You didn’t answer the two questions that need to be answered before I will ever be ready to provide a free education to anybody.

You obviously missed the entire point of my previous comment, so I will give it one more shot.

What you are ready, or not ready, to provide has no bearing because “YOU” won’t be providing it. Congress was given the monopoly patent on the US dollar “AND” a mandate to create it “for the general welfare” in Article 1: Section 8. No restrictions apply to this authority, and any that have been applied via legislation since would likely not stand a SCOTUS test. The US dollar has always been self-funding and fiat and at no time will it ever “need” to get its own currency back to enable spending.

This is critical to all economies to allow their governments to provision themselves without regard to revenue. The use of taxation is never required to “fund” such a government and only drives the need for the nation’s currency in the general economy so it becomes the unit of measure that denominates trade and contracts. However, achieving that status requires that Congress creates enough of its currency in excess of tax collections to allow it to be used as a store of value in commerce or the people soon figure out their government is stealing the resources and labor it requires by clawing back all payments made for them in taxation (the definition of “balanced budget”).

What do those of us who have already paid for our higher education get for free? If we’re going to award one segment of our population a freebie, then in order to be fair and equal, everybody who has already paid for their education gets a freebie also. So, I your obvious superior intellect, what are the millions who have paid for their education getting for free?

They will be getting an assurance that their children and grandchildren will have a somewhat equal shot at success in an increasingly competitive world. Given that the productivity of those future generations will be the anchor of value enabling their retirement, that is considerable. By your logic(?) we should still allow child labor in factories to be “fair” to previous generations. We do the best we can until we know better and then we do better.

Why is a college education so expensive today?

It is mostly a result of our trade policy. The blue-collar jobs that provided some level of security back in your day are all gone now and every job above flipping burgers requires higher education just to gain an entry position. On top of that, the job market is so volatile that it is impossible to decide on a field when entering college with some assurance it will be there when you graduate in four years.

It was not possible to avoid imported goods since the ’60s, but we could have demanded better labor standards from our new trading partners in exchange for access to our very lucrative markets. This was entirely the fault of the left for not standing up for their base in labor instead of chasing the big donors of the financial sector. The economic dynamics were well hidden by the massive influx of cheaper consumer goods, but many economists were warning of the potential danger of reliance on private sector debt without public money injections to enable retiring that debt other than continual GDP growth.

The result has been a neoliberal takeover of the means of production and the government that creates the money supply. This is not a right/left problem, although I understand that the current world revolves around political divisions that are easy to understand. This is a “both sides being corrupt fascist forces that are against every best interest the people might have” problem. This is a “suck the people dry of any possible asset they, or their heirs, may have and leave them in debt” problem. With such powerful opposition a simply change of parties or politicians isn’t going to make a difference or bend the trajectory by much. This is going to take a revolution of how we think about money and its purpose, and someone with the political will to make required changes in spite of the abject ignorance of the people.