Left behind, hell...

...under the omnibus funding bill railroaded through the lame duck Congress, the Department of Education is poised to leave 84,000 students out of the Pell Grant program altogether. Without that help, in fact, there's a fair chance that many of them won't be students at all. Welcome to the WalMart economy.

Changes in eligibility will reduce awards to another 1 million prospective recipients, most of them from families earning $35,000 to $40,000 dollars a year. Now it seems to me that families in that range are the very definition of Americans who work hard and play by the rules. They aren't in line for a lot of entitlements, they have enough income to pay taxes and they don't have much cushion for emergencies or relative luxuries like higher education. It also seems unlikely that their kids will do even as well as they do without education that makes them ready for the fabled "new jobs of the 21st century."

How many Pell Grants is, say, a Presidential yacht worth?

Or an elective war?