Obama state of the Union Address tonight

@whipassmt: Anyone can learn in the right environment.

I'd much rather people that want to go be able to, instead of not being able to due to costs.

The VA benefits is a bad example. Veterans put their lives and limbs on the limb, and spend time away from their families to protect their country. America owes them a certain debt of gratitude.

And as for stimulating and "boosting" people and helping them to afford college (community college is cheap anyway, I think it's mostly subsidized by the state), I prefer other methods: namely the federal gov't should stop profiting off of student loans and lower the interest rate on those loans, and the federal gov't should expand the current tax credits given for college tuition to also include tuition at the high school and elementary school levels.

Even beyond that, it just flat out makes sense from an economic standpoint to remove educational barriers. We need to have a well educated populace, in general, because the laborer type positions are becoming scarcer and replaced with those that require a more educated and specialized skill set. Furthermore, the more barriers we have to education, the fewer scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, etc. are nurtured and given the opportunity realize their potential (which also hurts the general economy).

While we could tailor our education policies to be more precise, this proposal is definitely better than what we currently have. It at least encourages secondary education in general when we have some gaping holes in our educated workforce.

Hopefully more than a few pursue STEM degrees. We could use some more of those.

@whipassmt: I'm in favour of those ideas but they're not viable right now with how much states have cut funding to higher education. The governement straight up making it free is really the easiest solution at this point.

@whipassmt: just want to point out that life isn't fair.

Since I created this thread, I should probably inform you that I didn't watch the address. It was on instead of Agent Carter, but it seemed boring and I watched Counting Cars instead.

I just can't believe that Obama had to open his mouth and say that he will put Fast Track and the TPP into law. What he doesn't know is that doing so will censor and destroy our Internet, destroy our American jobs, and pollute our planet Earth! This means war!

Too bad this guy has fans rather than constituents. If only he were as good a president as he is a comedian.

I missed the state of the union address but I plan on reading about it or watching a video of it. I was attending to a family emergency last night while it was on.

I listened to it on NPR. I thought it was pretty good. We've come a long way.

I'm glad to see him taking a stance on free community college. Yeah, it's a community college and not university level, but it's a start. We need to claw our way up to offering up to at least a bachelor's degree without charge, as some countries in Europe do. More wasteful spending needs to be dealt with before we can do that, though.

FactChecking Obama's State of the Union Address

I'm glad to see you post one of these fact checkers. The new thing seems to be to call the fact checkers "Liberal Propaganda", and it was making me weep for humanity.

I liked it. I didn't get to catch all of it but I really liked what I saw. I still remember when everything was falling apart though. What the world is today almost feels like a miracle compared.

Free 2 year college? F that! I owe like 30k in loans

And the official GOP response wasn't even criticized at all. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul didn't make it out unscathed, though.

I've found that these are some of the best tools around to sift through the BS, half truths, and intentional misinformation (although you need to take the time to look past the high level rating and actually read the full text, which I get the feeling most people generally don't do).

Even though I have student loans to pay, I still agree that free or much cheaper education is something we should be working towards. So many european countries are able to provide for their young people and make their populace educated and grow because of it. It's an amazing long term investment to make and I don't understand how people would be against paying for it. Just because I missed out doesn't mean I want other people to as well.

Definitely agree with that, one of the more important issues here imo that definitely needs to be addressed. But, sadly, I also think something like this should have been administered and in full effect like, at least 5 years ago.