And This Is The Bill With The Smooth Sailing

Barron YoungSmith (I'll admit to the name irking me) reports on President Obama's student loan reform, one of the most no-brainer bills of all time, but one which has been stymied for decades by business interests wanting to cash their corporate welfare checks:

Last month, taking cues from Obama, the House of Representatives passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which would alter the way the government funds Pell Grants and other student loans. Under the current system, the government gives banks huge subsidies to encourage them to lend to students. Effectively, this means the government is bribing banks to extend student loans by handing them money and letting them cream huge profits off the top. It is a vast waste of taxpayer money, since Uncle Sam could accomplish exactly the same thing by cutting out the middleman and lending directly to students [...]

The next hurdle is the Senate, where Tom Harkin's HELP Committee plans to introduce a student loan bill as soon as it's cleared some *ahem* backlog on health care reform. It looks as if Harkin's committee will introduce a bill that, like the House version, hews very closely to President Obama's proposals as well. And, since the bill is moving through the notorious budget reconciliation process instead of the normal legislative track--a decision made by Obama's allies who want to increase the likelihood of passage--it will pass through no other committees, save the quiescent Budget Committee, and it will not face the threat of a filibuster.

Game over? Not quite. In a testament to the sway that student lenders exercise over the Senate, it's not clear that Democrats have the 51 votes necessary to pass the bill in its current form. Ben Nelson, the staunch friend of lending companies, is against it--as are Blanche Lincoln, Mark Begich, Jeff Bingaman, and Tom Udall. And Senators Bob Casey, Arlen Specter, Bill Nelson, Mark Warner, Jim Webb, and Mary Landrieu are all said to be wavering because their states contain student loan companies. Many are searching for a way to keep lending companies involved in the process--an anguished Senator Casey even held a field congressional hearing in Philadephia this week, hoping to clarify his thoughts on the issue--and they'll be tempted to back some of the numerous pro-lender amendments that will be offered once the bill is open for floor debate. (Even in the House, Democrats couldn't prevent a mass revolt until they watered down the legislation by exempting existing state-based non-profit lenders from subsidy cuts.)

(Seriously, what the fuck, Tom Udall? I expect this from a lot of the others, but you?)

It's insane that there would be eleven lawmakers who call themselves Democrats opposed to something this obvious. It's a pure bank subsidy with no reason to exist whatsoever. There's no argument to be made other than "let's give the banks we bailed out even more free taxpayer money." And yet, I count eleven Senators up there wavering, despite the fact that this bill would create the largest benefit to students in history and cement Democratic gains among young people, while saving the government money. With college costs rising we're not even going to have a higher education system in this country, at least not one for anyone but the super-rich, if we don't accomplish this. Even this bill, which would expand Pell Grants with all the savings from no longer subsidizing banks to make student loans, would fall short of keeping pace with costs (although they would index an increase to inflation).

Really, if we can't do this, Congress might as well pack it in and go home for a couple years to do some soul-searching.

At Least Education Reform Seems To Be Moving Swimmingly

There actually is one area of President Obama's agenda which could be plausibly described as a government takeover. That would be his plan to streamline the student loan market, eliminate the middlemen who provide no service, and allow students to borrow from the government directly, with the massive savings from that plowed into Pell Grants to help more kids go to college. If Obama were this swift with the middlemen in the insurance industry he'd be praised on the left as another FDR. As such, Sallie Mae and the others in the private student lending market, who get subsidies to do what the government can do on their own for much cheaper, don't have the power and influence to stop their own destruction.

Educational institutions currently have two ways to offer federal loans to students. In the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL, pronounced "fell") program, the government pays subsidies to banks and lenders to dole out money to borrowers and reimburses companies up to 97% of the cost of any loan that is not paid back. The second way is the direct-loan program, created in 1993 as an alternate option, in which the government cuts out the middle man, lends money directly and gets all the profits. If the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) passes both houses of Congress, the approximately 4,500 colleges and universities that are currently signed up for FFEL will have to abandon the program and start using the direct-loan option by July 1, 2010.

The House will likely pass the bill this week, and if it runs into trouble in the Senate, it could easily move through reconciliation since the whole point of it is to end wasteful subsidies to the private lending market, which expand the deficit. I think there will be 50 votes for this, as Pell Grants are popular, the private loan market serves no purpose whatsoever, and another part of the bill offers challenge grants for early childhood education, another broadly popular priority. We're going to see change - we can actually believe in! - in higher education. And the students who supported Barack Obama in record numbers will recognize this almost immediately. Savvy play.

Cutting Off The Middleman

We're going to get student loan reform this year. It's basically a done deal. And as such it's not getting a lot of credit. But it's a significant, smart reform.

Right now, middlemen get subsidies from the Feds to lend to students, taking their cut from both the Feds and students in the process. There is no reason the government cannot lend directly to students, the PURPOSE of the student loan program, making the system more efficient and cutting down significantly on costs. The only people against this have personal stakes with student loan middlemen in their communities. But we should create jobs that create things rather than suck off profits from processes they don't need to be involved in. Yesterday a bill cleared a House committee that would end the unnecessary payments in the student loan market.

A bill that cleared a House committee Tuesday would largely remove private lenders from the federal student loan industry, generating an estimated $87 billion savings over 10 years to fund more government grants and loans.

The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 would eliminate an entire category of student loans issued by private lenders and subsidized by the federal government, vastly expanding direct lending by the government starting next July. Democrats would use the savings to fund a $40 billion increase in federal Pell Grant scholarships over 10 years, $10 billion in community college upgrades and $8 billion in pre-kindergarten changes, among other uses.

Republicans opposed to the legislation say it amounts to a federal takeover of student lending.

Yes, indeed it is a federal takeover. One that would save $87 billion dollars.

We have several problems with the conservative takeover of the rhetorical side of government. One is that taxes are verboten. Another is that private industry always works better and cheaper than the federal government. That's not true, especially in this case, where the government pays lenders to do the lending they could do directly just to maintain the illusion of the private market.

Why I say that this will pass is that there's a budget reconciliation option on it. And unlike with a complicated health care reform bill, this is completely straightforward and falls entirely under the deficit reduction standards of the budget. So we'll get this, and it will be a step forward for America.

