E.J. Dionne's commentary in the Washington Post today, A Political Idea Warp, makes the point that sometimes political labels are less than helpful in evaluating various proposals before Congress. He uses the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act as an example.
The bill, which passed 253 to 171, would allocate about $80 billion over the next decade for new loans, community colleges, school construction and early childhood programs without increasing taxes or adding to the deficit. How? Instead of paying bankers to provide loans for which they bear no real risk, the government would make the loans directly.Mr. Dionne also remarks about how this talk over labels and "prefabricated boxes" is coloring the health care debate. We encourage you to read the entire article.
Liberals are always accused of spending money without worrying where it comes from, but in this case, costs are covered by making a government program more efficient -- yes, at the expense of bankers.
"We were paying these exorbitant subsidies to bankers who were taking government money, loaning it to somebody else, getting government guarantees that the loans would be paid back, and then taking all these profits," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the bill's champion. This, he told me, led Congress to ask itself: "Hey, chump, what is it you don't get about what's going on here?" The only knock on the proposal is ideological: that government is "taking over" the student loan program. But it's already a government program. The bill simply eliminates corporate welfare.
This is a classic case of how the Great Ideological Distortion Machine does its mischief: Instead of focusing on how the bill advances values typically regarded as "centrist" -- government efficiency, pay-as-you-go budgeting -- the banks' defenders bury the specifics behind abstract discussions of "big government." Yet I'd venture that middle-of-the-road Americans prefer that their tax money go toward education rather than to padding the profits of financial firms.
