Tag: college debt

…meanwhile…

(TUE 9/27/22)

1/6 HEARING DELAYED -- The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has delayed its ninth, and potentially last, public hearing originally scheduled for 1 p.m. Wednesday, because of Hurricane Ian brewing off the Florida coast, NPR reports. The make-up date and time is to be announced later.

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Continuing Resolution Update – The White House has asked for a continuing resolution extending the fiscal year past Friday with $47 billion in short-term spending, including $13.7 billion for additional aid to Ukraine, Government Executive reports (govexec.com). The CR also would include $22.4 billion in short-term COVID needs, $4.5 billion for monkeypox vaccinations, testing and treatments, and $6.5 billion to help tribes and territories deal with natural disasters and extreme weather events. 

Bipartisan support: The additional aid to Ukraine has sufficient bipartisan support in the Senate, NPR’s Morning Edition says, where 60 votes are needed for passage. That’s at least 10 Republicans as well as all the Democrats, of course. We’ll be watching to see which MAGA-leaning Republican senators support the vote.

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Cost of College Debt Forgiveness – President Biden’s plan to cancel student debt will cost $420 billion, of which $20 billion is the extension of a pause on student loan payments, according to the Congressional Budget Office, per The Washington Post. The number is roughly equal to the cost of the $1,400 stimulus checks mailed to Americans for pandemic relief at the beginning of the Biden administration. 

Upshot: Cancelling student debt always was going to be a major issue for the midterm elections, with Republican candidates objecting to shifting the student loan payments from former students and their families to taxpayers.

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Jury Selection for Oath Keepers Trial – A federal trial for the far-right Oath Keepers for allegedly helping organize the January 6 Capitol insurrection begins Tuesday, NPR reports. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and his co-defendants are accused of spending months recruiting, training and conspiring to use force to prevent the transfer of power from Donald J. Trump to Joe Biden, according to Morning Edition. The alleged plot included storing guns in Washington, D.C., for a quick reaction force to rush into the city on January 6, if necessary.

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Fake Disinformation Accounts for War in Ukraine – Facebook and Instagram owner Meta was used for hundreds of fake social media accounts and sham news websites that attempted to advance Russia’s cause in its invasion of Ukraine, the Associated Press reports. The scheme involved more than 60 websites designed to mimic legitimate news outlets, including the United Kingdom’s Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel that spread Kremlin talking points about President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Meta said Tuesday.

Note: The Guardian is among news outlets aggregated by our daily coverage. We always go directly to theguardian.com, not via social media.

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On Italy’s Right-Turn – Italy’s new coalition government, led by far-right Brothers of Italy candidate Giorgia Meloni, who becomes the prime minister replacing technocrat Mario Draghi, “threatens to fragment the European Union when unity is more urgent than ever,” Nicholas Lokker and Jason C. Moyer write for The Wilson Center (wilsoncenter.org). While Meloni’s new coalition government has been described as Italy’s most conservative since World War II, the new prime minister has repeatedly expressed support for Ukraine to maintain its democracy in its fight against Russian aggression.

--Edited by Todd Lassa

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What's Up This Week (MON 9/26/22)

Hearing IX – Potentially the last public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is scheduled for this Wednesday beginning 1 p.m. Eastern time. 

“It is possible that it’s the last,” committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. “But as we continue to work, we wouldn’t rule out the possibility of an additional public hearing.”

The 1/6 panel may be running out of time as the GOP probably retakes the House of Representatives in the November 8 midterms. 

Meanwhile, the committee also will interview conservative activist and Supreme Court justice-spouse Virginia Thomas, who exchanged emails with John Eastman, the attorney seen as instrumental in planning alleged Trump White House attempts to reverse the election results. 

“Eastman is the architect of the scheme that one federal judge has described as criminal, and we’d like to learn more about it,” Lofgren said.

Left-column preview: Be sure to read pundit Ken Zino’s Hearing IX “Curtain Raiser” in the left column.

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Senate and House Schedules – Both chambers are off Monday, with the Senate returning Tuesday, as Rosh Hashana concludes, through Friday. The House is in session Wednesday through Friday. 

Critical CR: Both the House and Senate must pass a continuing resolution this week to avoid partial shutdown of the federal government. The fiscal year ends Friday. 

--Edited by Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

The Burden of College Costs

By Chase Wheaton

Higher education should be one of the key pathways to increased access and opportunity for every American. It should provide people with the prospect of increased knowledge, training, and expertise so they can pursue their passions and positively contribute to their communities without limitation. It should, at the end of the day, be a gateway to a more equitable and just society. Unfortunately, in the United States, higher education has been a gatekeeper for all of those things, and it is past time for that to change.

More often than not, the extraordinarily high cost of a college education in the United States, especially compared with much of the rest of the world, serves to prevent an otherwise qualified person from accessing higher education, or it becomes a massive burden for the person to carry after graduation. In 2017, the U.S. Federal Reserve estimated that the average debt from college is $32,731 per graduate. Couple that tremendous debt with the high interest rates many students are forced to pay on loans from private lenders that can easily double the cost of a college education, and you have many graduates paying off loans well into their 30s, 40s, even 50s.

That seems more than the lack of access and opportunity to me. It’s an explicit barrier that only the wealthy and privileged can possibly overcome. This barrier only serves to increase the divide in the quality of life that exists between different populations in the United States. Aside from the vast majority of jobs in the U.S. that require some level of education beyond high school, even employers who don’t require college are much more likely to hire someone with a bachelor’s degree than someone without. There are all kinds of studies showing how lucrative a college degree can be, often higher earnings of $1 million or more over a lifetime.

From this disparity, the cycle repeats itself, and those with the ability to pay for higher education continue to earn higher wages and have better access to higher-paying jobs, which in turn makes them more financially stable over the course of their lifetime, which then allows them to send their children to a college or university, and on and on through the generations.

I think the solution is incredibly simple: Cut military spending. Take a small portion of the $733 billion annual Defense Department budget and re-allocate it to the U.S. Department of Education. Time and time again, the federal government has defunded the Education Department to help pay for more defense spending, so why not flip that script? The College for All Act of 2017 introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-WA, estimated that the cost of free college to the federal government would be $47 billion a year. That’s just 6.5% of the entire Defense budget.

Budgets and federal spending reveal the priorities and values of an entity or institution, and right now, the federal government is telling us it cares more about the idea of complete global military domination than it does about providing all its citizens with programs and services that would vastly improve the quality of life for millions of people. As long as the federal government can continue to afford to give $733 billion to our military every year, you won’t be able to convince me that they shouldn’t be able to do one-fifteenth of that to guarantee every American access to higher education. 

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