Dawn Johnsen A Pawn In The Student Loan Privatization Game?

We now have a clear picture of why Dawn Johnsen has not been confirmed to head up the Obama Administration's Office of Legal Counsel. Key legal questions on Administration policies are being left unchallenged by a true civil libertarian because a couple Democrats refuse to allow an up or down vote.

Here are the numbers as they stand right now:

Votes Against Johnsen: 37 Republicans

Votes for Johnsen: 57 Democrats plus Indiana Republican Richard Lugar

Undecideds: Republicans Olypmia Snowe and Susan Collins and Democrats Arlen Specter and Ben Nelson

Reid frames the issue by saying he needs a couple Republicans to cross the line before he has the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster. But as the numbers show, it's just as much an issue of Reid not being able to muster the entire Democratic caucus in support of Johnsen.

Specter has been noncommital on whether he would vote for cloture. But Ben Nelson is basically opposed entirely and that's holding the whole thing up. During the Bush years, Nelson very willingly supported almost all of Bush's most controversial judicial and executive branch appointments, while fighting harder against the President of his own party. I agree with Christy Hardin Smith that Nelson is fishing:

And the latest from Nelson's press secretary? Johnsen worked for NARAL.

No. You are kidding me --a pro-choice president in a pro-choice country nominated a pro-choice attorney to an office where she won't even be dealing with abortion issues. And that's objectionable.

It's a mystery.

And then? I did a little digging. I think Ben Nelson is fishing:

Nelson is perhaps the Senate's fiercest protector of subsidies for student lending institutions, which, not coincidentally, are an engine of job growth in Nebraska. He has vowed to block any effort to reduce those subsidies. And given that Democrats have 58 members and generally need 60 to break a GOP filibuster, he can enforce his will on his colleagues....Multiple congressional sources say that congressional Democrats have decided to use reconciliation to go after student-lending subsidies, specifically to get around Nelson.

Nelson is holding up Obama Administration appointments so he can save his student loan middleman and increase the burden on students. Now that's cynical.

But as Christy notes, there's a way around this, especially for a popular President. Yes, Reid could just wait for the extra vote of Al Franken and make Nelson, at least in this case, irrelevant. But the President could also loudly suggest to the people of Nebraska that their Senator is vindictively withholding the ability of his White House to do their job because Ben Nelson wants to punish students some more. And that might generate some opposition inside Nebraska, particularly the Omaha area where Obama WON. Unless we are to conclude that Obama would rather not waste political capital on having a strong civil liberties voice at the Office of Legal Counsel.

The Sea Change In Higher Education

Quietly and with little fanfare, the President has embarked on a lasting, substantive benefit to Americans seeking college loans. And because he'll seek budget reconciliation for it and the measure clearly cuts costs, he'll get it, and finally we'll have a common-sense initiative that saves money, helps kids and ends the myth that privatization always benefits the country.

President Obama's health-care goals may be garnering attention, but his higher-education proposals are no less ambitious.

If adopted, they could transform the financial aid landscape for millions of students while expanding federal authority to a degree that even Democrats concede is controversial.

At stake is a plan to expand the Pell Grant program, making it an entitlement akin to Medicare and Social Security. Key to the effort is a consolidation of student lending that would give the U.S. Department of Education a near monopoly over the practice -- a proposal that has mobilized the private loan industry, which lent $55.3 billion to 6.4 million students in the 2007-2008 school year.

Obama outlined his initiatives, which also include incentives for colleges to cut costs and to raise graduation rates, in the fiscal 2010 budget that Congress approved Wednesday, and Democratic leaders said they hope to make them law by October.

The private loan industry takes federal grant money, delivers it to kids, and takes their profit share off the top. There is absolutely no reason for them to exist. With the savings from ending the privatization of the student loan industry, we can make Pell Grant funding permanent and help millions of Americans go to college. Without affordability, our efforts to bolster education in this country, in particular higher education, will never succeed. Furthermore, unsustainable student loan debt burdens young people coming out of college, lowers their purchasing power and forces their decision-making, furthering the debt peonage society.

The leeches in the private loan industry think they've created something:

"The only reason they're doing this is the government can make a lot of money," said Kevin Bruns, executive director of the trade group America's Student Loan Providers. "Private-sector lending built this entire industry, and now the federal government has piggybacked off of it."

Uh, no. Unaffordable higher education costs built the industry. They forced students to get loans or forego college. And middlemen benefited for no reason for decades. The taxpayer need not fund this industry any longer.

Obama is ushering in a sweeping change here, and practically nobody is talking about it.

The Corporate Borg

The corporate lobbyists continue to line up to obstruct President Obama's budget reforms. An excellent example is the proposed rollback of the privatization of the student loan industry, which has caused lots of consternation among... the private student loan industry (which, incidentally, got a bailout last year). They think direct government lending of student loans, which would save $94 billion dollars over a decade, would just be a terrible outcome for, well, them, and they're leading a fight based on, get this, the fact that Pell grants would be mandatory and not subject to the whims of appropriators. "Make grants for higher education more uncertain!" certainly sounds like the stuff of popular outcry.

But even more telling are the cautions of Richard Gephardt with respect to health care reform. Gephardt, a longtime labor leader while in Congress, wants the Obama Administration and Congress to scale back their ambitions.

The caution comes from Richard A. Gephardt, a former Missouri congressman and a major figure in Democratic politics in his 28 years in the House and service as party leader. He put health coverage for all Americans at the center of his 2004 presidential bid, calling it “the moral issue of our time.”

Now Mr. Gephardt says universal or near-universal coverage cannot pass this year — and he is urging the White House to defer that goal until it enacts cost-saving reforms in health care delivery. Otherwise, he argues, the new president risks the same losing argument about paying for expanded coverage that stymied President Bill Clinton 15 years ago [...]

“I feel so much now like déjà vu all over again,” said Mr. Gephardt, who now lobbies for corporate America on issues including health care. Universal coverage “is absolutely imperative, and it needs to be dealt with. But the way to get to it is to show that we can deal with some of these problems first.”

