Saturday, February 09, 2008

Enough Is Enough   [Victor Davis Hanson]

OK, already — enough about those loans.

I think the Obamas really need to cool it on their personal angst stories about their student loans. Two Harvard Law tuitions are not an entitlement, but a gamble-one of going into short-term debt to have marquee credentials for long-term security.

In their case, their joint professional careers and incomes (apparently nearly a million last year) paid off well and more than justified their savvy undergraduate and professional school Ivy-League gambit.

But consider: (1) that their Ivy-League student loans are hardly proof of first-hand experience with typical student indebtedness; (2) that their availability (e.g. why is the public subsidizing Harvard Law School?) should instead be a reason for gratitude to the government for the subsidy rather than anger that it had to be paid back; (3) that a better source of criticism would be the universities themselves whose tuition rises faster than inflation, and whose billion-plus tax-exempt endowments could subsidize tuition far better, as Congress is now arguing; (4) that the remedy of eliminating private lenders and creating or expanding another federal agency, is, by liberal universities' own admission, going to raise not cut costs.

There is a familiar theme here unfortunately: the expansion of middle-class entitlements is a birthright that only government can grant; and the experience of relatively affluent Harvard-trained lawyers gives them first-hand empathy with the middle-class ordeal.

02/09 07:50 PMShare