July 26, 2011 11:22AM # ‘Education’: The Relentless Political Weapon By [Neal McCluskey](https://www.cato.org/people/neal-mccluskey) --- SHARE On at least six occasions in his [address to the nation](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20083258-503544.html) last night President Obama invoked the words “education,” “student,” or “college” to scare listeners into thinking that the federal government must have increased revenues. Typical was this bit of cheap, class-warfare stoking rhetoric: > How can we ask a student to pay more for college before we ask hedge fund managers to stop paying taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries? How can we slash funding for education and clean energy before we ask people like me to give up tax breaks we don’t need and didn’t ask for? Now, I’m all for eliminating economy-distorting tax loopholes, incentives, etc. But there is simply no way on God’s green Earth that the President—or anyone else—could look at what the federal government has done in the name of education and conclude that it has been anything but a bankrupting, [multi-trillion-dollar](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_380.asp?referrer=list) failure: - Spending on Head Start is ultimately just [money down a rathole](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11175) according to the federal government’s own assessment - In K‑12 education, Washington has dropped ever-bigger loads of cash onto schools out of ever-bigger jumbo jets, but has gotten [zero improvement in the end](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12775) - In higher education, all the money that supposedly makes college more affordable is actually a major driver behind students having “to pay more for college”—just what the President decries—because it [enables colleges to raise their prices](https://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb111/hb111-21.pdf) at rates far outstripping normal inflation The only people who regularly benefit from federal education profligacy are not students, but school employees and, especially, their lobbyists. They are[ teachers’ unions](https://www.cato.org/grigori-rasputin-bailout/), tenure-track [college professors](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_267.asp?referrer=list), school administrators of [all](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_084.asp?referrer=list) [varieties](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_254.asp?referrer=list), but not students, and definitely not taxpayers. Oh, and one other group: politicians who, despite the overwhelming evidence that all their spending on education is utterly useless, just keep exploiting students to buy votes and beat down anyone who would return the federal government to a sane—and [constitutional](https://www.cato.org/on-federal-education-think-progress-should-think-harder/)— size. Education, for our politicians, is not a thing to be fostered. If it were, they’d get out of the business. No, it is a political weapon, and it continues to be used to deadly effect. ##### Related Tags [Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).