Obama’s Student Loan Monopoly

Phil Boehmke
American Thinker
March 8, 2010

Hey kids! While you and your leftist profs were busy marching, stopping traffic, breaking windows and getting arrested last Thursday to protest tuition increases and classroom cutbacks, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) was working on an op-ed for The Washington Post. As the protestors were trying to draw attention to their desire for more government funding, Senator Alexander was illustrating the added expense of increased government involvement in higher education.

[...] Starting in July, all 19 million students who want government-backed loans will line up at offices designated by the U.S. Education Department. Gone will be the days when students and their colleges picked the lender that best fit their needs; instead, a federal bureaucrat will make that choice for every student in America based on still-unclear guidelines. They say that this will save taxpayers up to $87 billion in subsidies that now go to “greedy” banks. In gleeful anticipation, members of Congress have lined up to spend those billions on Pell Grants and almost a dozen other programs. Banks are punished. Students are helped. Members of Congress look good.

Here is what they haven’t told us: The Education Department will borrow money at 2.8 percent from the Treasury, lend it to you at 6.8 percent and spend the difference on new programs. So you’ll work longer to pay off your student loan to help pay for someone else’s education-and to help your U.S. representative’s reelection.

And there are some other things the government should tell you: The estimated $87 billion in savings isn’t real. According to a July 2009 letter from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the savings are closer to $47 billion including administrative costs, if we use the same “scoring” (I.e. cost analysis) method that Congress required the CBO to use when it scored the Troubled Asset Relief Program last year because the method would more accurately calculate the cost to taxpayers.

Alexander also points out that when given a choice, students overwhelmingly choose private lenders over government ones.

By eliminating competition and forcing students to borrow from the government Obama is creating another powerful bureaucracy, which means more government (union) jobs. The expansion of the public sector and the growth of their unions helps the Democrat party to expand its base and maintain control over yet another sector of the economy. How long will it be before the loan approval process is politicized and the government will have the power to determine which students will be allowed to pursue a college education? We can be fairly certain that the future former president and his comrades have given this matter a lot of thought.

Obama’s Latest Assault on Freedom– New Regulations Will Ban Sport Fishing

Jim Hoft
Gateway Pundit
March 9, 2010

More Hope and Change…
Obama’s latest assault on your rights– He wants to ban sport fishing.

Barack Obama has a message for America’s 60,000,000 anglers– We don’t need you.

The American Sportfishing Association reported back in October about the sweeping changes proposed by the Obama Administration in regards to the sport fishing industry:

A sweeping oceans and Great Lakes management policy document proposed by the Obama Administration will have a significant impact on the sportfishing industry, America’s saltwater anglers and the nation’s coastal communities. The draft policy, the Interim Report of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, issued on September 17, will govern federal Pacific and Atlantic Ocean waters and Great Lakes resource conservation and management and will coordinate these efforts among federal, state and local agencies. This past June, President Obama created the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, led by the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), to develop a draft national policy and implementation strategy for conserving and managing the United States ocean territory and the Great Lakes.

Now it looks like the Obama Administration is going to move ahead with these restrictions.
ESPN reported:

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters…

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

“Now we see NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the administration planning the future of recreational fishing access in America based on a similar agenda of these same groups and other Big Green anti-use organizations, through an Executive Order by the President. The current U.S. direction with fishing is a direct parallel to what happened in Canada with hunting: The negative economic impacts on hard working American families and small businesses are being ignored.

“In spite of what we hear daily in the press about the President’s concern for jobs and the economy and contrary to what he stated in the June order creating this process, we have seen no evidence from NOAA or the task force that recreational fishing and related jobs are receiving any priority.”

Consequently, unless anglers speak up and convince their Congressional representatives to stop this bureaucratic freight train, it appears that the task force will issue a final report for “marine spatial planning” by late March, with President Barack Obama then issuing an Executive Order to implement its recommendations — whatever they may be.

Led by NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco, the task force has shown no overt dislike of recreational angling, but its indifference to the economic, social and biological value of the sport has been deafening.

Additionally, Lubchenco and others in the administration have close ties to environmental groups who would like nothing better than to ban recreational angling. And evidence suggests that these organizations have been the engine behind the task force since before Obama issued a memo creating it last June.