Education: College Part II

In the State of the Union Speech, President Obama laid out a plan to cancel student loan debt after 20 years, or 10 years if they decide to work for the government. Great plan, if you want educational costs to skyrocket in ways you have never seen before and want the economy to crumble to ever finer ashes.

What incentive does paying off loans give to schools or students to try and make it affordable? All they know is that if they charge (or an institution costs) a student $100 or $100,000 a year that the government will be covering it so there is no reason to keep a single cost in line, no reason to be efficient with the money they take in. In fact, a University would be stupid NOT to raise tuition when, after all, a graduate of their institution simply has to work for a few decades, paying the minimum, and poof! all the debt magically disappears.

This is the type of perverse incentive modern liberals offer economies, from the ivy league to the Detroit projects. Why be more efficient if the cost of inefficiency is paid by someone else? To feel good? Bet that money you're raking in feels pretty good too, and with minimal work to get it. It's the New American Dream.

Meanwhile, as tuition- already divorced from any economic principles by government subsidy- goes to ever greater heights, graduates who would otherwise put their value into the private sector and employ more people would be going into government work, where the citizens have to pay for them. It is one of the most egregious liberal fallacies that the government can make the economy better by making government larger. Every single dollar paid to a state employee (who produces nothing and therefore is already a net drain on the economy) is a dollar YOU do not get to spend in the private economy.

Simple math: You make $40,000 a year. You spend about $20,000 on goods produced by other people, keeping them employed and therefore keeping the economy going. The state, though, makes certain you don't take home $40,000 even if that's what you and your employer agreed you would be paid. So really, after average income taxes, you bring home about $28,000. That means that they have robbed the economy of $12,000 to keep people employed, to produce goods to ship overseas and increase the value of our economy and our dollar. And that is just one person- imagine the net theft from our economy by doing this 100,000,000 times. Yet they do, every year.

Government expands by 20% and necessarily they have to take more of your income to keep those people (who produce nothing and are a drain on the economy already, did I mention that?) they hired employed. So now you are left with $26,000, an additional $2,000 out of the hands of those who produce what we need, an additional $2,000 that wont go to wages, making materials, providing health benefits to people working for them.

Now take even more college graduates, especially those with very expensive advanced degrees out of the economy, and pay for them with your money to produce nothing instead of having them out in the private sector where they could produce a net benefit to the country.

For those who don't understand what progressivism is, it is the gradual and progressive encroachment of the government into all facets of our life. But it is, as I said, gradual. And insidious- no huge steps to take away personal rights, just one case at a time, till progressives get the right judges to make the right rulings and presto- the state can now take your house and demolish it so a corporation can use the land instead. Or , even worse, so they can leave the lot empty for "natural space" laws and drive up housing prices by decreasing supply (therefore increasing net property tax revenue for fewer services).

Obama is not a Stupid man, indeed he is very intelligent, and very "progressive". So there is no possible way he has overlooked the long term impact of having the ever more high-end graduates out of the economy and into the government; just as there is no possible way he does not see what the effect a FULL government subsidy will do to tuition rates. If you think he hasn't, who is really the fool?