Barack Obama is on a whirlwind tour of the country this week, touting his administration’s success in resurrecting the economy. Yesterday, he announced that home prices have risen under his watch and the real estate market is recovering, and in response, he’s again lowering the requirements to get an FHA mortgage, because if there was anything that was totally not responsible for tanking the housing market, it was giving unqualified people mortgages. 

Today, he followed up that remarkable policy pronouncement with something even bigger. Now, when you finish high school, you can get two more years for free!

President Barack Obama will need the approval of Congress to realize his proposal for making two years of community college free for students.

So far, that plan doesn’t have an official price tag — other than “significant,” according to White House officials. If all 50 states participate, the proposal could benefit 9 million students each year and save students an average of $3,800 in tuition, the White House said.

But administration officials insisted on a call with reporters Thursday evening that “this is a proposal with bipartisan appeal.

The plan is supposed to provide students with a quality education, and it might, but in practice, the plan functions more like a political handout. While four-year college students can get Pell Grants, two-year college students aren’t so lucky. The Pell Grants have become something of a handout system to major universities (they’ve increased in number yearly since 2008), and this expands that welfare program to publicly-run community schools and their slate of instructor employees, which, like four-year universities, are the last existing bastion of the Communist party in America. This also provides a boost to those schools currently competing with for-profit universities for the crowd of youngsters who choose not to (or can’t) attend four-year programs. The Administration has been after the for-profit education model for a while, and this will help community schools gain an advantage in the fight. If you can’t beat them in the marketplace, fund their competition with tax money, apparently. Lastly, of course, it provides a unique opportunity for Democrats to demonstrate a Republican lack of commitment to “the youth,” as they will no doubt prevent the measure from leaving Congress just in time for the next election cycle. 

Frankly, it’s undeniable that a bit of universal education would be better for the country at large, but there would be better ways to do this, specifically by insuring that students at any university get their – and the taxpayers’ – money’s worth. The Administration has already instituted “gainful employment” rules on for-profit schools, which mandate that those schools show that a minimum percentage of students are employed in their given fields one year on from graduation, and expanding that to public and private two- and four-year schools would certainly go along way to ensuring that those schools provide quality education to American students. But, as we’ve known for years, student loans are a major boon to government coffers, pulling in around $14 billion per year, and unemployed Womens Studies majors are essential to the survival of the Democratic Party. So while real solutions are available, it’s much easier for the government to simply offer more stuff for free without any word on how they plan to pay for it.

I, of course, have a few initial questions about this plan, aside from exactly what the “significant” cost will be (which early reports indicate to be roughly $34 billion). One, does the program work retroactively? Because I could really use a break on the student loans I acquired pursuing my graduate degree. Two, does this apply to “non-traditional students?” Because I think I’d like to go back to school and learn a trade that pays more than blogging, and I think I would make a really spectacular plumber, probably. And three, can I please have a pony? Because a Free Pony Policy is approximately as beneficial to the survival of the American economy as anything the President has announced this week.