President Obama’s student debt assistance programs are beginning to siphon off taxpayer dollars at an alarming rate, prompting even the gift-happy Obama administration to try to rein them in.
The notion that anyone who wants to go to an college should receive money to do it is central to Obama’s Creeping Socialism Doctrine, which seeks to guarantee everything from health insurance to jobs that provide a good salary.
But the White House in this case is figuring out that SOMEONE HAS TO PAY FOR IT ALL.
With Obama’s aggressive marketing of the student loan plans and the enticing changes he’s made to them, enrollment in the plans has surged 40 percent in just six months, according to the Wall Street Journal.
This is prompting all kinds of scams, including, naturally, moves by schools to raise tuitions since students can more easily have taxpayers help foot the bill for their education.
One of the plans forgives the loans altogether at a certain point, so get this: some TOP law schools are now offering deals where they’ll cover the cost of students’ loans until the government finally picks pays them off!
FULLY GOVERNMENT-SUBSIDIZED LAW SCHOOL! I hope they’re teaching the Soviet legal system.
This deal, which our motivated young learners are just flocking to, is called Pay as You Earn.
Don’t you love the name? Once in this country we stuck to a quaint notion you might call Earn Before You Pay. Or at least wait tables during the summer, for God’s sake.
Anyhoo, under Pay as You Earn, you only have to pay off your loan in the amount of ten percent a year of your “discretionary income,” which is defined by the amount you make above 150 percent of the poverty line.
Now this is the really fun part. If you haven’t paid off your loan in ten years, the debt is forgiven. BUT ONLY IF YOU WORK IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR OR FOR A NONPROFIT. If you work in the private sector, you have to wait 20 years.
Can you even believe this? A nation founded on the principle of limited government is actually trying to steer people into working for the government. So now if you graduate and then go sit on your ass somewhere in the bowels of the Agriculture Department, you can emerge by about the age of 30 debt-free and go get a real job.
Have a look at this fascinating case study.
Max Norris, a 29-year-old lawyer for the state of California, illustrates the potential costs of the program. He pays about $420 a month to the Education Department on his $172,000 in debt, which he says fails even to cover the interest owed. But his out-of-pocket expense falls to $100 monthly after aid from his school, University of California’s Hastings College of Law.
Mr. Norris, who makes $60,000 a year in his job, would have about $225,000 in debt forgiven after 10 years, assuming he stays in public service and his salary rises 4% annually, according to a repayment calculator created by the New America Foundation, which advocates less-generous forgiveness.
He said he learned of the programs before enrolling. “My intent the whole time in going through law school was to take advantage of this program,” he said.
Who can blame Max? He took his free stuff offer to the max.
“An independent study estimates the future cost of the 2011 program, known as Pay As You Earn, could hit $14 billion a year,” according to the Journal. Whoops.
So Obama is now trying to cap the amount of debt forgiveness at $57,500 per student. There currently is no cap at all.
Maybe Obama is running out of free stuff to give away.
The change won’t pass this year, the WSJ says. Anyway, you and I know it’s going to take some ogreish, woman-hating, racist, Republican president to clean this up. Do you really think Obama is going to anger all those adoring children who flock to his college campus speeches?
21 thoughts on “Cost of Obama’s Student Aid Scheme Skyrockets”
Was it Maggie Thatcher who said Socialism works until you run out of other peoples’ money?
Yep !
We need another Maggie.
One of our own.
That law school gambit is theft from the govt.
It can be construed as something similar to common core.
Just another form of indoctrination.
Law School: an expensive form of mental illness.
:-)
There’s no need to get one’s ire all fired over this most generous program.
All that’s needed now is another agency/law that could be called the Student’s Affordable Education Act that outlines which college a student may attend, what courses they are allowed to study, and of course, how much each professor will be paid for each and every action they take in the furtherence of a student’s education. We could also insist that a certain panel of intelligent people be formed to decide who’s worthy of such largess from the government based on sex, racial identity, and importence to the collective good.
The taxpayer’s representatives in Congress could allocate a trillion or so dollars to implement such a program, so then we could set up a spiffy website for all to use, and designate who will benefit and who will pay for this service.
Such worrywarts at the WSJ and the WHD, it’s all being handled for the good of all, so relax.
And of course, they will be required to take lots of courses that have nothing to do with their degree or their future, because that extra college tuition is paying for a “better plan” that way.
And think of the hatred that will be directed at the racist republican prez who would dare cancel this program. The only correction to what you wrote, Keith, is that there is no way these freeloaders (and who can blame them) will work in public sector until their debt is forgiven and then go get a “real job”. They will be lifers.
Obama forgives school debt, mortgage debt, advertises the food stamp program in Mexico, gives free cell phones, gives free cable, sends a few billion $$ to Iran and other countries. He sold guns to the drug cartel, refused to rescue Americans in Benghazi, used the IRS for political purposes, refuses to secure our border and so on and so forth. They let 68,000 illegal alien prisoners walk free yet said it was only 2,000. Now they’re planning to open the prison gates and let 23,000 criminals walk free. This is Obama’s most dysfunctional world, where laws don’t matter, where money grows on trees and there’s nothing more important to him than playing golf and schmoozing with celebrities.
60-70% of kids in college SHOULD NOT be there! They have no interest in college, they go because they’ve been brain washed into thinking they ‘need’ college…
Colleges today are just neo-socialist ‘education camps’ (i.e. Obama ‘elections’ by stupid college kids in 2008/2012) Half the majors at college are useless & made up and are ‘jobs programs’ for leftists/socialists Profs. (re: ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ never had a real job after college)
…so much more to rant about what is wrong with the scam that is called “US colleges” today…
I agree totally and I have one in college and one a year away from it. The one in college is getting an engineering degree so he’s okay. The one a year away wants to be a lawyer. Only thing that’s letting me allow that is she wants to do corporate law and she’ll be getting an undergraduate degree in Finance and Accounting. We’ve talked about public versus private schools and the number of “Studies” degrees the schools have. The less of those meaningless degrees the better the school in our assessment.
It was reported 88% of the needed jobs do not require a university degree. Why is all this money being thrown around for someone to get a piece of paper saying they have an education when what is needed is people with skills?
Our high schools do a horrible job of steering kids towards technical schools. They like to brag about the number of kids that graduate and go on to college, but they never follow up to see how many of them actually graduate. That would be an interesting statistic.
Good points, Robin.
Exactly right.
There is an extreme shortage of welders in this country.
The ones that know how to do it are retiring.
The pay for an experienced welder is way up there, and yet they do not have the people to fill the vacancies.
sign this petiton and spread it to pass Bill HR 532 concerning bankruptcy for student loans https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pass-hr532-private-student-loan-bankruptcy-fairness-act-2013/LLlfvw2H
And this happens as college education comes to mean less and less.
A long time ago only a few people went to college.
Then businesses began using college degrees as gate-keeping tools to sort out applicants.
Now everyone has to go — the fact that degrees have been dumbed down so everyone can graduate, well, that reveals the next point, doesn’t it?
The one who benefits are the college administrations who can continue to avoid the well needed trimming of their expenses.
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Sallie Mae shareholders saw a 25% gain over the last 52 wks. If someone has one of their student loans, they should invest and pay off their loan with SM’s profits. Just a thought.
Aside from the sheer cost of this scam, all of these public service lawyers will be working away at various government agencies, thinking up more and more regulations to stifle the ability of the private sector to create jobs and wealth. We’re so screwed.
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