Freedom Fighter Media - Obama's Student Loan Grab

Part of Obamacare involves the Obama government taking over the student loans of every American. Good idea? Let's look at an example of just one US government success story.

"Daily value not established."

If you take supplements, you've seen words like those above. I just read it on a bottle of L-Glutamine. Who decides what the daily value is? In the US, it's a government agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

So why hasn't the FDA gotten around to establishing those daily values? It's not like L-Glutamine is some exotic synthetic elixir created by Big Pharma last Tuesday. It's one of the 20 main amino acids, the most abundant one, in fact, and your own body is lousy with this good stuff. You wouldn't exist without it.

L-Glutamine has worked in our bodies since Eden and as a supplement for decades. The FDA regulates supplements. The FDA has existed since 1906 and has over 220 field offices, a dozen laboratories, and even has offices in China, India, Costa Rica, Chile, Belgium, and the UK. But a "daily value" for L-Glutamine? What do you want, government efficiency? In fact, except for the vitamins and minerals, the FDA has established virtually no values for the surfeit of supplements taken in the gajillions by millions of Americans every single day.

Perhaps the FDA might just be responsible for too many things: food, drugs, cosmetics, veterinary, tobacco. Tobacco? Isn't that also the purview of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF)? Two mammoth government agencies involved in the same thing. What could go wrong there? Well, you could always have more overlap from the Agriculture Department or the Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration, or the Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services (not to be confused with the Food Safety and Inspection Service).

Come to think of it, maybe the ATF is stretched in too many directions just like the FDA. And why Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms? Who comes up with these amalgamations? The FDA should give the ATF it's "Drugs" and give the Firearms to...well shouldn't firearms have it's own agency?

Obama's administration has just made the biggest play of all, taking over 1/6 of the American economy, aka: healthcare. On a smaller scale, and under the auspices of helping to pay for his boondoggle, Obama wants to take over the entire student loan system.

The government is already involved with student loans, just not totally. Obama claims that if he, er, the government, was in complete charge, the student loan system wouldn't be the mess it is today. He's right. It would be worse. "According to new numbers from the U.S. Department of Education, default rates for federally guaranteed student loans are expected to reach 6.9% for fiscal year 2007. That's up from 4.6% two years earlier and would be the highest rate since 1998." (Anne Marie Chaker, Wall Street Journal, 21 April 2009).

The government is run by people who, with few exceptions, have never run a business, had to meet a payroll, or had to deal with the strangling regulations of which government intrusion is full. So why should it be involved in student loans? Come to think of it, why is the government involved with students at all?

"According to the California Department of Education, the 2007-2008 average per pupil school year expense was $8,594 ($9,000 is the average). Students across Los Angeles attend extremely overcrowded classrooms. Half of all math classrooms and two of every three science classrooms in the LAUSD enroll more than 33 students. But this will require us to invest more in our schools. Los Angeles schools spend only 85% of what the average U.S. school spends per student. Surely we can and must do better." (John Rogers, Assistant Professor, UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, 8 November 2006, kcet.org)

As long as we're throwing numbers around, $8,594 x 33 comes to $283,602 being spent on that over-crowded class. Teachers get about $50K a year. Even being generous that all the other overhead (schoolbooks every few years, utilities, grounds and house keeping, etc.) comes to another $50K, that leaves $183,602 -- per classroom -- unaccounted for. Well, if the whole $283,602 isn't making it to the classroom, the educrats' answer is (this will shock you): more money must be sucked out of the tax-payers' veins.

"Democrats tend to have more faith in the system than they have in the individual. When President Reagan tried to close the Department of Education, he was considered to be against education. It’s not just spin, Democrats really think that way. They feel it’s important to keep the Department of Education, because without it, there will be no education. Without the Department of Health, we would all be sick; without the Department of Commerce, the economy would fold. Ditto for the FDA, the FCC, FAA, and the rest of the alphabet soup...They want to live under a huge bureaucracy that will direct their life, from the time they are born into a government hospital through their time in government schools, then punch the clock at a government job until a government appointed doctor gives them an assisted suicide. A Democrat Utopia would be like a human zoo where the lions are kept separate from the zebras, every one is fed, and the doctor comes round once a year. Just keep re-electing Democrats who will insure the air is clean, your food is safe, your retirement is secure, and the tithe is paid." (Tim Slagle, Big Hollywood, 3 July 2009)

Thomas J. Clement