Obama's legacy of student loan dependency: America has 2 million too many enrolled in college

In 1990 7.3% of the civilian noninstitutional population was enrolled in college or graduate school.

In 2016 that has grown to 8.1%.

The difference in 2016 comes to almost 2 million.

That's one reason why college tuition has exploded, along with the student loans to fund it.

Loans outstanding in 2016 are FIFTY-ONE TIMES their size in 1997.

The current balance of $1.05 trillion is an artifact of the Obama disaster, financing "education" for the chronically unemployed.

Just ask the kids using their loans to finance Spring Break. 

If the Fed can buy $4 trillion in shitty mortgages and Treasuries, it can buy $1 trillion in student loan debt

Just sayin'.

Crony Socialism: Fed Profits On College Student Loans Rank Third Behind Exxon-Mobil And Apple!

Or is that socialist cronyism?

Anyway, those thirsty blood suckers in the federal government made $41.3 billion off the nation's college student loan program in fiscal 2013, according to the Detroit Free Press, here:

It’s a higher profit level than all but two companies in the world: Exxon Mobil cleared $44.9 billion in 2012, and Apple cleared $41.7 billion.

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That's not quite right, however.

In 2012 the profits thrown off from massive numbers of government bonds and mortgage backed securities "purchased" by the Federal Reserve and returned to the Treasury by the Fed were more than double that, as reported here last January:

The Federal Reserve sent a record $88.9 billion in profits to the Treasury Department in 2012 as it reaped gains from the unconventional programs it launched to spur economic growth.

Last year's remittance to Treasury topped the previous record of $79.3 billion in 2010, Fed records show.

Spineless Republicans Cave On Cordray Nomination, CFPB Spying On Citizens

Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), Susan Collins (Maine), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), John McCain (Ariz.), Rob Portman (Ohio), Roger Wicker (Miss.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Bob Corker (Tenn.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) voted with Democrats to confirm Cordray. ... Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee ... pointed out that Republicans want to replace Cordray's director position with a bipartisan “board of directors with staggered terms.” He also expressed concern over recent reports that the bureau is conducting “unprecedented data collection.” “The CFPB [Consumer Protection Financial Bureau] is collecting credit card data, bank account data, mortgage data and student loan data,” Crapo said ahead of the vote. “This ultimately allows the CFPB to monitor a consumer’s monthly spending habits.”

More here, if you need to puke.

Sen. Harry Reid wins.

"It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad."

So says Edward Leamer, Director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, here in The Los Angeles Times:

The country's tepid growth in its gross domestic product isn't creating enough good jobs to build a strong middle class, according to a UCLA report released Wednesday. ...

Real GDP growth — the value of goods and services produced after adjusting for inflation — is 15.4% below the 3% growth trend of past recoveries, wrote Edward Leamer . . ..

"It's not a recovery," he wrote. "It's not even normal growth. It's bad." ...

Young adults are facing staggering student loan debt that will force them to put off buying homes until later in life, said senior economist David Shulman.

Outstanding student loans have tripled since 2004, according to Federal Reserve Bank figures. In 2012, public and private student loan levels reached $966 billion.

"Never before have so many young people been saddled with so much non-mortgage debt, and that burden will keep them out of the home buying market for years to come," Shulman wrote.

Obama Is Eliminating The Middle Class, But Do You Know Why?

Based on how thorough-going are Obama's attacks on the middle class, I'd say it's all intentional, something the professor would not dare say if he wants to keep his career, so I'll say it for him since I don't have a career to save.

Summarized from an op-ed by Peter Morici, University of Maryland, here:

His immigration policy swells the ranks of visa-holders in skill-short areas like engineering as well as the ranks of semi-skilled immigrant workers, frustrating the middle-class aspirations of the working poor born in this country.

His massive expansion of student loans permits universities to jack up tuition . . . Students are graduating encumbered by massive debt and too few marketable skills. Broke and unemployed, they are not marrying and starting families—that shrinks the middle class. 

