Dem House Solves College Costs With Subsidies And Regulation

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.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.