Gephardt may be correct about the difficulties of funding health care; he neglects to take into account the extreme desire of the public to reform the system, much more so than in 1993. But the half-disclosure comes in paragraph 17:

One old friend links Mr. Gephardt’s assessment to his lucrative new career as a lobbyist. “He’s advising a lot of big corporations,” said Tom Buffenbarger, president of the machinists’ union. “All he’s hearing is costs.”

You won't find this in John Harwood's article, but Gephardt's lobby shop represents the US Chamber of Commerce, Goldman Sachs, and the government of Turkey, in which perch he lobbied to kill a resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide that he once co-sponsored. Here's a long article on all of Gephardt's corporate ties.

In this respect, I see Washington as a kind of Roach Motel, where politicians of all ideological stripes walk in, but they don't walk out without a sweet corporate gig and a mindset to protect the interests of the powerful over the people. A familiar story, of course, but at this crisis point, when those same corporate interests have just about sucked the Treasury dry, we need those defenders of the public and the common good, and cannot find them.

The Looming Budget Fights

The Obama Administration budget has a number of elements that would restore fairness and progressivity to the tax code, end the creeping privatization of government functions, cut down on waste, fraud and abuse in contracting, and invest in some of the most important elements, notably education, health care and clean energy, that will drive our economic future. It is a telling quirk of the entrenched nature of Washington, however, that the most promising parts of this budget, the parts that do the most to shake up the status quo, are precisely the parts that will be fought so strenuously by those who wish to maintain that status quo.

For instance, there's the perfectly sensible alteration of the financial aid system for higher education, which would eliminate the middleman in the student loan market, reducing rates for college students while saving the government money through increasing efficiency and cutting subsidies to loan officers.

Among other changes, the Obama budget eliminates the Federal Family Education Loan Program, which excessively subsidizes banks, and moves to the U.S. Department of Education’s Direct Loan program. The Congressional Budget office projects this move to save $94 billion over nine years. The Obama budget then redirects the savings to students. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that in 2010-2011, $5 billion would be cut from subsidies to banks and lenders, and invested in students instead.

Redirecting the bank subsidies toward Pell grants would solidify the grant program as the premier source of assistance for low-income students. The Pell grant maximum would increase from $5,350 to $5,550; the estimated national average Pell grant award would increase by $121, from $3,299 to $3,423. Increasing the award will also enable an additional 130,000 more students to attend college per $100 increase in the maximum award.

However, because this system would take aim at the student loan industry that has built up in particular Democratic areas, top Democrats want to scuttle the deal.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) are opposed to provisions in Obama’s budget plan that would remove private banks from the federal student loan program and transfer the expected savings — $94 billion over a decade, according to the CBO— to a new program that would instead guarantee Pell Grant funding for eligible students [...]

Conrad is under some pressure from his home state to preserve a role for banks in the federally backed student loan program.

“If the president’s proposal goes through, that will deeply affect the Bank of North Dakota,” according to Julie Kubisiak, the director of student loans at the state-owned bank. She said the bank’s entire advisory board, consisting of the governor, attorney general and other officials, have written to the state’s Congressional delegation opposing the change.

That's ALL this is about. There's some lip-flap about not wanting to create a new entitlement by guaranteeing Pell Grant funding, but it's B.S. The banks want to keep their subsidies. I mean, it's not like they've created any hardship for the country lately, is it?

Then there's the battle over ending subsidies to the oil industry:

The Obama administration's push to raise taxes on the oil industry is reigniting a battle the industry fought and won last year.

Under pressure to narrow projected deficits, President Barack Obama's 2010 budget proposal calls for raising more than $31 billion over the next decade by eliminating the oil and gas industry's eligibility for various tax breaks.

The plan would slap companies with a new excise tax on production in the Gulf of Mexico worth $5.3 billion between 2010 and 2019, and repeal the industry's eligibility for a manufacturing tax credit worth $13.3 billion in that period. The industry says the final cost of Mr. Obama's proposals on petroleum production could top $400 billion, once his plan to put a price on greenhouse-gas emissions is factored in [...]

The oil industry, which in its campaign donations has long favored Republicans, is taking its case to voters. A new ad campaign by the American Petroleum Institute in about a dozen states says new taxes would "hobble our ailing economy" and "cost thousands of American jobs."

"I think we should pay our fair share of taxes, but I don't think we should look at this industry as the source of all money to pay for the renewable energy industry," said Peter Robertson, vice chairman of Chevron Corp. Mr. Robertson said Mr. Obama's tax proposals will discourage domestic oil and natural-gas production and undermine his goal of reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

I know that President Obama vowed to fight the special interest he takes on in his budget. And It's good to see the grassroots advocacy groups rallying behind this, particularly against conservative Democrats who want to hide their views from their constituents. But the power is very entrenched. So this will be a very big struggle.

The Education Agenda

I know I've said once before that education looks to be the area where Republicans could find some common ground with Barack Obama's agenda. Interestingly, that's where Democrats found common ground with George Bush over No Child Left Behind early in his term. That's not an endorsement of NCLB, but a description of where the politics were at the time.

There is a split in the Democratic Party on education policy between reformers and those who favor a more traditional approach. While Obama is borrowing from both sides of that divide, he is definitely siding with the reformers on key issues, like merit pay and charter schools.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama laid out his "cradle to career" agenda for education Tuesday, including a controversial plan to boost pay for teachers who excel.

In a speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Obama said he backs the idea of merit pay for the best school teachers.

"It is time to start rewarding good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones," he said. Teacher unions have strongly opposed bringing such a system to public education. But in his talk, Mr. Obama said the time has come to do just that.

He said, "too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay," and the resistance has continued "even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom."

The merit pay proposal would significantly expand a federal program that increases pay for high-performing teachers to an additional 150 school districts.

Obama is really begging to be seen as selling out teacher's unions, although I'm not convinced that merit pay really would do that. For one thing, as Dana Goldstein notes, he's not even actually proposing merit pay, and this is a bad job by traditional media for not understanding the difference:

Teacher pay: Obama promised a federal investment in developing "performance pay" plans in 150 school districts. The language here is key. "Performance pay" is supported by teachers' unions, and awards salary bonuses to teachers based on a variety of factors, including classroom observations, teaching in hard-to-staff subjects and schools, and improving student achievement. "Merit pay," on the other hand, is understood as directly aligning teacher salaries to student test scores.

