I would like to thank my district rep

Steve Oelrich for attempting to make the cost of post primary education go up in Florida. It's not enough that the state university system gets over $1.7 BILLION of tax revenue (from my state sales tax, thank you, NOT including cash from the state's lottery fund), they now want an extra $1000 per-student, per-year to have access to the state's university system.

Now, I'll give you "it's just $20 per week". That's as far as I go with it.

Statements like the following are what anger me:

[Representative Oelrich] said 95 percent of UF's in-state students receive Bright Future scholarships to further offset the relatively low tuition of $3,300 annually for residents. And he said the median family income of students is $100,000.

My rebuttal to that would be "so what". Lemme rephrase that statement into what I read there:

"A lot of rich people send their kids to our university, so let's get more money from them."

Thanks for playing.

Besides that, while there may be a group of students whose families have a medical doctor/surgeon/whatnot in the family, the majority of prospective students in the area don't have that kind of fiscal backing.

The surrounding counties' primary economic systems are agriculture based. Between that, and the skewed population size (year 2000 Census data) vs student count (UFL.edu fact page) in Gainesville, getting a decent paying job (Gaineville, Florida's Wikipedia entry supports this statement.) around here requires basically being in the medical field. Which requires a degree. Which Rep. Oelrich is trying to make more difficult to get for the very people who support and work at this particular university.

I wouldn't gripe about this so much if it wasn't for the sheer audacity of the statement above. It just reeks of class warfare to me. *Another* tax, except this time only on university students.

How about this, Rep. Olerich: You show me that you and the universities are working as hard as you can to cut the fat out of the university budgets, and then we'll talk about it. For now, I'll call it what it is: A TAX on STUDENTS who are trying to get a piece of paper to make more money. While we're talking about budgets, how about more work on smaller government?