By Adrianna McGinley
President Obama called on Congress Tuesday to channel the policies of former President Theodore Roosevelt to bring the country out of recession and keep the “American dream” alive for middle-class Americans.
“At the turn of the last century, when a nation of farmers was transitioning to become the world’s industrial giant, we had to decide: would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low? Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary? Would we restrict education to the privileged few? Because some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress,” Obama said during remarks in Osawatomie, Kansas. “Theodore Roosevelt disagreed.”
“He believed then what we know is true today, that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history,” Obama added. “But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can.”
Obama said Roosevelt was called a radical, socialist and communist for his progressive ideas, but reminded his audience that those ideas were what eventually brought the country out of depression. According to Obama, Roosevelt faced the same skepticism that exists today from “a certain crowd in Washington” who claim the market would “take care of everything…if only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes.”
These critics, Obama said, praise the “trickle-down” theory; a theory he believes lacks what the country needs.
“It’s never worked,” he said. “It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 50s and 60s.”
Obama said that a child born into poverty in the years following World War II had a 50 percent chance of reaching the middle class and in 1980 their chance dropped to 40 percent. Today, he said, their chance has fallen to just one in three.
“The idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable. It’s wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for,” Obama said.
“This isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”
Obama called on Congress to pass comprehensive, long-term tax reform, consumer protection measures and support for higher education to bring the U.S. back to prosperity.
“In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class… We shouldn’t be making it harder to afford college, we should be a country where everyone has the chance to go.”
Obama pushed for an extension of the payroll tax and unemployment benefits to aid struggling middle class families immediately but said “we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally” in the long term.
“We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both. That’s not politics. That’s just math,” Obama said.
The president called out Republicans for continuing to defend the Bush-era tax cuts and criticized his conservative colleagues for refusing to ask millionaires to return to Clinton-era tax rates.
When Clinton proposed tax increases on wealthy Americans, Obama said, there were fears it would “kill jobs and lead to another recession” but instead, nearly 23 million jobs were created and the deficit was eliminated.
“I’m here to reaffirm my deep conviction that we are greater together than we are on our own,” Obama said. “I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.”