I don't agree with merit pay because it judges teachers on the cognitive ability of their students, which is neither static nor constant. A child who was not well-prepared before stepping into a teacher's classroom and gets the expected low test scores as a result is not the fault of the teacher. But performance pay sounds like it's based on better metrics.

As far as the other proposals, I really like his plan for cutting out middlemen in the student loan business. If the government is supplying loans, they don't need private companies to be doing work that adds nothing but cuts them into the deal with a profit. What's more, President Ben Nelson doesn't like it because it would hurt a private student lending firm in his home state of Nebraska. Gotta love those "fiscal conservatives" stoking wasteful parochial interests.

In addition, there is a strong push toward early childhood education, a clear predictor of success for young people. Obama would lift caps on charter schools, which encourages experimentation but has had mixed results, and he would move toward promoting a national standardized curriculum. Finally, he talked about lengthening the school year to provide more intensive education. That's just a question of funding, IMO.

If a Republican was looking to draft off of the President's popularity, it would seem that supporting his education initiatives, particularly charter schools and performance pay, would be the smart thing to do. Education has such a real-world effect on constituents, too, that it's a natural. I haven't heard much from Republicans in Congress on this, because they're too busy trying to self-immolate, I guess.

...Maybe Obama could jump on the rubber room at the New York City Board of Education. This is nuts - hundreds of teachers put on probation who show up at a room, with full pay, for sometimes years, and do nothing. Somehow, I think we can do better than this.

Budget Musings

The President's budget for FY2010 is online. This is a pretty remarkable leap forward, and offers the ability for geeks and wonks of all stripes to dig into the line-by-line appropriations and see what the President is offering. While Congress will almost certainly change some of these terms, a lot of what's here is promising while not totally sufficient. Bill Scher has a good overview of two of the major concerns, energy and health care.

Over the course of the 10-year budget window, President Barack Obama envisions a $634 billion fund for health care reform that would provide coverage for all Americans, paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy and various budget savings -- a dramatic gesture that confirms the deep commitment from the White House to solve the health care crisis.

But as the White House acknowledges and The Treatment's Jonathan Cohn observes, $634 billion is but a healthy down payment. More will be needed [...]

On energy and climate, I wrote yesterday about the stunning news that the White House expects to have revenue from a carbon cap and emissions trading system to combat global warming and transition to a clean energy economy.

Such a plan would raise significant revenue, particularly in the early years of the plan while the carbon cap would be looser (it would gradually tighten over time). However, the White House understandably wants to return the vast majority of revenue from polluters to consumers, to reduce the impact of short-term price spikes and refute charges that the plan amounts to a tax hike.

But that means the White House only expects to use $15 billion to invest in clean energy. The Apollo Alliance concludes we need to invest $50 billion a year for 10 years to transition to a clean energy economy. Again, a good down payment, but not all we need.

The other big funding tranche, education, is getting a pretty good deal, more than even a lot of optimistic education advocates expected. It looks like Obama will reauthorize No Child Left Behind but with the actual funding to make it work. There is a definite effort to split the difference between reformers and teacher's unions on things like charter schools, where I think he can get significant Republican buy-in. And this is great:

Recognizing that the push for college access for low-income and minority students must be complemented by a new focus on college completion, the administration is proposing a $2.5 billion Access and Completion Incentive Fund, "to support innovative State efforts to help low-income students succeed and complete their college education."

The administration wants to originate all student loans in the direct lending program, cutting out wasteful middle-men. This is a very good thing, as it will save the federal government billions of dollars that can be funneled back to students.

There is just no need for the government to invent a secondary student-loan market, adding an unnecessary layer of inefficiency. Good thinking.

There's also a dedicated state grant program for high speed rail of about a billion dollars a year. Again, great, but somewhat insufficient. And there is a provision to speed the development of generic drugs into the market and tear down attempts by drugmakers to block them, which would save the government and consumers billions.

Still, there are concerns. First of all, while most of the fuzzy math is gone, the budget depends on pretty robust growth in 2011 and 2012. Obviously Obama feels that the results of his policies will return us to better times, and that may be true, but he's using pretty optimistic numbers. The other issue is the military budget. Again, Bill Scher:

Congressman Barney Frank argues we can and should cut our $670 billion military budget by 25 percent. That includes spending for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Disregarding the President's budgeting for Iraq and Afghanistan (because I don't believe we can discern too much on his strategy from the budget numbers), Obama's basic defense budget is scheduled for a slight increase in 2009: from $513 billion to $534 billion.

The WSJ reports that there is likely to be major weapons reductions in the future, as a result of putting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan back on budget.

President Barack Obama has talked about the need to prune some high-end Pentagon acquisitions programs and withdraw most U.S. combat troops from Iraq by mid-2010, both of which should result in significant defense-spending reductions. But the president plans to direct additional financial and military resources into Afghanistan, so much of the savings may be offset by new spending on the troubled war effort there.

That could force the military to cut back its spending on its most-advanced weapons, and the Pentagon plans to overhaul its weapons-purchasing system.

I'll have more as I keep reading.

...One thing I'm noticing, reading over the President's budget, is that it is a starkly ideological document. Almost shockingly so. For example, read pages 5-17, describing what got us into this mess. And many of the backpedal steps that Obama made on domestic issues during the campaign are not in here at all. Nothing on nuclear power in the energy section. Nothing on offshore drilling - in fact, the only thing is an excise tax starting in 2011 to stop oil companies from getting excessive royalty relief. I'm not sure if all the numbers line up, but rhetorically it's really on point.

Why Working Americans Are Scared

Conservative apologists are perplexed. They can't seem to understand why Americans are so worried about their economic struggles. After all, unemployment is down from historical highs, we haven't had a quarter of negative economic growth yet, the Dow is still high relative to prior downturns, so what's the problem?

