The poor were mostly paying fees and not tuition anyways, since TAP covers up to 90% of tuition but 0% of fees. So this doesn't do much for the poor.
It's not about communism, it's about having an effective program. If the goal is to increasing availability of education, this is a loophole that should be examined, not dismissed. If we're trying to make education available we're probably doing it because we want a benefit from that--economic growth through providing education to low-income areas (or something like that, I'm no economist).
If that were the goal, we wouldn't be making college free. I've talked about this many times - Canada, Israel, Japan and South Korea all charge tuition fees to students to attend public colleges and have much smaller student loan programs, yet they are the only four OECD countries in the world which have more college educated citizens per capita than the US.
This is the problem with the left in America - instead of trying to improve public programs to make them better achieve social objectives, they just go dining at the socialism buffet and take single-payer healthcare from Canada, free higher education from Germany, universal basic income from Switzerland, minimum wage from Australia, and then pile them on top of complete non-enforcement of immigration laws and existing social programs like food stamps, Section 8 and school lunches. That's not the way it works.
No country has the kind of welfare state the left in the US now wants - free food, free healthcare, free education, free income, $15 minimum wage, socialized profits, punitive tax rates, non-enforcement of immigration laws - because actually, that's pretty damn close to a perverse open borders form of Communism.
