Obama’s slacker-bailout move

If you’ve got lots of student debt, thank public education, Democratic welfare politics, and your parents.

You can blame public education for failing to give you even the most rudimentary education in economics.

Thank Democratic welfare politics for giving you the notion that you deserve stuff for free and that somebody else can pay for it.

Blame your parents for not filling the gap in your economic education and for not disabusing you of harmful socialistic ways of thinking.

So now you’re a hopeless slacker, living in your old bedroom at home when you’re not carrying a “Kill the Rich” sign at an Occupy Wall Street protest, all the while texting your friends on your iPhone and keeping track of all the other slacker losers friends via Facebook on your MacBook Pro, typing whenever you don’t need to flutter your fingers to show solidarity with a left-wing speaker using a bullhorn, and circulating petitions for a student-loan bailout.

You got that undergraduate degree in sociology and that master’s degree in counseling, and suddenly you realize that you’re only trained to be a parole officer, and that doesn’t pay enough to pay off your $60,000 in student debt.

A story in The News & Observer highlighted the sob story of Alison Wadsworth, an UNC-Chapel Hill grad who got a law degree and an MBA from Campbell University. Now she’s working as a sales clerk with a huge college-loan debt.

Note to Alison: We. Don’t. Care. You chose to incur this debt for your glam degrees. You ought to have to pay it back with no help from the taxpayers. But, as much as Obama claims this won’t cost the taxpayer anything, taxpayers will likely end up paying off most of your loan. Under Obama’s new guidelines, you never have to pay more than 10 percent of your salary as a loan payment, and after 20 years you’re free to quit paying at all.

Now, if one day you’re actually working as a whizbang lawyer or CEO somewhere, you’ll be one of the lucky ones, and maybe you’ll actually pay off your ill-advised loan. But thousands of kids with huge student loans are working as baristas, waitresses, and unemployed actors. Their small pittance of monthly payments will never pay off their loans. And after 20 years, the taxpayer will suck it up.

In fact, as with most liberal programs, there is no incentive to do the right thing. Just the opposite, in fact. Most student-loan “victims” will be content to pay the minimum for 20 years and then stick the taxpayer. To say this is an affront to kids and parents who actually did the responsible thing and paid their own way is an understatement.

But, hey, it’s just another step down the “redistribution of wealth” road that Obama and his czars have put us on.

(Photo credit: Carolina Journal‘s David N. Bass took the accompanying photo at an Occupy Raleigh “general assembly” in Moore Square on Oct. 2.)