Despite the availability of loans, skyrocketing tuition mandates ever greater family contributions to finance college. This puts higher education further out of reach for many working class families, and fewer low income children are pursuing post-secondary education than in the past—that shrinks the middle class too.

The President has jacked up taxes on families earning more than $250,000. Unfortunately, most businesses in America are either proprietorships or pass through corporations that pay those higher individual, as opposed to corporate, tax rates, raising the cost of investing and expanding businesses—that spells fewer jobs for the middle class and those that aspire to its ranks.

Unable to push through Congress limits on CO2 emissions, President Obama has used executive orders and the EPA to impose limits by fiat. Unfortunately, those raise manufacturing costs, China has no such limits, and all this encourages business to outsource in China—again fewer jobs for the middle class and aspiring middle class.

Free trade agreements that permit trading partners to undervalue their currencies, subsidize exports and artificially under price their products on U.S. store shelves, health care mandates that raise the price of insuring employees instead of controlling costs, unnecessarily cumbersome regulations to run factories, mindless limits on developing U.S. oil reserves, and exporting abundant natural gas to countries that shut out U.S. products with high tariffs all encourage outsourcing, not just in manufacturing but for many supporting services too—yet again, fewer jobs for middle class Americans.

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“The lower middle-class,” in Marx’s words, “has no special class interests. Its liberation does not entail a break with the system of private property. Being unfitted for an independent part in the class struggle, it considers every decisive class struggle a blow at the community. The conditions of his own personal freedom, which do not entail a departure from the system of private property, are, in the eyes of the member of the lower middle-class, those under which the whole of society can be saved.”

And this is the very reason why the lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They represent a very strong section of society. Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods.

The disturbance of credit cuts the ground from under their feet. They begin shouting for order, for the strengthening of credit, in such a way that every concession to them leads in effect to a complete restoration of the old order. ...

[Marx] wished to separate the Labour movement from all lower middle class elements, because the lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.

-- Bela Kun, Pravda, May 4, 1918 (Marxists Internet Archive, here)

The New York Times Uncorks The Wildest Slur Yet Against The Tea Party

Suddenly the Tea Party is the most selfish, arrogant and yet servile lot on the planet, according to one Jennifer Burns, an assistant professor at Stanford, for The New York Times, here:

". . . the Tea Party, whose members believe they are the only ones who deserve government aid."

Wow. Haven't heard that one yet. Is that what it takes to get tenure at Stanford these days? The intimate connection she divines between the Randians and the Tea Party is, quite simply, the sort of fantasy one might expect of someone trying to find something new to say. Not that the Shruggers wouldn't like to co-opt the Tea Party. They would, and they are trying, as is the Republican Party's Dick Armey, which is enough to give anyone who has watched them from the beginning the staggers. The spontaneous revulsion of common, everyday folk in America to the designs of their elected leaders provoked the reaction which is the Tea Party, most of which is as non-ideological as a hamburger. 

I dunno, maybe she's confusing the Tea Party with Occupy Wall Street, some of whose members are infamous for demanding student loan forgiveness, and the right to poop on your stoop.

Just two years ago in Slate Mark Gimein could reasonably characterize the Tea Party as "the responsibles" who rose up against "the deadbeats", homeowners who had stopped paying on their mortgages and wanted bailouts from the Obama regime even as millions of underwater homeowners continued to pay on theirs.

I guess Jennifer is fairly new to the planet.

"Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison"

The greedy Marxists who outnumber conservatives on college faculties by three to one figured out long ago how to avoid the draft, subvert the values of America's children and future teachers of the young, and get rich doing it all at the same time.

It's been a veritable trinity of scams milked by the coward and follower classes: military conscription deferments for MA and PhD students, the tenure system which has permanently installed radicals nationwide, and now the most important, federally-backed student loans.

