The Tools for Success
Create Prosperity for the Nation
Make your own way in this world.
That’s what we tell people who enter it with no money, no means, and increasingly no opportunity. A child born into poverty is expected to compete in the same economy as someone with tutors, elite schools, and family wealth. Then we fault them for struggling in a system designed to reward those who already have advantages.
Would you put someone in a canoe without a paddle and tell them to make their way upstream? So why do we expect people without a stable foundation, without education, security, or opportunity, to succeed? And dismiss them when they stumble?
If we want a society where people can stand on their own, we have to give them something solid to stand on and a clear path forward.
Social Security for All secures the foundation.
Education for All creates the path.
Start at the Beginning
When people think of education as a path to a better job or financial security, they often focus on college or trade schools. Those are important, but success does not begin at eighteen. It starts much earlier, with Universal Pre-K.
Access to quality Pre-K improves high school graduation rates and college enrollment. It even reduces the need for special education. All children benefit, but the greatest gains are among those facing the highest risks of poverty.
A nationwide universal Pre-K program for four-year-olds would cost about $20 billion per year, according to Penn Wharton. Congress increased the defense budget by $150 billion this year alone. Finding $20 billion to give millions of children a better start should not be controversial.
This is not charity. Universal Pre-K pays for itself over time by reducing future education costs, increasing wages, and allowing more parents to work. It is an investment that delivers returns to the entire country.
Universal Pre-K pays dividends.
ZIP Codes Shouldn’t Determine Success
Let’s look at two students who attended the same quality Pre-K program. They have a step up over those who didn’t attend Pre-K, but now they’re moving on to the next stage of education.
One enters an elementary school with small class sizes, counselors, updated textbooks, modern lesson plans, and experienced staff. When the student struggles, there are tutors. When their family has a setback, the school can help.
The other enters a school with outdated materials, overcrowded classrooms, chronic staff shortages, and constant teacher turnover. There is no counselor. No tutor. No buffer when something goes wrong.
The gap between the two students’ progress becomes visible almost immediately. By middle school, it is structural. By high school, their futures appear miles apart, even though their journeys began in the same place.
Today, the quality of a child’s education is largely determined by where they live and how much money their family has. That is not only unfair but also economically reckless.
Quality K–12 education raises wages, reduces unemployment, lowers crime, decreases reliance on assistance programs, and improves long-term health outcomes. By not spending on education, the government ends up spending more on addressing the damage caused by underfunding.
The Department of Education plays a critical role here by partially funding schools, researching effective teaching methods, and supporting states in improving outcomes. States like Louisiana and Alabama have used federal support to rapidly improve student performance.
An important factor in those improvements was the additional funding provided to address the educational disruptions caused by COVID. That funding ended in 2024. Without increased support going forward, many schools will struggle to make the same necessary changes.
The Department of Education needs to be funded more, not less. States control curricula, but the federal government can help ensure that every child, regardless of ZIP code, has a real chance to succeed.
The Final Link
Graduating from high school improves wages. But earnings rise much more when people gain trade skills, complete apprenticeships, or earn a college degree.
Free college and job training extend the benefits of Pre-K and K–12 education. Education works as a system. When we focus on only one part, people fall behind in the next. When we support the entire system, opportunity compounds.
A robust federal program covering college and job training would cost up to $75 billion per year, depending on scope. Add universal Pre-K and targeted K–12 support, and the total still falls short of the increase to the military budget this year.
Job training matters not just for first careers, but for transitions when industries decline, technology changes, or AI displaces workers through no fault of their own. Training allows people to remain productive and self-sustaining in an ever-changing world.
Quality education reduces not just poverty and crime, but some of the most expensive government costs later in life, including financial assistance, incarceration, emergency healthcare, and child welfare interventions.
Even by conservative estimates, free college and job training would begin fully offsetting their costs within a decade through higher tax revenues and reduced government spending, recovering $10–20 billion per year early on and eventually producing an economic windfall. The same is true for Universal Pre-K and sustained investments in K–12 education.
Education is the most reliable investment America can make.
The Bigger Picture
Social Security for All can be achieved with what we already spend on assistance today. Education for All can be afforded now and pays for itself over time.
It costs America nothing to help people this way. It costs us enormously not to.
We cannot demand that people succeed on their own while denying them the tools to do so. When they are given those tools, they don’t just improve their own lives. They strengthen the entire nation.
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/6/2/total-cost-of-universal-pre-k
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-cost-of-inaction-on-universal-preschool/
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1461/RAND_RR1461.pdf