Maybe if they actually listened to just one average American instead of figuring out ways to place the numbers in the right combination to make all look well, they'd get their answer. Hint: it has nothing to do with what they hear on the nightly news.

Ann Shea, 47, an attorney who lives in Butte, said the nation faces hardships that trump patriotism.

"The issue is, we're paying almost five bucks a gallon in gas, we're in a war we shouldn't be in, and the current administration, which is the one McCain will carry on, is just lying to the American people to get what they want," she said. "Obama's not about that."

Indeed, people are incredibly unhappy and worried about their prospects for the future. And it's pretty simple to understand why, if you actually interact with this economy instead of spin numbers about it. Staple items cost more, and wages remain stagnant. Health care is out of reach. Junk mortgages are re-setting and threatening millions with foreclosure. A car is more of a fiscal liability than ever. Suburban housing developments and shopping centers are becoming ghost towns.

In short, risk has shifted entirely in the direction of the worker and the consumer as the rich become more insulated and disconnected. The recovery from the initial Bush recession in 2001-2002 was a recovery solely for the rich and well-connected. Out of seven indicators of economic growth, only corporate profits surged from 2001-2007.

This CBPP chart from April does a great job of describing Republican Party economic policy in a nutshell. The Bush expansion may have featured sluggish wage growth, sluggish GDP growth, sluggish investment growth, and sluggish employment growth, but it also featured a terrific, tax-cut driven surge in corporate profit growth! That makes it a success by anyone's measure, right?

At the same time, the middle class has almost disappeared as stratification between rich and poor has exploded.

In recent years, the statistics regarding income disparity in America have been startling. After-tax annual income for the bottom fifth of American households inched up just 6 percent form 1979 to 2005, according to the Congressional Budget Office. During that time, income for the middle fifth of households grew by a modest 21 percent, with much of that gain caused by women in many households working more hours. Over that same period, income for the top fifth of households jumped by an impressive 80 percent, while income for the top 1 percent more than tripled, soaring by 228 percent.

The highest-earning fifth of households received 51.6 percent of the nation's after-tax income in 2005, meaning that the income of the top fifth exceeded that of the bottom four-fifths. As for the top 1 percent of households, they received more after-tax income than the bottom 40 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A study that Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez did based on federal tax returns found that the top 1 percent of households, averaging $1.1 million in annual income, received nearly 22 percent of all reported income in 2005, up from 9 percent in 1980. That income shift helped create the greatest level of inequality since the Roaring Twenties.

The leading economic indicators cited most often by Republican hacks and Bush apologists often don't capture this dangerous situation, which is why they sound more and more out of touch. They look at the Dow and corporate growth while ignoring the growth in real wages for the middle class. They look at inflation while taking away food and fuel prices, making it look far more stable. They will do anything to preserve those gains for the super-rich and the losses for the shrinking middle class.

If you're a working American, you know all this intuitively, and all this talk about how "there is no recession" and "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" and "it's the Democrats' fault for doomsaying about the economy" just make you angrier. In a superb op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Peter Gosselin explains how the risk shift has engendered this uneasiness:

Working Americans and their families arrived on the doorstep of the current economic crisis uniquely ill-equipped to cope with its consequences. Rather than having gained a financial protective coating during the period of growth that preceded it, working families up and down the income spectrum were actually nudged further out on an economic limb and therefore were primed for being picked off once problems emerged.

It's not that the growth of the last generation wasn't real; it was. The U.S. economy doubled in size between 1980 and last year. It's not that all of the benefits of the just-past era went to those at the top (although a very substantial chunk did); millions upon millions of Americans prospered right along with the super-rich.

But the prosperity we enjoyed was purchased at a price of diminished security for our families and ourselves. Even as our incomes went up, economic risks -- the costs of being laid off, of suffering a work-stopping illness or of a catastrophe like a house fire -- that were once largely borne on the broad shoulders of business and government were being shifted onto the backs of ordinary families, from the working poor to the reasonably rich.

That means that even before the current crisis struck, families were primed to take steeper financial falls than in the past, ones from which they'd have a harder time recovering. And now that trouble is upon us, they are falling in greater and greater numbers.

What we're really talking about is the unmaking of the New Deal, and it pre-dates this President, going back to failed conservative policies that refused to limit consumption, rein in health care costs or address inequality. Conservatives have used federal laws like ERISA to allow businesses to deny benefits to employees, in contravention of the law itself. They have sat by idly as insurers in the health and homeowner fields made their customers responsible for more and more of the burden of what the insurance is supposed to cover. They have cheered on the shift from defined-benefit plans like pensions to defined-contribution plans like 401 (k) retirement accounts which are subject to the whims of a volatile market. They have shrunk the amount of available federal grants for college education, leading to more borrowing and an entire generation of college students sunk with debt.

Indeed, similar changes have occurred in just about every corner of Americans' financial lives.

Some argue that in the new, globally competitive economy, U.S. business and government simply cannot afford to provide the kinds of protections against financial peril that they used to. Perhaps not. But that doesn't mean that we should automatically shunt the job of bearing these dangers to families alone. And it most assuredly doesn't mean that we should pass along the task without letting people know they've just been assigned the job of bearing a big new load of risk.

But that's essentially what has happened. As a result, working Americans and their families are operating on an economic high wire -- only one or two missteps from a steep financial fall. Little wonder people are so bleak about their prospects now that times are tough.

People know this without seeing the numbers from economists - they feel it in their daily lives, and they acutely understand the notion of their world in peril. Americans not in charge of major corporations are starved for some economic leadership and a glimmer of hope that the government cares about what happens in their lives. That's the choice in this election.

On DREAMs, Intimidation, and Nativist Jerks

The federal version of the DREAM Act comes up for vote today in the US Senate. The bill would set on a path to legal status those children of immigrants who enlist in the military or enroll in college. Yesterday, college students who would benefit from this program were on Capitol Hill, lobbying Congress for passage. Tom Tancredo, noted jerk, called for the arrest of the students.

