The Impending $1 Trillion Dollar Student Loan Crisis

                                                           

Barack Hussein Obama, in last Saturday morning's weekly address, played pawnbroker and urged Congress to allow students to re-finance their student loans.  He made no mention of student loan debt surpassing the trillion mark last year.  He made no mention of the ten percent annual tuition inflation rate.  He certainly didn't mention that over 50% of last June's graduates are back home with mom and dad, and not working in a job commensurate with their field of study.  And he didn't mention that economists are saying that trillion dollars in student loans are every bit as dangerous as the housing crash and may stunt the growth of the economy for several more years as graduates, so loaded with debt, won't be able to purchase cars or homes.

Nope, Barack just wants to throw more money at the student debt problem, just as he ignores the failure of a 1200 percent increase in K-12 education since 1960 failing to produce high school literates.  But then there's no political gain in doing that, is there?  So Obama is going to, once again, circumvent the Constitution, and Congress, and issue an Executive Order on Monday that will cost taxpayer's over $12 billon dollars in earned interest on taxpayer dollars.  Further, this new easing of student loan interest rates will encourage even more borrowing and even more debt.

Being a responsible citizen, as soon as I heard Obama's weekly address I googled "student loan debt" and came up with all kinds of interesting facts.  

How many of you know that half of all student loans are not spent on school related expenses?  Our current generation of college students are partying in the local pub, furnishing their apartments, attending rock concerts at $150 dollars a pop, purchasing automobiles, buying iPads and iPhones and funding their dating lifestyle?

And why not?  If someone was willing to loan me $12,000 dollars a year, and I only needed half of that to pay for books and tuition, I'd party hearty too...I had no concept of finances at 18 years old!  And if I had a politician who promised me $5, 615 in Pell Grants, with no obligation to pay those grants back, I would have owned a 66 Mustang and hit every Stones or Beatles or Grateful Dead concert that hit town!

During my googling I was somewhat surprised to learn that the greatest misuse of student loans and free Pell Grants is coming from Community Colleges where tuition costs can be as little as two bucks per semester hour!  And not only are these Community College students spending like drunken sailors but they aren't showing the least interest in pursuing academics at the college they are being paid to attend!  Apparently the drop out rate is so bad Community Colleges are trying to stagger student loan and Pell Grant payments just to get these miscreants to stay around awhile!

And I've written of this before, but how many of you know that Uncle Sugar has doled out tens of billions of dollars to allow high school graduates who can't perform at the 12 grade level to attend remedial courses at Community Colleges, just so they can learn what they were supposed to have learned in high school?  And yes, that program too is a failure...so far $147 billion dollars have been spent on this program and over half of all grantees, after taking the money,  never finish their high school remedial program.

None of this was mentioned in Obama's Saturday morning address....that would be much too close to addressing the "real"' problem on our nation's campuses....but it sure as hell gets Democrats elected!

Post Script:  Sacre Bleu!  The liberal YAHOO/ABC news feed just commented on The Anointed One's new Executive Order:  Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Aaron Task has reservations about the order. “In 20 years the debt goes away if you haven’t repaid it all and guess who it goes back to? The taxpayer. And I just don’t think that that’s going to end very well for the taxpayer. It does give an incentive for someone to make less money because their debt payment is going to be less and they know over the course of time that debt’s going to go away,” he says.

Yahoo Finance’s Lauren Lyster points out that this might encourage students to take out more debt than they normally would. Task adds, “That might be the origin of the student debt crisis in the first place - the availability of credit.”

Related: The real reasons the high cost of college is threatening society

The easy credit, concludes Task, is what allows colleges to keep raising prices.  

I'll bet very few of you remembered, or knew that Barack has a built in forgiveness clause in his previous student loan program.  You didn't remember that little "vote-buying" codicil that he put in his last Executive Order that forgives all remaining student loan debt after 20 years!  But that's for our children to pay, and four Presidents later who has to deal with the problem.