The Education President! Barack Obama! ,The Education Candidate, Mitt Romney!!Funny! I believe there was another president...a republican , that originally coined that title..Was it George W.????? Nah...It couldn't be. This week, President Barack Obama is on a blitz to keep the cost of college loans from soaring for millions of students, taking his message to three states strategically important to his re-election bid.
By taking on student debt,President Obama is speaking to middle-class America and targeting an enormous burden that threatens the economic recovery. Now of course the spin meisters at Fox News, who take everything the man does and try to spin it in the negative is saying that he is just trying to woo young voters. Of course he is...and what is wrong with that?
Interestingly enough, before President Obama got his road trip under way,His chief Republican opponent, Mitt Romney found a way to steal some thunder from the president’s campaign argument: He agreed with it. (For now anyway...Next week, he won't!)
The two competitors are now on record for freezing the current interest rates on a popular federal loan for poorer and middle-class students. The issue is looming because the rate will double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1 without intervention by Congress, an expiration date chosen in 2007 when a Democratic Congress voted to chop the rate in half. President Obama is heading to campuses in the South, West and Midwest to sell his message to colleges audiences who are bound to support it.
As he pressures Republicans in Congress to act, he will also be trying to energize the young people essential to his campaign – those same young people who voted for him last time and the many more who have turned voting age since then.
The president speaks Tuesday at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and then the University of Iowa on Wednesday. All three universities are in states that Obama carried in 2008, and all three states are considered among the several that could swing to President Obama or Mitt Romney and help decide a close 2012 election. Both campaigns are fighting for the support of voters buried in college debt.
The national debt amassed on student loans is higher than that for credit cards or auto loans. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has estimated about 15 percent of Americans, or 37 million people, have outstanding student loan debt. The banks put the total at $870 billion, though other estimates have reached $1 trillion. About two-thirds of student loan debt is held by people under 30. Ahhh brings back memories of when I was in my twenties and early thirties ,when I was in student loan debt.
Thankfully, that is all ancient history to me now...but I certainly feel their pain. President Obama, previewing the message he will give at all three colleges, said over the weekend that allowing the interest rates to double this summer would hurt more than 7 million students.
The White House said it would cost students $1,000, based on the average amount borrowed a year ($4,200) and the average time it takes to pay the loan (12 years). “That would be a tremendous blow,” President Obama said. “And it’s completely preventable.” Mitt Romney agreed with that conclusion even in the midst of blasting President Obama’s economic leadership. “Given the bleak job prospects that young Americans coming out of college face today, I encourage Congress to temporarily extend the low rate,” Romney said in a statement.
Both President Obama and Mitt Romney are championing what amounts to a one-year, election-year fix at a cost of roughly $6 billion. Congress seems headed that way. Members of both parties are assessing ways to cover the costs and win the votes in the House and Senate, which is far from a political certainty.
All parties involved have political incentive to keep the rates as they are. If you remember, President Obama carried voters between the ages of 18-29 by a margin of about 2-to-1 in 2008, but many recent college graduates have faced high levels of unemployment. That raises concerns for the president about whether they will vote and volunteer for him in such large numbers again. Lord knows ...we need their energy!
1 comment:
Hey Keith, here's my two cents, late. We can't rely on young people to help our president! When we look closely at the numbers, the youth vote increased by just 1%!! That was with Russell Simmons, hiphop stars, and the Rock the Vote effort. Young folks don't have the reputation for showing up and following through. Yes, they filled the streets at get-out-the-vote rallies but on election day too many just stayed home!!
I'm still hopefull. I believe good always triumphs. To me this election is about the ethnicity of the president. Some folks will vote against their children's lives if it keeps another person down. That's what these folks are doing. They can't stand the idea, let alone actuality, of a black man in the oval office.
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