In an attempt to circumvent Congress and move the free college agenda forward, The White House will launch a $100 million grant program for free community college tuition. The new program, America’s Promise Grants, was unveiled last week by Vice President Biden in a speech at the Community College of Philadelphia.

The Department of Education, in its latest move to enlarge the ever-expanding education bureaucracy, has announced plans to create a Student Aid Enforcement Unit to better respond to “predatory institutional activity.” The Student Aid Enforcement Unit was established following an investigation of prohibited tactics in student recruiting. It will apply to any school receiving federal aid.

This election cycle, young voters are enamored with the concept of “free college.” That’s right, “free.” I am assuming those same students aspiring to higher education took a basic science class along the way and learned that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. The same principle applies to tuition. What you are not paying for, someone else is.

Sometimes, a picture is worth a trillion words.

Minimum wage is set to increase from $6.55 an hour to $7.25 on July 24th. The Wall Street Journal article “Mandating Unemployment, congress prepares to kill more jobs”, from July 13, 2009, raises the question of who this raise will benefit, and who it will hurt. According to the article, David Neumark, an economist from University of California, Irvine, believes “the 70-cent per-hour minimum wage hike this month would kill ‘about 300,000 jobs for those between the ages of 16-24’”.  As of June, 2009, 24% of American teens are already unemployed.