September 18, 2009

More Lefty Shenannigans

Knowing how much I detest liberal interference in what was once among the best systems of education in the world, Seth forwarded the following material to me awhile ago, from Red State.

While we are all focusing on H.R. 3200, the House Democrats’ health care plan, we should at least glance at H.R. 3221, the House Democrats’ plan to kill off higher education access. (PDF)

The legislation is opposed by many major universities including Notre Dame, among others. Basically, the bill would shut down all private providers of student loans, drive up costs for universities, and become a bureaucratic nightmare for institutions of higher learning. The professors may be leftists, but the administrators have to pay attention to the bottom line.

Incredible! It’s bad enough that today’s students are subjected to a course of liberal indoctrination during the span of their educations, now the lefties in Congress have decided that the government should decide, by controlling student loans, who gets, and doesn’t get, a college education?

In the process, putting the government in charge of something like this will create another big bureaucracy, one fraught with the same quagmire of ineptitude and the normal attached smothering taxation we always get from government usurpation of private sector functions. Prime example: The mess to which we’ll be treated if we are victimized by government run healthcare.

The Director of Student Financial Strategies at University of Notre Dame warns in a letter to Congressman Miller, “Any legislation that eliminates choice and competition and mandates that all institutions adopt an all-government run program for the 2010/11 academic year is filled with immense risk and would create massive confusion.”

Get that? The Democrats want an “all-government run program” to provide people access to money to pay for college. And if they do that, then they can force universities to comply with lots of new rules or deny students the right to use federal student loans to go to particular colleges.

But it gets better. Boy does it ever get better.

How!!!?

§ 343 of the plan creates a Green Schools Czar. No kidding. A Green Schools Czar (and committee naturally) would examine the impact of more environmentally friendly universities and find ways to create even more environmentally friendly universities. Oh . . . I have an idea . . . if students need financial assistance and they are forced to go through the feds, the feds can simply tell universities to become compliant or they won’t let students use their student loans to go there.

What is so funny is that §312 of Obama’s stimulus plan also sent money to schools to become more environmentally friendly. That was the carrot. Well, this new law will become the stick.

A green schools czar. Czars and more czars, all the better for the Obama Administration and the Kommie Left to maintain Kontrol.

Recapped today,

If you want an indication of just how radical the Democrats in Congress have become, consider the vote on H.R. 3221. The legislation, which I wrote about yesterday, shuts down all private lenders for higher education student loans, requires that colleges and universities adhere to a new federal bureaucracy, creates a new Green Schools Czar, and hints that any school not complying will see its students denied federal student loans.

The liberals now in firm control of our government will stop at nothing to change America into something entirely different than the great country in which we were born and raised.

We right thinkers had best enjoy it while there’s something left to enjoy.

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4 Responses to “More Lefty Shenannigans”

  1. BB-Idaho Says:

    Student loans are already subsidized by the feds: this simply cheapens them for students by eliminating the profits. Win one for the taxpayers….

  2. Chuck Says:

    BB-Idaho

    It also provides the government, which the left apparently assumes (if their healthcare agenda passes in any way, shape or form, rightly) will remain to left of center, with the means to direct loans to students who are applying to more liberally oriented universities while finding reasons to deny loans to those applying to institutions of a more conservative nature.

    Also, taking away the right of private sector institutions to advance college loans is, as are most liberal agendas, just another way to push America closer to being a socialist state. It is not the government’s place to issue edicts such as this, at least not in this country!

  3. BB-Idaho Says:

    Chuck, true: The private sector shouldn’t have to compete with the gov’t. But as a taxpayer, I would rather the $$ be used directly, rather than being siphoned into private sector coffers. As a taxpayer, I would rather subsidize students and patients, rather than big banking and big pharma/health insurance..as happens currently. Medicare Part D, which costs me considerably, hits me again when my tax dollars are fed into the private sector supplement. (My company, like most, is happy to report a 27% profit) much of which comes from the feds. Those be the facts, thats
    all. Subsidizing big business is not a gov’t function either, is it?

  4. Chuck Says:

    BB-Idaho

    Be that as it may, when the government prohibits the marketplace from a function that is of the marketplace, in order to make that function exclusively its own, it is a direct violation of the Constitution.

    That is actually double indemnity, as college loans, like mortgage loans and a variety of other modern “responsibilities” of our beloved government, falling outside the categories of national security, diplomacy, interstate crime and very limited aspects of the economy, are also unconstitutional.

    You can intimate that certain exceptions should be made to that great document, but face it: It has served this country well since its adoption, and the farther we have strayed from it, the more problems we’ve faced as a result.