Democrats were planning to hold a press conference today featuring three college students whose parents came to the United States illegally in order to promote the DREAM Act. But the event was postponed after anti-immigrant Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) called on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to arrest the three students:

“I call on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to detain any illegal aliens at this press conference,” said Tancredo, who claims to have alerted federal authorities about the well publicized press confrence. “Just because these illegal aliens are being used for political gain doesn’t mean they get immunity from the law. If we can’t enforce our laws inside the building where American laws are made, where can we enforce them?”

They eventually held the press conference anyway and nobody was arrested. Tancredo is not only being callous here, he's being ignorant. One of the students has permanent residency status, and another cannot be deported because she exists in a kind of legal limbo. Her name is Tam Tran.

Tam Tran, whose Vietnamese parents came illegally to the US from Germany, has lived in the US since she was ten, is a UCLA graduate who wants to pursue a PhD at USC, but can't because she can't afford further schooling without federal student loans. The government can't deport her family back to Vietnam because her father was persecuted by the communist government there, but the German government won't take them back either. Tran said today she is in "permanent legal limbo."

The last time Tran spoke out in support of the DREAM Act, in an article in USA Today on October 8, her family was detained by the ICE.

Just three days after the article appeared, federal officers entered her home in the middle of the night and forcibly arrested her family. Tran’s family was detained on a “years-old deportation order,” even though they have been in regular communication with immigration officials for almost 20 years since arriving in the United States.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), chair of the immigration subcommitee, equated the family’s arrest to “witness intimidation” and accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials of targeting the Tran family because Tam “testified before Lofgren’s panel earlier this spring.” Earlier this week, USA Today spoke with Lofgren about the Tran family’s arrest:

“Would she and her family have been arrested if she hadn’t spoken out?” Lofgren said of Tran, who was not at home for the raid but has been asked to report to Immigration and Customs officials next week. “I don’t think so.“

This is shocking behavior for the ICE to undertake, and not only does it show the price for dissent in Bush's America, but it shows how convoluted our immigration system is in the absence of a comprehensive solution. You can punish immigrants, who have no political power, or you can punish companies who hire the undocumented, who have loads of political power. In this case, the solution is clear; allow students who have known no other home to contribute to the country in which they were raised. Brian has the numbers; light 'em up.

Biggest Increase In Student Aid Since The GI Bill

Time to give the Democrats credit where credit is due.

WASHINGTON - Congress approved a $20.2 billion boost in financial aid for college students yesterday, a package that backers said would be the single largest increase in federal tuition funding since World War II.

The bill, which President Bush is expected to sign, raises the maximum Pell grant for low-income students from $4,050 to $5,400, and temporarily slashes interest rates on student loans by half.

It also establishes debt-forgiveness programs for graduates who enter certain poorly paid fields such as law enforcement, firefighting, and teaching. According to the Department of Education, the average student now graduates with $19,000 in debt.

The new aid would be funded by a massive cut in subsidies to the scandal-plagued private student loan industry. Lenders said the cutbacks would cause some banks to stop offering student loans.

The president had threatened to veto an earlier version, but the White House indicated Thursday that Bush would sign the legislation.

This is fantastic news. The student loan industry has been gouging kids for decades and forcing them to live the beginning of their professional lives in debt. It discouraged innovation and entrepreneurship among young people. I'm especially pleased to see debt forgiveness for those who enter public service-sector jobs like police, firefighting and teaching. And to get the President to agree to sign it is quite a coup.

This Congress has endured a lot of headache from all sides, a lot of it deserved, but this is a step forward. In fact, it was one of their core priorities in the "6 for '06" election-year agenda. Now education reform moves to the reauthoriztion of No Child Left Behind, where George Miller has some ideas.

The leading House Democrat on education issues proposed revisions yesterday to the No Child Left Behind law that would ease the penalties for public schools that barely miss academic testing targets but tighten another rule that has helped the District and Virginia.

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and a leading sponsor of the law in 2001, called his proposal a work in progress. He and three other committee members were floating the ideas as they move toward introducing a bill likely to contain major changes to the controversial law. Miller has said he wants to move a bill through the House of Representatives next month.

The proposal would allow states to use more than annual tests in reading and math to rate schools; give credit to states for students who are projected to reach proficiency within three years; and require states to test certain students with limited English skills in their native language. For some schools that fall only slightly short of academic targets, the proposal would also lift requirements to provide after-school tutoring and let students transfer to better schools.

In addition, Miller proposed strengthening a rule that requires test scores to be reported separately for groups of students identified by ethnicity, race, family income and other factors. Currently, Maryland reports separate scores for groups in a given school if there are at least five students in the demographic category. D.C. schools report scores from all groups with at least 40 students in a given school, and Virginia sets the threshold at 50 students.

Hopefully, we can work hard to establish some sensible solutions to a flawed education bill. This is a good day for the future of our country.

Veto Proof Majorities

Because of an intransigent President who doesn't think Congress even counts, the only numbers that matter are 290 and 67. Those are the 2/3 majorities you need to override a Presidential veto and pass any legislation.

Well, yesterday the Senate passed their education bill, which would roll back federal subsidies to student loan corporations and plow that money into expanding Pell grants. It passed 78-18. After a conference with the House to reconcile the bills, I expect it will pass with similar numbers.

Also, the Senate Finance Committee voted to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The vote was 17-4. That'll move to the full Senate, and I expect similar numbers there.

On these core domestic issues, the veto threat is empty.

On The Legislative Front

There is more evidence that the answer to the question of "Is our Congress learning?" is yes. Frustrated by procedural obstructionism, the Democratic leadership plans to do some dirty work of their own to get important legislation passed:

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are hoping to ram through ethics legislation that has become an albatross for the new Congress. Instead of waiting for the traditional conference committee to create a compromise version of the bill, the Democrat leadership is expected to use parliamentary tactics to both block amendments and speed the bill to the Senate, where Reid is hoping that popular sentiment will sway enough lawmakers to ensure a filibuster-proof majority.

The Republicans will bitch and moan, but at some point you have to fight fire with fire, and this ethics reform has languished for too long. They've passed it through both houses of Congress and now the Republicans are BLOCKING THE CONFERENCE REPORT, so they really have left no choice.

