yes, there s always been money in politics, but look at the explosion of it over the course of the past couple of election cycles, in particular 2012. lesley, do ordinary people still have a voice when there s this much loud spending going on? i think you mentioned a point about the 915,000 political ads. what wasn t added to that is it s a 44% increase from 2008. you wake up in the morning, your twitter feed is full of political ads. the truth is, all your mailings and everything else, i do want to reiterate it is on both sides. there s transparency that the public skepticism about this is because for many years there was not balance anywhere those dollars were. now i think the healthy part of this conversation is we re going to step out of this election and need to talk about american democracy, the influences that are in it. and see if there is a fair way
there s no immediate perceived effect. one of the biggest barriers that politician haves to make the case to my generation about is the fact that sloeting is more than a historic right and necessity. it s something as to how resources and investments are allocated. when we talk later about education, higher education is often the first thing on the menu to cut in many states because young people don t vote in as great a number. that needs to be clearer and more boldly stated by the candidates. it s an interesting point. if i m tutoring at the neighborhood school, i get the instant gratification. if i vote for a candidate, the candidate is a messy sort of things. it also feels to me, ben, part of what that distinction is between charity and justice. charity feels good but justice takes a long time. i hate to do the, oh, young people need to cultivate patience thing, but it does feel a little like that sense. look at our culture. we have the high speed internet,
statistics. to getting to the first thing you said, at the president s state of the union address, he said we can keep protecting the pell grant, but that s going to skyrocket to the point where it doesn t make sense anymore. at a certain point you have to force colleges to keep their costs in check. and the way to do that is ultimately going to be, you know, a tough decision and holding higher administrators of these colleges and universities accountable for the next decade or so. when we come back, i want to ask what would be the metrics you want to have if selectivity isn t it. i value liberal arts education for itself. up next, is the education that students receive worth the money they pay for it. with the spark cash card from capital one, olaf s pizza palace gets the most rewards of any small business credit card! pizza!!!!! [ garth ] olaf s small business earns 2% cash back on every purchase, every day!
quickly because she s been making the point about on voting day it should be that every vote counts the same. if it s not advertising, if they re putting voter suppression action in the field, that strikes me as particularly troubling. yes. what s especially enraging is that in this time of economic depression so economic waste is being poured into these campaigns. the majority is being spent on negative ads. it would be one thing if this money was deepening political discourse. it s actually cheapening it. they re organizing faith leaders to stand up to money and politics and with ben organizing folks in colorado to pull for a constitutional amendment to overturn citizens united. there s some kind of solution do this? there are a variety of different solutions. i don t think there s any one silver bullet. i think we need to work on a variety of different fronts. just as important as getting the money out of politics, we need to think about policies that bring the people back in,
down the street from you. i think, well, that s the internet. free access that s down the street from you isn t your local college anymore. it is internet classes. which is an interesting point, because as the cost of learning is becoming cheaper, ironically the cost of education keeps going up and up and up. so why might that be? interesting. one of the problems this is what i like to call the u.s. news & world report industrial complex. oh, i know this one. people rank schools on not only how much money they can raise but how much money they can spend, like political campaigns, and on top of that, selectivity. so we re valuing prestige over quality access to learning, over the core competency of the college which is education. the schools are being priorit e prioritized to do the wrong thing. furthermore, we re investing in football fields at university of florida but cutting computer science classes. that makes zero sense. this is not a small point, the selectivity q