The visage above is a recent photo of United States
Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican
Member of Congress who alleges to represent people from the great state of
North Carolina.
What she really represents is a snapshot of many of the
things wrong with the United States Congress: out of touch, living in a
different world, backward ideas that stem from a past so distant as to have no
relevance to 2012, the inability to acknowledge or admit different points of
view, and the endless practice of personal indulgence in doing “the people’s
business”.
In other words, Foxx, like the US Congress, is ignorant and
irrelevant.
A few days ago, the old bat was on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio
show, opining that student loans (one of the biggest, if not already THE
biggest source of debt in the United States, surpassing Credit Cards) should
not be more than they were back when she went to school. Her website says she holds degrees granted in
1968 and 1972.
Foxx told the G-man “I went through school, I worked my way
through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. I have very little tolerance for people who
tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt
because there’s no reason for that”.
For the record, I have not taken her words out of context to
make her appear out of touch with reality.
The two sentences above represent the essence of her rant to Liddy.
The comments clearly illustrate how out-of-touch Foxx is
with tuition costs in 2012, and the other salient reasons driving the explosive
growth of student loan debt – not the least of which is a Congress that essentially
‘privatized” the student loan business, as if higher education were some sort
of undesirable social value, and allowed the private lenders to jack rates up
to the sky.
A point I’ve made many times to illustrate the growth of
tuition cost: when I was an undergrad – pretty much the same time Foxx was –
you could nearly afford to pay for an entire year at the costliest public
school in the state (which then was called “The University of Wisconsin”) with
a decent summer job. In the mid-60’s,
all-in cost of two full academic semesters at the UW was just under $1500. That’s tuition and fees, books, room and
board, and about one pizza and six beers a week. If you could bank about $125 a week on your
summer job ($3.50/hr x 40 hrs, minus 15 bucks a week for summertime drinking
and hell-raising and gas), you could spend the next nine months getting
yourself educated. If your job paid only
a couple bucks an hour, you could still do it without borrowing, by availing
yourself of “work-study” jobs at your institution of higher learning.
You simply cannot do that now. College costs have escalated dramatically;
many students have to work a 30 or 35 hour week to pay their bills and stay
afloat, and that means you can’t carry an 18-credit load, which means it’s
going to take you 6 or 7 years to get through school, and if you’re the typical
UW student now, you’re going to graduate with around 30 grand in student loan
debt – unless you’re in a profession like law or medicine, where you can
typically run up nearly six figures in student loan debt.
And that’s NOT because you’re lazy or a spendthrift; it’s
because it’s that expensive now.
This whole student loan debt thing is a huge monster that’s
going to bite the economy in the ass very hard in the next decade or so, and
this post doesn’t even scratch the surface of the problem.
But when we have people like this old Foxx woman “leading”
us, we’re in deep doo-doo.
