Readers may remember my last, shall we say, dialogue with the great Republican thinker Todd Akin. Akin is rapidly becoming one of my favorite Republicans because he articulates the party's true positioning on issues so well. He has been back in the news recently with this gem of a quote about student loans: "America has 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." While Mitt "Etch A Sketch" Romney and other Republicans are back-pedaling as fast as they can on the student loan issue to make it sound like they don't want student loan interest rates to go up, Todd Akin and the other right wingers who control the Republican party are digging in, questioning the whole idea of whether the government should even be involved in student loans.
Please, keep speaking out, Congressman. Your country, your Party, and my Party especially all need you to keep making clear the true Republican position on student loans.
There couldn't be a clearer distinction between Republicans and Democrats, between conservatives and progressives than on this issue. What Democrats, progressives, and incidentally the American people believe is that one of the best ways to rebuild the great American middle class is to invest in our young people's education through both high-quality K-12 public education and through grants and loans for college students. Thomas Jefferson's dream of public education for all, Abraham Lincoln's idea of a land grant university system, FDR's plan for a GI Bill for our country's soldiers so they could get a college education after serving their country, and Claiborne Pell's bill that gave grant money for college students in need helped create the legacy of a strong middle class in this country. We created a way for poor and working class kids to get a good education and make a better life for themselves than their parents had, and that made us a stronger country.
The American middle class, the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, was not built by accident. It was built brick-by-brick by the generations that came before. It was built by raising our wages through the power of the labor movement and the minimum wage; it was built by providing incomes, health care, and a safety net for our senior citizens and those with disabilities and those who had hard times; it was built by protecting us from financial speculation and the specter of bank runs; it was built by investing in roads, bridges, highways, and rural electrification; it was built by investing in the kind of R&D that created the transistor chip and the Internet; it was built by encouraging entrepreneurship and small business strength through vigorous anti-trust enforcement; and it was built by investing in the education of our young people. Education was one of the cornerstones.
Other than the honest ones like Akin, conservatives generally only want to talk about this in "quiet rooms" (as Romney would put it). They want to dismantle this infrastructure that created the middle class. They want to take it apart brick-by-brick just like our grandparents and parents built it for us brick-by-brick. They have been doing a pretty good job of it, too -- steadily cutting back on money for one program after another, pushing to dismantle even the biggest and most popular cornerstones like Social Security, Medicare, and public education. They believe that the market will just take care of everything, and that those who deserve to have success will get it without the help of anyone else. If the government invests in a working class kid who couldn't afford to go to college on their own, according to them it is socialism and should not be done.
Fortunately, the American people firmly believe in that middle class earlier generations strived so hard to build for us. They are with us on issue after issue. The right, though, has an incredibly well-funded media machine that is working overtime to convince Americans not to invest in each other, and never to trust government (especially when Democrats are in charge) to ever do anything right. They will blame all our country's economic problems, which were created by their own ideology, on government, and will distract people from focusing on the issues. It is the job of progressives to tell our story the way it should be told, and to keep people focused on the fact that conservatives believe that things like Social Security, Medicare, public education, and student loans are socialism.
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Sec. Arne Duncan: Lower Student Loan Interest Rates
Jerry Lanson: Burdening Our Children With a Mountain of Debt
I probably know 100 unemployed or underemployed people with excellent engineering training and decades of experience.
As a staunch independent with fiscally conservative yet socilaly liberal values I find it inappropriate and unfortunate that government feels a need to imbed itself in a financial transaction by an individual.
College tuition has increased at a ridiculous rate as money for student loans has flowed freely. Private colleges have exploded as space in public institutions has become more congested. The quality of eductaion has suffered as the educaion industry focuses on quantity over quality.
As an employer I have been increasingly dismayed by the poor education received by recent graduates. They not only have failed to learn the scholastic basics they also have not been imbued with any appreciation for a work ethic, an obligation to earn their pay or an understanding that position is earned through performance, not credentials.
A college graduate in China or India, in my experience (I hire chemists, engineers and biologists as well as accountants) is vastly superior in training, maturity and self discipline as compared to the average American graduate.
Do we really need hundreds of thousands more degreed, deeply in debt, poorly educated Americans?
Certainly there are many individual exceptions to the generalizations I have stated here. But an employer should not have to find just the exceptions that are worthy of employing.
So I must disagree with you. Liberal arts education does not provide the qualities that I want.
Quick somebody, show them the passages in "The Prince" in which Machiavelli recommends creating fears, particularly of outsiders, as a way for manipulators to hold onto their power. These menaces to democracy create the perception of otherness (as they have done with their dog-whistling about Obama); then they create the fear.
Please explain how and why the 'housing bubble' is a 'democrat bubble'.
Secondly please explain what said housing bubble has to do with
student loans.
I probably shouldn't hold my breath waiting for your answer.
Simple as that.
They just installed a soccer field at Gitmo.
lol.
Trusted? Look at Barry.
Please at least stay up with reality.
This is the way in which we get played by our corporate owned media. This was a fight that shouldn't have happened and did.
Our president has been opposed on pretty much every single thing he was elected to actually do. Most Americans quickly abandoned him. he made it clear that we needed to be informed and actually help him govern . . .
Know your facts. It is not Barack Obama who didn't close it.
The Department of Education never encouraged schools to raise tuition. Correlation is not causation. Lots of things happened prior to the tuition increases, maybe it was the EPA or the CIA.
But that doesn't fit with your little narrative, does it.
Try coming up with a new straw man. That one don't burn right.
And increasingly, by those who can prove who they are.
Taxes reduce the debt and take the same amount of money out of circulation and also make the currency valuable since taxes must be paid in the currency.
The problem is that we have to pay interest on the debt. Instead of the government creating the money the Fed/big banks create it and the government borrows and its spending puts it into circulation.
The fix is to have the government create the money like it did before the Fed was created. see http://monetary.org for a plan and a House bill to return money creation to the government, pay off the debt without causing recessions and limit the Fed to controlling interest rates.
Is it a complete solution? No. But it would be an excellent place to start, to show real determination to reverse the flow of red ink.
Under Pres. Bush almost all of our non-food consumer manufacturing was moved to China to take advantage of China's currency devaluations which made everything in China 1/5 to 1/2 the cost in US dollars.
Our jobs were moved to China under Bush and we are blaming Pres. Obama? Put the blame where it belongs, Bush and the Dem & GOP Congresses that didn't limit the movement.
We are not served well as a nation, but I would far rather take the intelligent but inept candidate who accomplished health care for (almost) all over the candidate who says that health care plan wasn't modeled on his plan merely to please the rabid right-wingers.