It Isn't A Trade

A maddening thing is that assumption that There Can Be No Nice Things, and if you want to add nice things over here you must take them away from over there. We're a rich damn country and we can have lots of nice things and we spend lots of money on not nice things.

There are some unavoidable trade-offs between the young and the old: A dollar spent on Medicare is unavailable for universal pre-K.

No this is not an unavoidable trade-off. How about "a dollar spent on stupid fucking wars is unavailable for universal universal pre-K." Or "a dollar spent giving money to campaign donors to lock babies in cages is unavailable for universal pre-K." Nobody except crazy hippies ever writes those sentences.

The rest of the linked piece is fine, but there is just no reason that *these* are the trade-offs.