Congressman Adam Smith

I mean, education is staggering.

The tuition that I paid for the seven years of education that I got, I added it up the other day.

I paid like $32,000 total for seven years of education, including a law degree from the University of Washington, and I graduated in 1990.

That same number to go to those same schools that I went to now is pushing $500,000.

The house my father bought for $15,000 in 1971, very small, very old now, is going for $400,000 or $500,000.

So that's the crunch.

That's the problem.

How do we rework that math so that a middle-class existence is possible again?

And there are challenges to this.

That's why I say just promising people free stuff is not a solution because, I mean, we are in a more competitive globe now than we were when I was growing up.

And we still had the after effects of the post-World War II advantage that we had.

We weren't competing with China or India or Taiwan, for that matter, or South Korea and these other countries.

Now we are.

So we're not going to be able to provide as much, but we can provide more because the other piece of it is the fair distribution of wealth.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, so much of the wealth that we've generated in the last 50 years has gone to a very, very few people in terms of billions of dollars.

Wages should be higher.

Benefits should be higher.

Yeah, we should do more for health care.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do more for health care.