Remember that great youth movement for Obama — the young supporters, first-time voters, mostly college kids? Well, they fucked up! They trusted him! “Obama’s Balloon: Federal Student Loan Debt Up 517% in 5 Years”:
Since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, the cumulative outstanding balance on federal direct student loans has jumped 517.4 percent.
The balance owed as of the end of May was $739,641,000,000.00. That is an increase of $619,838,000,000.00 from the balance that was owed as of the end of January 2009, when it was $119,803,000,000.00, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement.
Earlier this month, Obama announced new executive actions to allow five million student-loan borrowers to cap their monthly payments at 10% of their income, according to the White House.
“Now, I’ve made it clear that I want to work with Congress on this issue. Unfortunately, a generation of young people can’t afford to wait for Congress to get going,” Obama said. “In this year of action, wherever I’ve seen ways I can act on my own to expand opportunity to more Americans, I have. And today, I’m going to take three actions to help more young people pay off their student loan debt.”
Oh, joy! The benevolent dictator who oversaw the explosion of student loan enslavement while orchestrating the takeover of the student loan industry and nationalizing it is going to help the little people! Blessed be the One!
According to the White House, “The President will direct the Secretary of Education to ensure that student loans remain affordable for all who borrowed federal direct loans as students by allowing them to cap their payments at 10 percent of their monthly incomes. The Department will begin the process to amend its regulations this fall with a goal of making the new plan available to borrowers by December 2015.”
During President George W. Bush’s time in office, the amount of outstanding loans increased from $67,979,000,000.00 in January of 2001 to $119,803,000,000 in January of 2009, an increase of 76.2%. This means that under President Obama, the amount of federal direct student loans increased 579% more than under President Bush.
Which, of course, is Bush’s fault.
Anyway, for those keeping score at home, the Man of the People has overseen the fall of median incomes; the explosion of welfare recipients, a dramatic increase in the price of goods and energy; and an increasing rate of poverty. The champion of women in the War on Women has decreased the number of women in the workplace, and engaged in income disparity between the men and women in his own administration, with men earning more than women. The black-like-us President has presided over soaring unemployment among blacks, especially young blacks, and his myopic and economically illiterate insistence on minimum wage increases will create of young urbanized blacks a condition of permanent government clientism — that is, a new form of Democrat-created slavery. And now we see that he’s working on enslaving the future bourgeois by saddling them with student loans — while never once asking why the cost of a university education is so enormous as to be outrageous.
Sometimes you need to be careful what you ask for. Because as every con man will tell you, it’s your own greed that s/he is targeting — indeed, relying upon — to make sure you’re rolled.
Unfortunately, the useful idiots who voted for this guy sucked us all along for the ride.
cap their monthly payments at 10% of their income
Oh look. A tithe.
But he’s a good man. Mitt Romney vouched for him.
Which is why he’s President and Mitt Romney isn’t.
How long before a new government policy promoting “work off your debt through working for government” goes into effect?
Minimum qualifications: Must have not less than $200,000 in debt and hold a degree in one of the following: Women’s Studies, Art history, LGBT Theory or Marxism, theory and practice.
Man, if only Doug Elmendorf could see us now.
More importantly, how long before
educationcredentials, like healthcaretreatments, are so damnexpensiverationed that only people in good political standing can afford to have them?Except for the rich of course. Who will still be to blame.
It’s already here, Blake. I know a number of medical students who are indentured to the Rez for 4-8 years.
I have to assume the scary +517% number is mostly due to the Fed Govt’s nationalizing of the student loan industry in 2010, and not an explosion of new indebtedness. Most of the ‘new’ $619B in debt was previously owed to private banks.
The kids aren’t dramatically more enslaved now than they were then, only their master has changed. And unlike private banking, their new master has the ability to zero out or reduce their debt on a whim, without any of that pesky “being sued by the stockholders” business.
