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Politics : The View From the Centre -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (348)	2/8/2009 4:03:30 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1134

I can't believe it has fallen apart so quickly for Obama. Message 25395620

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (348)	2/8/2009 6:52:52 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1134

Someone on the other thread said: "I'm very pleased to see the aid to college students- and that's aid that makes long term sense. If you want people around who have jobs decent enough to pay off some of our massive debt, you might as well invest now in college students. While you can't always be sure you'll get money back on the poor and huddled masses, you can be pretty sure you'll eventually be able to tax someone with a college degree: Message 25396212 Unfortunately by the time they pay off their student loans they have become the poor huddled masses she disdains. Let them eat cake I suppose. Life and debt; Student loans weigh down graduates Posted By Paul Schliesmann Working the front lines of credit counselling, Irene Hughes is disgusted by how student loans are driving young families into long-term poverty. She is watching the children of former students suffer financially from their parents' pursuit of university and college degrees, said Hughes, program co-ordinator for the non-profit Kingston Credit Counselling. "Student loans can absolutely destroy people's lives," she said. "We have taken this generation of young people and taken them out of our economy. It precludes them from buying a house, from being consumers. It makes you wonder how productive that is to a modern society." Graduates of four-year bachelor of arts and science programs are leaving university these days with an average debt of between $21,000 and $25,000, depending on who is crunching the numbers. It costs nearly $20,000 to pay for a year's education and expenses at most Ontario universities. One couple Hughes counsels is carrying $80,000 in student loans. "He's a school teacher, so he's repaying his debt. Because of illness, she's not been able to get good, full-time employment," she said. The face of student loan debt is not what we might imagine. As Hughes describes it, yesterday's happy-go-lucky student going to pub nights and street parties has morphed into today's husband, wife and parent, trying to buy a house, raise the kids and make credit card payments - all the while carrying a student loan equivalent to a mortgage or car loan. At today's interest rate of 8.7 per cent, a student loan of $25,000 amortized over 10 years is equal to $37,500. That's a payment of $312 a month for the next decade. And it's a long-term burden not always apparent to young people as they take out their loans. Julian Benedict, co-founder of the Coalition for Student Loan Fairness in Vancouver, agreed there is a looming debt crisis for a generation of graduates. Many university and college graduates are simply unable to get lucrative jobs to keep up with their loan payments. "All of this is on the assumption that a 19-year-old is going to know what a good career choice is," said Benedict. The long-term results speak for themselves. In the five-year period from 2002 to 2007, 85,000 Canadian student borrowers were forced to apply for debt relief - 20,000 of them defaulted on their loans. Since graduating last year from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver with an honours degree in history - as well as $36,000 in student loan debt of his own, "I realized what I was going to pay" - Benedict has been campaigning against the high interest rates the federal government is applying to its student loans. According to federal treasury information Benedict uncovered, by 2009 the government will be collecting nearly $550 million a year in interest charges on student loans. In 2004, it hauled in $315 million. He believes provincial and federal governments must shoulder the blame. "In New Zealand, there's no interest charge on student loans. In the U.S., it's about 3.7 per cent," he said. Driving the university and college paper chase is the fact that a post-secondary degree increases your chance of getting a well-paying job. According to the 2001 Statistics Canada census, households in which the primary earner had a university degree earned 51 per cent more income than those in which the top earner had only completed high school. The Ontario government promotes post-secondary education on the universities and colleges website this way: "The McGuinty government understands that, in today's knowledge economy, education is the prerequisite for prosperity. The brains and know-how of a skilled workforce are the competitive edge of the 21st century." It goes on to say the Liberals will have invested $6.2 billion extra in colleges and universities by 2009-10. Ontarians, it concludes, "will see improved access" to post-secondary studies with all this investment. But is it affordable access? Benedict said the equation is simple: "You go to school and the government is making an investment in you and your asset is your degree. If you didn't charge people so much in interest, they wouldn't be stuck." studentloanfairness.ca

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (348)	2/9/2009 12:02:05 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1134

"In Ayn Rand's classic Atlas Shrugged, Robin Hood is the embodiment of the ideal the author wishes to see destroyed in two intertwined ways. First, he robbed the rich to give to the poor. Holding this up as a heroic act makes taxation seem moral, and contributes to the idea that the rich have no right to their wealth. Second, he gives altruistically, when Rand's ideals emphasize a conscious and deliberate selfishness. Robin Hood makes all the bad government policies in the world seem good-hearted; that's why he must be destroyed." enotes.com