Now is a good time to go back to college - you can get a 4.0. Why? because Obama's new plan to help colleges (who don't actually need any help) is to tie federal aid to performance - what's the measure of performance - number of graduates, how do you graduate more students, grade inflation. C is the new F. A is the new C.
How cool and ultimately useful that will be. The department of labor says, only about 20% of jobs need a college degree, yet were pumping out about 30%. Why? well it's good for the colleges, it's great for the teachers. Is it good for the students? with an average debt of $26K and lots of debt in excess of $100K and almost no empolyment opportunity for recent grads- yeah great idea. Do you really want to start your job as a janitor with $30,000 of debt, when you could spend half that, see the world and then end up in the same place with half the debt?
But he has a fix for that too. He wants to cap the payment to 10% of your disposable income, and if you don't get it paid off in 20 years we'll just let it go. So you can rack up a dept of 50K, have a disposable annual income of $1000 and pay be only $100 a year. So let's see if we assume a 0 interest load, you'll pay back $2000 of the $50,000 - Don't you wish they'd do that with your car? Or you house? Wondering who's going to eat the difference?
If you get a federal job you can stop paying after 10 years. Obviously working for the government is good and working for industry is bad. The obvious message is - BIG GOVERNMENT.
The flaw they never talk about is what happens when the costs of federal employees exceeds the income tax of the non-government employees - Government employees pay income tax too you say? OK so we discount the budget line item for salaries by 17% Think that'll solve the problem? You do? did you forget all the other stuff the government spends money on that isn't salary? Where did that money come from?
Compiled from: WSJ, ABC, NYT, and a few others.
I'd start with the WSJ, more facts less fluff.
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