The GOP is on the warpath against Pell Grants currently. When Paul Ryan-Mr. Medicare Block Grants-was asked about his opposition to these grants that help lower income students, he answered that students should work 3 jobs and take out a student loan.
During a town hall today, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) was asked by Matthew Lowe, a student, why the GOP wants to cut Pell Grants. Ryan responded by saying that the program is “unsustainable,” before telling Lowe that he should be working three jobs and taking out student loans to pay for college, instead of using Pell Grants:
LOWE: I come from a very middle-class family and under President Obama, I get $5,500 per year to pay for school, which doesn’t come close to covering all of the funding, but it helps ease the burden. Under your plan, you cut it by 15 percent. I was just curious why you would cut a grant that goes directly to the middle- and lower-class people that need it the most.
RYAN: ‘Cause Pell Grants have become unsustainable. It’s all borrowed money…Look, I worked three jobs to pay off my student loans after college. I didn’t get grants, I got loans, and we need to have a system of viable student loans to be able to do this. The second concern I have is, in the health care bill — people don’t know this — for budgetary gimmickry reasons, the administration and Congress at the time, took over the student loan industry. So they had the federal government, the Department of Education, basically confiscate the private student loan industry.
http://thinkprogress.org/education/2011/10/20/349627/paul-ryan-three-jobs-pell-grants/
Ryan is half right: it is true that the private school loan industry has been shut down. What he doesn't say is that it's not a moment too soon. I don't know what this "viable structure of school loans" is about but surely he doesn't mean that we need to increase the number of private loans?! The idea that the answer for young Americans is to take ever larger levels of school loans is to condemn them to a life time of indentured servitude. As student loans are constituted today they are like no other loan on earth. There is no bankruptcy protection and the lenders can garnish your wages. Mr. Ryan is all heart huh? He doesn't see why a college student should do anything but work during college to pay for school loans, they are allowed no time for enjoyment or even studying. Then when they get out they will have no job anyway as Mr. Ryan and his fellow conservatives not only do nothing to bring down the unemployment rate they are actively working to stop it from dong so with their austerity and illusions about "structural unemployment."
I'm going as far as to say that there are tea party nuts out there that are actively urging businesses not to hire. http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/10/19/tea-party-nation-urges-businesses-to-stop-hiring-people-in-order-to-bring-down-president-obama/
So today's college student leaves college that they spent working three jobs rather than having any fun or experiences or even having much time to study-who knows how he got out of college?-and now he finds no jobs and yet owes thousands of dollars to the school lenders. And of course because of the general deflationary economy we live in, these loans are worth more and more. Paul Ryan making dreams come true; of course these dreams are all nightmares.
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