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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (54873)	8/29/2012 8:47:52 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

The Obama non-recovery is 100% Obama's. He had a supermajority in Congress and got everything he wanted was passed. The fact that he outsourced the writing of his priorities to the idiot Nancy Pelosi is 100% Obama's responsibility. If he wanted something differently he needed to proceed like he was a leader rather than a passenger in the ship of state. Obama will probably be quite relieved when Mitt Romney is sworn in and he can stop pretending to be President.

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (54873)	7/9/2013 11:44:03 PM
From: greatplains_guy	Respond to of 71588

Student Loan Pretenders New evidence that subsidized debt is harming borrowers. July 9, 2013, 7:16 p.m. ET. Government researchers continue to show that federal student loans are hazardous to both students and taxpayers. But Senate liberals don't seem to care, as long as the money keeps flowing to their constituents in the nonprofit academic world. As the Senate prepares for Wednesday voting on student-loan subsidies, a coalition that includes congressional Republicans, President Obama and moderate Democrats favors reform that ties the rates on student loans to the 10-year Treasury rate. This protects taxpayers from having to guarantee low fixed rates to students while the government's own borrowing costs rise. And it provides some marginal encouragement to students to consider whether their chosen course of study is worth the money. Such taxpayer protections and borrower incentives are sorely needed. The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated taxpayer losses on student loans at $95 billion over the next decade. Meanwhile, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have been tracking the harm to young borrowers. Student-loan debt used to be a rough indicator of economic progress, because it meant that the borrower was attaining higher levels of education, long associated with higher incomes and lower unemployment. But in recent years an historic surge in student-loan debt is changing education for many borrowers from a winning investment into a staggering burden. Such debt has nearly tripled since 2004 and now hovers around $1 trillion, with defaults rising on student loans and other types of debt held by these young borrowers. Whereas credit scores used to be similar for young people with or without student-loan debt, New York Fed economists find a divergence after 2008. "By 2012, the average score for twenty-five-year-old nonborrowers is 15 points above that for student borrowers, and the average score for thirty-year-old nonborrowers is 24 points above that for student borrowers," they note in a recent report. Fed researchers are now struggling to understand the impact on markets such as housing and autos given the "lowered expectations of future earnings and more limited access to credit" for those who made large leveraged bets on education. Many of them must now delay starting families and buying their first homes. In recent congressional testimony, Todd Vermilyea, an official in the Fed's division of banking supervision and regulation, acknowledged the obvious when he noted that "post-secondary education is becoming increasingly expensive." Liberals apologize for the price hikes imposed by their friends in the faculty lounge by pretending that universities are starved for revenue. Rep. Frank Pallone (D., N.J.) claimed on MSNBC on Saturday that "the federal government is not making the investment in higher education." Perhaps he's forgotten that annual Pell grant spending of $34 billion has roughly doubled in the Obama era, or that Uncle Sugar now originates more than $100 billion in annual loans. According to data from the government's National Center for Education Statistics, the nonprofit crowd on campus has shown a remarkable ability to collect cash from its various funding sources, even during and after the financial crisis. Both public and private nonprofit institutions grew revenue per student faster than inflation in the period from the 2005-2006 academic year through 2010-2011. And their spending also increased faster than inflation. How many organizations in the real world could do that? As ever, increasing government education funding to students is pocketed by universities in the form of tuition increases. The never-ending federal effort to "make college affordable" simply provides the resources to sustain higher prices. A policy disaster that results in rising costs, taxpayer losses and overstrapped borrowers is now manifest. So naturally this week Senate liberals will bring to the floor a plan to ensure that the policy continues unchanged. Rates on subsidized Stafford loans would stay frozen at the 3.4% rate that prevailed before a July 1 expiration, with new taxes to sustain them. Liberals would be happy to accept an even lower rate, or expanded loan forgiveness that shifts more of the losses to taxpayers, or more grant money instead of loans. Anything that doesn't exert downward pressure on the cost of college is apparently on the table. No one should be surprised that one of the chief sponsors of this anti-reform bill is (fake Indian) Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), not even a year removed from her membership on the Harvard faculty. During the August recess she can expect a warm welcome in Cambridge. online.wsj.com