Meanwhile, the pulled defense authorization bill has given way to an education bill, which seeks to markedly increase Pell grants and fix the ailing student loan program. The President has vowed to work with Congress on the bill (even though the first line says he'll veto it), and while we may not get the same numbers talked about here, it's possible that there will be some compromise worked out.

Meanwhile the Democrats are not backing down from the President's heartless and totally ideological resistance to re-authorizing and increasing funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP). Republicans who have worked on this bill know that they will be destroyed electorally by voting against children's health, and they're signaling their opposition to the President (which for them is a win-win).

The chief Republican architects of a deal to expand a children’s health insurance program are defending the proposal against criticism by President Bush, who has threatened to “resist” it.

This week, members of the Senate Finance Committee tentatively agreed on a renewal and expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which covers about 6 million children from families that are low-income but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

Bush sees the legislation as a backdoor move toward government-run health care, but committee Republicans Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Pat Roberts of Kansas said in a July 11 letter to Bush that the issue that most concerns him — the use of SCHIP to cover adults — is partly his fault. Under Bush’s watch, the department of Health and Human Services has approved 12 waivers to states allowing SCHIP coverage of adults, records show, including a waiver issued May 24 allowing Wisconsin to cover parents earning up to twice the poverty level.

There may be enough votes to override this veto, and if not, the Democrats are playing hardball:

About 3.3 million additional children would be covered under the proposal developed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), among others. It would provide the program $60 billion over five years, compared with $30 billion under Bush's proposal. And it would rely on a 61-cent increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes, to $1 a pack, which Bush opposes.

Grassley and Hatch, in a joint statement this week, implored the president to rescind his veto threat. They warned that Democrats might seek an expansion of $50 billion or more if there is no compromise.

Damn straight. Make these Republicans vote over and over again to protect their President and deny children health insurance. I can't think of a better bill on which to take a stand.

UPDATE: Much more on the education bill here.

The Age of Accountability

This is what sadly passes for accountability in the age of Bush - an official resigning two days before the Administration has to face a Congressional committee.

I guess that's as close as we're going to get to "I'm sorry."

A Government Without A Head

There are these two big scandals looming under the surface that are affecting people right now, and they cannot be twisted as political, they cannot be explained away by blaming Democrats or Bill Clinton or whatever trick the executive branch wants to use. They are the pet food scandal (I should say human food too at this point) and the student loan industry scam, which was well-known to this government for six years and yet they did nothing to stop it, allowing predatory lenders to buy their way into university's favor and limit choices for consumers. These aren't political scandals; they're simply the obvious outgrowth of an ideology that views the mechanisms of government with contempt, and perceives power as a way to make money for cronies and friends.

In the case of both the student loan industry and the pet food industry, oversight was non-existent, and companies were allowed to subvert the rules at the expense of taxpayers. This is not incidental - it's what Republicans call "good, solid American enterprise." This is exactly what they want, and they turn a blind eye to the consequences. As someone said to Bill Kristol in his embarrasing display of a debate with Robert Kuttner at yesterday's "Failure of Conservatism" conference, "Why is it that, 6 years after 9-11, this government can't guarantee the safety of my cat's food supply?" The answer is because they have no interest in it. And Republicans usually won't tell you that, although sometimes they'll slip up and tell the truth:

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson today joined an exodus from President Bush's first-term Cabinet, announcing his resignation at a press conference in which he also warned that the world faces a potentially catastrophic flu pandemic and that the U.S. food supply is vulnerable to terrorists [...]

Thompson said he also worries constantly about food poisoning.

"I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not, you know, attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," he said. "And we are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."

Although inspections of food imports have risen sharply in the past four years, "it still is a very minute amount that we're doing."

That idiot wants to be President, after he admitted that in four years as Health and Human Services Secretary he made no effort to inspect the human food supply coming into the country.

But there are even more examples of this failure of governance that have come out in the last couple days. The White House used a rural Internet financing program to reward rich companies, and did nothing to actually finance Internet infrastructure in rural areas, which was its intent:

Members of a House committee charged yesterday that a five-year, $1.2 billion program to expand broadband Internet services to rural communities has missed many unserved areas while channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidized loans to companies in places where service already exists.

The Post reported that since 2001 more than half the money has gone to metropolitan regions or communities within easy commutes of a mid-size city. An Internet provider in Houston got $23 million in loans to wire affluent subdivisions, including one that boasts million-dollar houses and an equestrian center.

Congress created the rural broadband program in 2002. To date, according to Andrew, 69 loans for $1.2 billion have been approved to finance infrastructure in 40 states. Only 40 percent of the communities benefiting were unserved at the time of the loan, Andrew said.

They can't implement laws they've passed because they have no interest in doing so. And the laws they don't like, they try to change, if the change can reward big businesses or their own pocketbooks:

An Interior Department official who was recently rebuked for altering scientific conclusions to reduce protections for endangered species and providing internal documents to lobbyists resigned Monday, officials said.

Julie A. MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary who oversaw the Fish and Wildlife Service's endangered species program, also faced conflict-of-interest questions in a report issued by the Interior Department's inspector general in March. [...]

In 2004, MacDonald was criticized for overruling field biologists on the habitat requirements of the greater sage grouse, disputing their conclusion that oil and gas operations could interfere with the birds' breeding and nesting.

The inspector general's report outlined instances where MacDonald, a civil engineer with no formal training in natural sciences, advocated altering scientific conclusions in ways that favored development and agricultural interests.

H. Dale Hall, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, told investigators that MacDonald overrode field experts on designating habitat for the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher.

Hall, a wildlife biologist, told investigators he was in a "running battle" with MacDonald over the issue. Hall said MacDonald had a particular interest in endangered species rulings that affected California because her husband had a ranch in the state.

California property records show that MacDonald and her husband, Charles, own 80 acres identified as crop land in Yolo County near Sacramento.

McDonald was about to face a House committee on this issue, so she did the brave thing and resigned first.

