Today President Obama proposed a multi-billion dollar government investment in community colleges. He wants $12 billion of taxpayer money to be spent on the two year institutions to train more people for "the jobs of the future" and address dropout rates. (source) Here's a thought: let’s concentrate on jobs of the present and stop creating an environment that encourages students to drop out of school.

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The "jobs of the future" Mr. Obama refers to are more of the same green rhetoric the left is constantly spewing. In this case he refers to the jobs that are expected in the clean energy industry. Expected? We've all seen how good he is at predicting the job market. Should we really be spending even more billions on his hope and expectations of change?

Regarding the dropout rates, there's no better way for a student to care about their education and want to complete it than to have to work for it. Traditional student loans and (gasp!) income from part-time jobs are all that's usually needed to fund an associates degree at a community college. Throwing billions of taxpayer dollars on programs to address dropout rates will do nothing but de-value the degree in the minds of the students. If, by the time they reach the age of 18, they do not have the ambition to do the work required to get a degree, no government program is going to magically create the desire to succeed.

In this year when the budget deficit has topped $1 trillion, $757 billion have been spent on an economic stimulus bill that has stimulated nothing and obscenely expensive cap & trade and health care legislation is on the horizon; the $12 billion proposed by the president today may seem like a bargain. How sad that in just a few short months, we the people have been so desensitized to the wasteful spending of our money that twelve billion dollars seems like a pittance.