So it’s arguably kinda a win for the students. Well, except for the fact that their new master also has a monopoly on the use of force (trigger warning!), and can make debtors work for OFA, assist elderly Democrat Senators by ‘making sandwiches’, or pick cotton, as desired.
So yeah, there’s that whole Slavery angle to contend with. Perhaps this time it’ll be the predominantly red states of the South rising up and going to war to do the whole “end this vile practice” thing.
At the modern university, the tenured celebrity professor who doesn’t teach and gets paid is the 1 percent and the adjunct that teaches, but is unlikely to ever get tenure or a decent paycheck, is the 99 percent. But just as national inequality did not happen because a few CEOs receive huge salaries, student loan debt didn’t spin out of control because of a few celebrity Socialist 1 percent professors.
i made some very real sacrifices what were degrading of my dignity to pay off all my school loans lickety split quick like a bunny
i ate bologna for god’s sake
fuck you Barack Obama
This is the part where I say that we are so screwed.
The balance owed as of the end of May was $739,641,000,000.00.
Hell, that’s just a rounding error in Obama’s budget. (Assuming that he ever bothers to get one passed. Crazy talk, I know, but who needs a Constitution?)
– A voice of sanity in the din of the Obama chaos.
oh shut says valgal junta
Please understand that I’m not referring to just the student loans. That’s a symptom, not the disease.
My wife’s student loans were paid off very soon after she graduated; she and her mother made it a top priority.
I didn’t even take out a student loan myself, because back then you needed decent credit and some prospect of being able to pay them off.
Greetings:
For quite a while now, I’ve been thinking of federal student loans and such as the follow on of President Clinton I’s “welfare reform” initiative. What has shaped my view has been TV’s most subversive Conservative, namely, “Judge Judy”. When I see the numbers of her plaintiffs and defendants who are supping at that trough, their ages and personal histories, I have to conclude two things. One, this is nothing more than “wealth redistribution” by other means. And two, how stupid would one have to be to loan these individuals anything more than a nickel.
It is getting harder and harder to avoid conscription in the Left’s ‘movements’ anymore. Their tolling turnstiles proliferate around the free citizen at every turn. Putting the taxpayers on the line to pay for the Lefts’ activists’ university debt is one more brick in the wall.
Getting the American sheep to fleece themselves is a silent glee to the Alinskyites in academia.
And the universities, themselves, appear inescapable, too. Their perverse speech codes and identity fetishes, used so ferociously to cow their paying enlisted’s on ‘the Square,’ now permeate discourse and legislation from Mayberry to Marin. And the credentia-ist monopoly enjoyed by higher ed finds endless customers in the certification and regulatory machinery at the Federal, state and local levels.
And even the US Patent Office is infected: You simply cannot live free from these campuses anymore.
There is an analog for this quiet encirclement lawful citizens by abstract campuses in America. It lies in our system of sentencing convicted criminals, and grew out of the manufactured crisis that is “prison overcrowding.”
Our criminal prisoners, once institutionalized, used to stay confined to the prison grounds for the duration of their term. This arrangement properly delimited the prison campus and the wardens’ punitive jurisdictions. Then, as parole gained in popularity, criminals were released into the general population and tracked – thus, the finite punitive campus, “prison,” was extended abstractly into AnyMan’s neighborhood. Then, the courts further smudged the prison campus’ limits with its sexual molesters’ program. Here, a convicted ‘predator’ is allowed to domicile comfortable at her home, the prison being represented physically by her tracking anklet and her warden’s telephone calls, but abstractly by the looming scold inherent in public sex-molester databases. With this, the latest extending perversion, the prison – along with its need for monitoring and selective licenses to interrogate, suspect, and tattle-tale, exploded onto every block in America.
The Left lives wholly within the wool of its itchy campuses, and it thinks the rest of us should, too. And, knowing that we are unlikely to submit voluntarily to their identity clubs and join obediently in their tribal conga-lines, they are content to simply erect them around us if need be. And so it goes…