The Economist in September 2010 (link) noted the incredible disparity in the rates of college cost and income increases:

College fees have for decades risen faster than Americans’ ability to pay them. Median household income has grown by a factor of 6.5 in the past 40 years, but the cost of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and 24 for out-of-state students. The cost of attending a private college has increased by a factor of more than 13 (a year in the Ivy League will set you back $38,000, excluding bed and board). Academic inflation makes medical inflation look modest by comparison.

More recently Virginia Postrel thinks the reason costs have escalated is the federal student loan program itself, a veritable gravy train which guarantees rising costs for everything academic (link):


Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions. ...

If you offer people a subsidy to pursue some activity requiring an input that’s in more-or-less fixed supply, the price of that input goes up. Much of the value of the subsidy will go not to the intended recipients but to whoever owns the input. ...

[T]he number of slots at traditional colleges and universities is relatively fixed. A boost in student aid that increases demand is therefore likely to be reflected in prices rather than expanded enrollments. Over time, enrollments should rise, as they have in fact done. But many private schools in particular keep the size of their student bodies fairly stable to maintain their prestige or institutional character.

Arrests Spread as Occupy Wall Street Spreads

Like a disease.

Last time I checked, ZERO Tea Partiers have been arrested for anything since 2009, but just over the weekend unruly Occupy Wall Streeters in scores have been arrested:

175 arrests in Chicago;

another two dozen in New York City (where police were injured);

an unknown number of arrests in Tucson;

maybe 40 in Phoenix;

and at least two dozen in Colorado.

See the AP story here.

Tea Partiers protested bailouts in the name of free market capitalism's cure for failure: bankruptcy. They showed up at the ballot box in November 2010 and put a stop to Barack Obama's Democrat Party. Now they wait for November 2012.

Meanwhile, Occupy Wall Streeters suddenly decide to protest bailouts in the name of bailouts for their student loans, a living wage, and sundry other entitlements which don't yet exist but they hope to extract by mob action and intimidation, the modus operandi of the unions.

A cold snap can't come soon enough, or a flu epidemic.

Sarah Palin Quit a Governorship, and Bails Out of a Race for President

Americans don't like quitters. Just like they don't like bailouts, unless they get one. All the Wall Street occupiers would go home tomorrow if you just gave them what they want: cancellation of their student loans. Political protest? I call it extortion.

I'm guessing the polling in the aftermath of Palin's Sept. 3 "crony capitalism" speech didn't look very good, either, otherwise Sarah would be getting ready to run right now, not announcing that she's quitting before she's begun.

I don't think anyone really believed her on Sept. 3, seeing how she defended the bailouts after McCain's defeat. She got the religion against bailouts long after the fact, then didn't press it home consistently as the number one issue and got sidetracked by all kinds of other stuff, only to find at this late juncture that the issue has, unhappily, lost its intelligibility among the electorate.

Government intervention in the financial sector has been too bewilderingly thorough-going and complex even for the experts to explain, even when they've been against it. Which is why people end up accepting facile explanations, which boobs like Rush Limbaugh excel at explaining and which elites are happy for people to believe as the surest way forward to business as usual.

One day after declining to run, here, Rush Limbaugh is telling his listeners that the bank bailouts were a big success, that TARP has been repaid, and that the banks are on the side of free-market capitalism, so don't be deceived and fall for occupywallst.org.

Too bad we haven't really had any free market capitalism since FDR, just big shots who stand to gain the most because they are the first in line for the money, which other big shots need at preferred rates to do business.

Try to remember that every time Rush takes an obscene profit center time out.

The rest is just entertainment.

Greedy Little Monsters 'Occupy' This City and That, Seeking Forgiveness of Student Loans

In DC, the mostly leftist little monsters closest to the federal feeding trough were more careful to de-emphasize the fascist partnership between the current regime and the banks in hope of getting them to forgive their debts, too, and make the 1-percenters who already pay for almost everything pay for that as well. Stories here and here, and video here.

likes Obama, sees a bailout as reform

can't stay, has to go to class

Which just proves that greed is not the exclusive preserve of the rich and powerful. But cut off the student loan gravy train and the student protesters would be replaced by tens of thousands of unemployed PhDs, college administrators and support personnel from newly closed colleges and universities all across the land, which would be a good first step in improving education in America. 

