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Can we discuss political optics? Student Loan interest rates
both sides agree that rates should remain low. Yeah. Unity horse.
However, they disagree with how to fund them.
Rs want to further destroy Planned Parenthood by eliminating funding for women's heath (breast cancer screens, pap smears for the poor).
D's want to pay for it cutting subsidizies to oil companies.
I don't see how this plays well to the R's but I'm a D so maybe the base loves this but seriously gas is currently close to $4/ga Exxon, Conoco, etc have all been reporting record profits and we want to keep giving them subsidies so they can offer bigger dividends to the 1% while making it even harder for poor/working class/uninsured women to receive healthcare?
Re: Can we discuss political optics? Student Loan interest rates
What are you? Some kind of communist or something?
Companies are job creators and many of their employees own stock, so it's not just giving bigger dividends to the 1%. Also, young people should learn the value of living below their means, not taking out loans for non-essentials and working hard to pay back what they borrowed.
Planned Parenthood helps women have abortions, so taking funding for them to help students is a win-win.
Bingo.
The student loan issue is a total distraction from the larger, more important issues o the day - debt, entitlements, jobs, economy ---
The original SL bill in 2007 was designed and passed by the D controlled House and Senate - Obama was absent and did not cast a vote - with the expiration date to be prior to a presidential election.
Obama has been using this as a political tool to recapture his young adult voter base which has declined significantly. - and distorting the R's position in the process (supported by Fact Check)
WP article:
Two Republican members of Congress are striking back at President Obama for personally targeting them in recent speeches about keeping student loan rates low.
Both claim Obama misrepresented them in citing comments suggesting they oppose keeping student loan rates at 3.4 percent, rather than allowing them to revert to 6.8 percent on July 1.
It is somewhat unusual for a sitting president to single out individual rank-and-file members of the opposition party for criticism and scorn in public speeches, and both rejected his comments Thursday.
Obama?s pointed criticism of Republicans over the student loan issue is prompting legislative action ? Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) announced late Wednesday that the House will vote Friday to keep rates low, paying for the $5.9 billion proposal by siphoning money from the federal health-care law?s preventive health-care fund.
Democrats will surely oppose the effort to cut funding for the health-care law. The Senate will vote the week of May 7 on a Democratic alternative that would pay for the loan program by imposing new payroll taxes on some small businesses with more than $250,000 in earnings.
On Monday, Obama mocked Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), once in a speech in her home state and again in a speech in Colorado for saying that those with student debt are sitting on their butts having opportunity dumped in their lap.
?I?m going to quote this because I know you guys will think I?m making it up,? Obama said at the University of North Carolina. ?She said she had ?very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with debt because there?s no reason for that.??
But Obama dropped a few words from Foxx?s comment on the G. Gordon Liddy radio show. Foxx told Liddy she had ?very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there?s no reason for that? ? apparently limiting her comments to those who take on large amounts of debt for school.
She went on to say that she reminds people that the Declaration of Independence promises life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ? stressing the word ?pursuit.?
?You don?t sit on your butt and have it dumped in your lap,? she said.
?The only thing I would say is that I wish the president?s speech writers would get their quotes right,? Foxx said Wednesday of Obama?s barb.
She declined to address the broader student loan issue.
Obama had a similar back-and-forth Wednesday with Missouri Rep. Todd Akin (R), who represents the St. Louis suburbs and is one of three Republicans competing to challenge Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) in November.
At the University of Iowa, Obama said, ?You?ve got one member of Congress who compared these student loans ? I?m not kidding here ? to a ?stage-three cancer of socialism.??
?Stage-three cancer? I don?t know where to start. What do you mean? What are you talking about? Come on. Just when you think you?ve heard it all in Washington, somebody comes up with a new way to go off the deep end,? he said.
Though Obama did not name him, that was a reference to a comment from Akin in a debate with the Republican senate candidates Saturday. Asked about the student loan issue, Akin slammed the government for taking over college loans in a 2009 bill.
?America has got the equivalent of the stage-three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,? he said.
In a statement, Akin objected to Obama?s paraphrase.
?With all due respect, the president misquoted me. I was not saying that student loans are a cancer. I referred to the policies where there is a government takeover of private industries,? he said.
Akin said he suspected that ?the president was given a misquotation? of what he actually said.
But, he added, ?I am sure we have a fundamental disagreement on the role of government and what constitutes socialism regarding current public policy.?
For his part, Boehner also blasted Obama for devoting government resources to political attacks on the issue, noting that it costs $179,000 per hour to operate Air Force One as Obama travels to politically-themed events.
?Frankly, I think this is beneath the dignity of the White House,? Boehner told reporters Thursday. ?Democrats and Republicans knew that this was going to take effect. Democrats and Republicans fully expected this would be taken care of, and for the president to make a campaign issue out of this and then to travel to three battleground states, and go to three college campuses on taxpayers? money to try to make this a political issue is pathetic. And his campaign ought to be reimbursing the Treasury for the cost of this trip.
?Our country?s facing some major economic and fiscal challenges,? the speaker added. ?Yet here?s the president wasting time on a fake fight to try to gain his own reelection. These are the types of political stunts and frankly they?re not worth it and worthy of his office. This is the biggest job in the world, and I?ve never seen a president make it smaller.?
Staff writer Ed O?Keefe contributed to this report.
By Rosalind S. Helderman | 12:30 PM ET, 04/26/2012
I agree, but the problem is, how do you fix this? Make funding harder or impossible to get? Then you're shutting out thousands of poor and middle class students from college for however many years or decades it takes for the cost of college to come back down.
yes, you are right.
Maybe this needs to be an s/o, but I had a conversation with a co-worker about this the other day. He feels that the federal government should not be in the student loan business at all. That they should provide grants for low income, but not give student loans. Loans should be left to the banks where they will weigh several factors before granting a loan. He feels that this would reduce the number of people going to college, which will make business decrease their minimum requirements for entry level employment, and will decrease the cost of higher education because you will have less demand for college which will bring down the price.
I am not saying I agree. I just think this would shut out more poor and middle class from college, but maybe it would return to days where you didn't have to have a college degree to make a decent living. I don't know, but it made me think for minute.
And it might help to end grade inflation in colleges and universities. I suspect the fact that it's been drilled into us that "everybody HAS to go to college" in order to get a job that pays well has really lowered the standards of a university education - which people used to seek for its own sake.
Just wanted to point out that the budget Obama submitted this year proposed cutting that same Womens Health money per this AP article:
http://news.yahoo.com/house-gop-set-curb-college-student-loan-costs-075429717.html
Agree with the others that loan rates are not the problem here.
Find me here instead!
I work at a public university (no raises for 8 years now, whee!) but I can tell you that our tuition has gone up proportionally to what the state has cut. Eight years ago the state used to subsidize 68% of the cost of attending a university---now it subsidizes less than 1/3rd. We cut as much as we could and then used federal stimulus money to keep tuition down for a few years, but that's run out and currently classrooms are packed, new hires and raises are frozen, and the students are begging us to open up another section of Senior Basket Weaving in order to graduate next semester. We're stuck. It's not like we're spending new money on the fitness center or golf course. While we're thankful to the donors who earmarked their donations for those things, we need more money in the general operating fund.
So, either the state subsidizes tuition at public colleges (including community colleges) or the feds do through student loans (which ultimately gets passed to students in addition to their other costs.) It's six of one or half a dozen of the other, but, either way, there is a bare minimum that must be spent at a university to keep the lights on and the elevators up to code.
The next real option is to be more selective about admission, but since part of our mission is to serve those students who do need additional help, again, I'm not sure what the answer is.