Putting the Promise in Perspective

By: Alanna Powell

I hear people all over campus complaining about their hard-earned scholarship being taken away. They cry out, “This is a violation of our rights!” But let’s be rational. How did you earn your “Promise Scholarship”? Oh, yeah—by making patterns on MEAP test scantrons.

I’m a college student too, and I would love to get $2,000 for free. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as free money. There is, however, something called redistribution. This happens when the government taxes its citizens and then uses that money, among other things, to hand out to certain groups of people under the guise of lofty, feel-good names.

Euphemisms and promises aside, when there’s a $2.8 billion budget deficit in Michigan, we need to see the Promise Scholarship for what it is: not a promise, but an unsustainable social program that shouldn’t have implemented without first considering how to fund it.

This may be a bold claim, but the Promise Scholarship is a pretty bold program. People everywhere are mad that their “promise” has been taken away—but this is the heart of the problem. Nothing has been taken away; the money to fund the Promise Scholarship was never there to begin with. How can you take something that doesn’t exist in the first place? Furthermore, in order to have the money to fund something, our elected officials have to take money from us.

People just don’t seem to get it: social programs are not an inherent right. They aren’t this constant, primordial force of society—they are evidence of tax dollars at work. So, when government officials don’t fund a program, they’re not cheating you out of your rights. And, if you want to make the argument that you’re being cheated out of your hard-earned money, then you should complain on April 15.

Governor Granholm re-vamped the Michigan Promise scholarship program in 2007 when the state was facing a budget deficit of $600 million. That’s right, when the state had negative $600 million, she offered up to $4,000 per student for the Promise Scholarship.

Republicans did the responsible thing by cutting this year’s Promise Scholarship funding—it turns out that you cannot fund things when you do not have funds. For this fiscal year, maintaining this program would require an increase from $80.5 million to $140 million. Democrats can call Republicans heartless for cutting funding, and Republicans can call Democrats heartless for getting people’s hopes up by making false promises. But more importantly, when you look past party politics, it doesn’t matter how many promises politicians make. Because government doesn’t operate on promises, it operates on money.

Michigan simply does not have the money to afford the Promise Scholarship this year. What if, for once, we stopped looking to the government for a solution? What if tuition was lowered? Then, instead of subsidizing education to make it more affordable, it could be directly more affordable. (Plus, one could make the argument that the Promise Scholarship is actually inflating tuition costs). Or, what if taxes were lowered? Then, people could use the money they saved to put toward education directly, thereby eliminating the government middleman.

While Americans may not be ready to accept these Republican principles, the Michigan budget crisis has shown us some of the gaps in the Democratic ideal. Government-intensive social policy is inefficient, and as the lack of Promise Scholarship funding has shown us, it is also unreliable. The unfunded Michigan Promise Scholarship is not a broken promise. If anything, it’s broken idealism.