“But how are you gonna pay for it?”

“Nothing’s actually free, y’know.”

“It’s socialism!”

These are the common tropes used by opponents of the progressive movement in the United States. The main one people hear—and the one I think is the most coherent—is the ‘how are you gonna pay for it’ question. Now this is a fair and, actually, a necessary question. Many politicians have conjured up different plans to pay for their progressive policy solutions. The most popular of which is the wealth tax, which has been proposed by figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The problem with the wealth tax is that Americans who are not familiar with American tax policy may be easily duped by big money interest groups into thinking that this is a tax that affects everyone instead of just the top one percent. In light of the recent proposals by the Defense Department to increase its budget to $715 billion, I think it is time we reared our heads towards the Pentagon for answers. In 2003, the United States spent $364.9 billion on its defense budget to finance its ‘War on Terror.’ In the years following the end of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, we continued to hastily inflate our military budget. Now in 2021, the nation is spending a staggering $636.4 billion on the military. This is only the base budget, too. When adding in the $69 billion in overseas contingency operations for the Department of Defense to fight ISIS, the total balloons to $705 billion. Instead of continuing down this disastrous path of raising the military budget, we must seek to instead re-appropriate these funds into social programs that help the disadvantaged people of America. One such program that would be extremely beneficial to American society would be one that provides free public college for all. This would ensure that American tax dollars would be going towards the betterment of American lives rather than serving the will of the military industrial complex.

Today, it is virtually impossible to sustain comfortable living without obtaining a bachelor’s degree because a high school degree simply will not cut it for most. However, it is becoming increasingly challenging to obtain a bachelor’s degree. This is not because the population is dumbing down or that classes are ramping up in difficulty. Rather, it is because the cost of four-year tuition has increased exponentially. Back in 1969, the average cost of a four-year public school was $329 per year. Only fifty years later, however, this number has shot up to $10,230. Adjusting for inflation, that is a staggering 340 percent increase. It should not be getting more expensive to educate the future generation of America, especially when a bachelor’s degree is becoming more and more important in securing a well paying job.

Providing free college education would be a modern version of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal-era plan which employed millions of unskilled men to carry out the building of infrastructure projects. The implementation of this plan helped lower the unemployment rate, but more importantly, it offered new skills to previously unskilled workers, helping pave the way for a booming economy in the years to come. It is the same idea for free college. Giving everyone equal access to higher education means that more people will be educated, leading to more jobs, and in turn, a more robust economy.

It is currently estimated that eliminating tuition for all students for four years at all public colleges and universities would cost $79 billion per year. This may seem like a lot at first glance, but it pales in comparison to how much we spend on our defense budget. In fact, it is only worth around 12.5 percent of our defense budget. With 3.7 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP) going towards the defense budget, we spend more on our military than the next eleven countries combined, which includes nations such as China, India, Russia, and the United Kingdom. When subtracting the difference of the $79 billion needed for free public college, the United States would still be the largest military power in the world by far, outspending the second largest military spender, China, by over $300 billion. Furthermore, with the United States having withdrawn from Afghanistan, the case to re-appropriate funds away from the military budget has never been more compelling. 

Nations all across the world—including France, Germany, Finland, Norway, Brazil, and Panama—provide their citizens with free public education through the college level. Students there do not have to worry about high tuition fees or crippling debt post-graduation. Yet, these countries have far less wealth than the United States and still afford it. Providing higher education to the citizens of a nation is imperative. It is a sacred tenet of good government, elucidating the give-and-take aspect of any working relationship between government and the governed. This is absent in the United States. Here, the government seems to have other priorities, such as protecting large corporations and defense contractors. Now, the nation has a moment to redeem itself and take the first step towards real reform. If so many other nations can provide their citizens with free public college, then why can’t the United States? 

A college education is not something that should only be available to the upper echelons of American society. It must be a right that every American is entitled to, no matter their economic status. Over the last two decades, the American people have had billions of their tax dollars being spent on waging endless wars in the Middle East. With thousands of our men dead and hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, what was it all for? The average American did not benefit from these wars—only the military industrial complex did. 

From 2001 to 2021, the top five defense contractors increased their stock shares between 3 and 12 times, outperforming the overall stock market by 58 percent. Large defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing have made billions of dollars by selling weapons to the U.S. government and its allies. While American taxpayers contributed a whopping $6.4 trillion towards the U.S. War on Terror, these defense contractors were earning billions of dollars in weapons sales. It is time to give back to the people and stop putting more money into a military budget that encourages war profiteering by large corporations.

With the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, there is no better time to finally put our taxpayer dollars into a program that will benefit the future of our country. This may only be the first step to more large-scale reform in the future. The military budget is enormous, meaning that there will still be truckloads of money that can be used for other common sense policies such as providing paid sick and maternity leave, tackling the climate problem, and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. However, there must be a starting point, and free public college is the correct first step. All of this ultimately hinges on our politicians and their willingness to stand up and change the nation for the better. But politicians are servants of the public, and as long as we continue fighting the good fight, there is hope for America.