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| Who Is Norman Borlaug? | Eating beef 'is less green than driving' |
by Christopher Chantrill
July 19, 2007 at 4:48 am
WITH COLLEGE costs soaring way above the rate of inflation and many graduates finding that they can’t find jobs to pay off their loans, what would you do if you were Congress?
Naturally, you would increase the already vast subsidies for higher education and you would get tough on price gougers with new regulations, as reported by Ruth Mantell of Marketwatch.
The House passed a student-loan bill Wednesday that would boost college financial aid by about $18 billion over the next five years and cut federal subsidies to lenders.
If you are willowy blonde Anya Kamenetz, writing a youth-oriented financial advice column on Yahoo called “Generation Debt,” this all seems right and proper. She quotes Democrat George Miller.
"This bill is a remarkable step forward in our efforts to help every qualified student go to college," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and author of the legislation. "With this bill, we are saying that no one should be denied the opportunity to go to college simply because of the price."
And the delicious thing for Kamenetz is that if you can’t afford to pay back your student loan, you don’t have to.
[G]raduates whose earnings don’t exceed 150 percent of the poverty line (about $15,000 for a single person) would be exempt from repaying student loans.
Isn’t that nice? Another subsidy program which will sluice more money into the bottomless pit of government education. But there will be strong controls to penalize colleges that increase their tuition too much!
Starting in 2011, any college with high, outlying tuition increases would have to submit a report to the education secretary explaining why. After two consecutive years, the college would be placed on "affordability alert status."
That will set them quaking in their shoes.
Twentysomething Kamenetz has perfect MSM credentials: an Ivy League education and a stint with the Village Voice. But the commenters on Yahoo weren’t too impressed.
They could see what was going down. They knew that more subsidies means more subsidies. They were contemptuous of the idea that you should only repay your student loan if you could afford it. Why that would mean that kids would sign up for basket-weaving and never try to earn a thing after they graduate!
It’s the great challenge for conservatives in the next generation. To educate Americans to the idea that more subsidies equals bigger government and less room to breathe, that the more the government helps us the more we have to turn to the government for help.
It seems too complex an idea to communicate, and yet the Yahoo readers seem to get it.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of agesthey seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.
E. G. West, Education and the State
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its
characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then,
once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities
But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.
Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
When we received Christ, Phil added, all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
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©2007 Christopher Chantrill