Right wingers like to call the anger that comes from hearing these stories "Bush Derangement Syndrome." Actually, the anger comes from living in a country where anarchy is reigning. The government doesn't exist for any primary function other than profit-taking. This makes principled, reasonable people furious, because it's our government, and we're paying the price. I guess those who would rather spin the truth and dismiss the effects, one must conclude, enjoy being ripped off this way, and don't care that their government has been turned into a cash register for the rich and connected. I do care, and so do a lot of people. At the roots, this is the real reason that conservatism is a dirty word nowadays. People actually want a government they can count on to be minimally competent in carrying out its mission and its policies. That is sadly lacking today.

No Child Left

Conservatives nationwide have hailed the decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban that passed Congress in 2003. They share their concern for the unborn and their determination that they ought to be protected and defended. But once the gestation period ends, from the approximate ages of 0-23, Republicans have shown with their policies a total lack of concern for the life, liberty and happiness of these same children, thrusting them instead into a YOYO ("you're on your own") society where they are neither protected or defended, recalling the old adage by Rep. Barney Frank that for the GOP, "life begins at conception and ends at birth."

The very act of delivering the child, which gets far less emphasis than the medical decisions made beforehand, is becoming an increasingly dangerous practice in America, particularly in the American South.

For decades, Mississippi and neighboring states with large black populations and expanses of enduring poverty made steady progress in reducing infant death. But, in what health experts call an ominous portent, progress has stalled and in recent years the death rate has risen in Mississippi and several other states.

The setbacks have raised questions about the impact of cuts in welfare and Medicaid and of poor access to doctors, and, many doctors say, the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes and hypertension among potential mothers, some of whom tip the scales here at 300 to 400 pounds.

“I don’t think the rise is a fluke, and it’s a disturbing trend, not only in Mississippi but throughout the Southeast,” said Dr. Christina Glick, a neonatologist in Jackson, Miss., and past president of the National Perinatal Association.

To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate — defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births — fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005.

481 babies died during childbirth in Mississippi in 2005, and this increase tracked with drastic cuts to Medicaid for the poor.

Jamekia Brown, 22 and two months pregnant with her third child, lives next to the black people’s cemetery in the part of town called No Name, where multiple generations crowd into cheap clapboard houses and trailers.

So it took only a minute to walk to the graves of Ms. Brown’s first two children, marked with temporary metal signs because she cannot afford tombstones.

Her son, who was born with deformities in 2002, died in her arms a few months later, after surgery. Her daughter was stillborn the next year. Nearby is another green marker, for a son of Ms. Brown’s cousin who died at four months, apparently of pneumonia [...]

In 2004, Gov. Haley Barbour came to office promising not to raise taxes and to cut Medicaid. Face-to-face meetings were required for annual re-enrollment in Medicaid and CHIP, the children’s health insurance program; locations and hours for enrollment changed, and documentation requirements became more stringent.

As a result, the number of non-elderly people, mainly children, covered by the Medicaid and CHIP programs declined by 54,000 in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years. According to the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program in Jackson, some eligible pregnant women were deterred by the new procedures from enrolling.

One former Medicaid official, Maria Morris, who resigned last year as head of an office that informed the public about eligibility, said that under the Barbour administration, her program was severely curtailed.

“The philosophy was to reduce the rolls and our activities were contrary to that policy,” she said.

And if you are cursed with the affliction of being poor in America, and yet you manage to get born, don't expect to be educated, because that money for your education has to go to rich cronies who steal it:

The Justice Department is conducting a probe of a $6 billion reading initiative at the center of President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, another blow to a program besieged by allegations of financial conflicts of interest and cronyism, people familiar with the matter said yesterday.

The disclosure came as a congressional hearing revealed how people implementing the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program made at least $1 million off textbooks and tests toward which the federal government steered states.

"That sounds like a criminal enterprise to me," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, which held a five-hour investigative hearing. "You don't get to override the law," he angrily told a panel of Reading First officials. "But the fact of the matter is that you did."

Stealing money from the Reading First program is pretty low. Of course, the NCLB has always been an unfunded mandate that forces schools to "teach to the test" which rewards anyone who prints those testing materials, including the President's brother. The lesson learned by Republicans on this, of course, is to dump education altogether as a priority rather than fund initiatives that help failing schools succeed.

Meanwhile, at those schools, students are taught abstinence-only education instead of responsible sex ed, which is both completely ineffective and medically dangerous, as it gives young people precious little information on sex and contraception, thus increasing the spread of venereal disease.

And once those kids go to college and require financial aid to get the kind of education they need to compete globally, rapacious student-loan companies search private data to prey upon anyone who takes out a loan with mass mailings and the like, including the potential for identity fraud and seriosu abuse. Further, the Administration has turned over the Education Department to lending companies:

The cozy relations that developed among the Bush administration, the Republican-led Congress and the lenders have left the loan industry essentially unregulated. Some observers liken it to the Wild West: Lenders and colleges pursue their own self-interest with little regard for students or taxpayers.

Every company wants to be a college's "preferred lender," competing fiercely to get on such lists. But the dirty little secret of the guaranteed student-loan market is how concentrated it is: Only 32 lenders hold 90% of the loan volume. What's more, the Education Department has found that at about 300 colleges, one lender controls 99% of the loan volume — essentially holding a monopoly on those campuses.

Any company trying to break into the market has to rely on unconventional means. Some upstarts have promoted revenue-sharing arrangements, in which colleges get a cut of each loan that their students take out. Established lenders, worried about losing market share, have taken up similar kickback practices. One of the most egregious schemes is called an "opportunity pool," which was pioneered by loan giant Sallie Mae. Here's how it works: A lender hands a college a fixed amount of private loan money that the institution then can lend to students who otherwise wouldn't qualify for loans because of credit problems. These are private loans — ones that typically come with higher interest rates and fewer consumer protections. In return for the "opportunity pool," the college makes that company its exclusive provider of federally backed loans.

Essentially, lenders are freezing students out of any competition in the student-loan market, forcing them to accept increased rates.

So all of this concern for the children is a lot of bluster, but when you look at the facts, the Republican Party has little more than contempt for them, excepting rich scions of privilege, of course.

P.S. Maybe this is why young people are moving to Democrats more and more, because they see them as the only Party reflecting their interests. This is a great piece on rising Party star and thirtysomething Rep. Tim Ryan.