Some worshippers at the altar of the great god have discovered that the religion is not all it's cracked up to be:

purportedly seen in Wall Street

Obama Caused the Panic, Not the Media

So says Jim Cramer. And he voted for the guy.

Video here:

"He came out and panicked the heck out of us.

"He talked about the higher interest rates for mortgages, he talked to spiking credit cards, he talked about how hard it's going to be to get a student loan. It took us all aback because we felt that he'd be a compromise leader.

"Instead, he created tremendous fear. Tremendous fear means uncertainty. Uncertainty means no spending. Uncertainty means no spending by businesses. It means no hiring. It was a setback.

"He caused the panic, not the media."


Obama went outside the experience of his enemy, Jim Cramer.

Now You Know Why The Dept. of Education Wanted to Procure Shotguns

The "federal business opportunity" placed here on March 8, 2010 was for 27 shotguns for the Dept. of Education.

They probably used them in the recent raid reported here, smashing down a family's door at six in the morning, looking for payment on delinquent student loans.

There's an old saying that if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have them.

Shotguns with barrels less than 18 inches long are outlawed. That's why Obama's fascist police state thugs from the Department of Education procured shotguns with 14" barrels.

Think of it as close quarters tutoring.

As we reported here, the IRS got some too, for close quarters audits, and ObamaCare insurance compliance.

Obama Safeguards Student Loans So Much He'll Break Down Your Door to Get to Them

"We be loans and shit."

Story here.

The Truth About Student Loans

From Mish, here:

Obama brags about safeguarding student loans. That is like bragging about safeguarding the plague.

Student loans have done four things, all of them bad.

Jack up the cost of education

Make students debt slaves for the rest of their lives

Unjustly hand over huge profits to schools like the University of Phoenix at taxpayer expense

Add to the national debt

The best thing to do with student loans would be scrap the program entirely.

America worships at the altar of a secular god, education. The student loans are the sacrifices offered thereon. The professoriate is the priesthood, which grows fat on the first fruits. And the campi are its churches and cathedrals. The Ivies are the Holy See. And the liberalism taught there is the indulgence of its day. It desperately needs a Luther to nail it to the wall. Perhaps he will be called Bankruptcy.

Suddenly Sarah Palin Gets Bailout Religion

In September of 2008 Sarah Palin was completely on-board with the idea of the bailout which subsequently came to be known as TARP. She and John McCain were wrong on the one issue which might have swept them into office.

A little more than a year later in her book Going Rogue she still defended the bailout of the banks.

But now, just a few months down the road from the book's release, she's suddenly outraged that the banks have suffered no consequences and that the bailout dam has inexplicably burst forth like a flood, as if she had nothing to do with its inception.

From her Tea Party speech in Nashville:

We can be conquered by bombs, but we can also be conquered by neglect, by ignoring our Constitution and disregarding the principles of limited government. . . .Washington has now replaced private irresponsibility with public irresponsibility. The list of companies and industries that the government is crowding out and bailing out and taking over, it continues to grow.

First, it was the banks, mortgage companies, financial institutions, then automakers. Soon, if they had their way, health care, student loans. Today, in the words of Congressman Paul Ryan, the $700 billion TARP has morphed into crony capitalism at its wors[t]. It is becoming a slush fund for the Treasury Department's favorite big players, just as we had been warned about.

While people on main street look for jobs, people on Wall Street, they're collecting billions and billions in your bailout bonuses. Among the top 17 companies that received your bailout money, 92 percent of the senior officers and directors, they still have their good jobs. And everyday Americans are wondering, where are the consequences for them helping to get us into this worst economic situation since the great depression? Where are the consequences?

Sarah Palin represents nothing so much now as a follower of the Tea Party movement. That's one down. And if a third of the voters are already sympathetic as well, that's only 23 million or so to go to a popular majority.

Good luck with that.