Tax cuts are hard lesson for students (JESSE JAGMO ALERT)

Chicago Sun-Times ^ | January 3, 2006 | JESSE JACKSON

[Chi-townChief]

One resolution for the new year: Let's be clear about the choices we're making as a country. I'm certain that if Americans understood the choices being made, they would be outraged -- whether conservative or liberal, rich or poor, whatever their race, religion or region.

Consider one choice that Congress is about to make. If the current leadership has its way, Congress will pass more than $100 billion in tax cuts early this year, the vast bulk of which will go to the very wealthy. At the same time, it will cast the final vote to make the largest cut in student college loan programs in history -- some $12.7 billion over five years.

I doubt that many Americans would support raising the cost of college for students to reduce taxes on the wealthiest Americans, yet that is exactly what the administration and the conservative leadership of Congress plan.

Two-thirds of all college graduates take out loans to help pay for their college. The average debt of graduates is nearly $20,000. The student loan cuts just passed by Congress, according to experts cited by the Wall Street Journal, will raise the average cost over 10 years by $2,000 to students and $3,000 to parents.

This comes at a time when tuitions and fees are soaring. After factoring out inflation, private college costs have risen by more than a third in the last 10 years. Public college costs have soared by more than 50 percent. States are cutting back public subsidies to colleges, forcing them to raise tuitions and fees. We are witnessing the slow privatization of higher education. The result is to price college out of the reach of more and more American families.

These costs are rising just as we tell Americans that college or specialized training after high school is the ticket to the middle class. The good union jobs in industry that paid wages, pensions and health care are disappearing fast. Our leaders argue that if you get your children a college education, they'll do just fine in the global economy.

Yet at the same time that our leaders tell us college is indispensable, fewer families can afford it. The Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance reports that, by 2010, as many as 4.4 million high school graduates will be unable to enroll in a four-year college, and 2 million will not go to college at all because they can't afford it.

Many students in college have to work long hours to help finance their education. Often that burden is too much for the young to bear. Fifty-three percent of low-income freshmen who work more than 35 hours per week drop out and do not receive a degree. And increasingly, parents, desperate to provide a future for their children, become saddled with college debts as well, even as they face the need to put funds away for their own retirement.

As James C. Garland, president of Miami University in Ohio, put it, ''Now that a public four-year degree costs more than $50,000, middle-income citizens must either saddle themselves with debt or scale back their college aspirations. Not a shred of evidence suggests this trend will do anything but worsen.''

Our leaders should be summoning the nation to a major effort to ensure that college education is affordable. The wealthy should insist on paying higher taxes to ensure that the children of all Americans can afford the education they will need. Corporations should be unleashing their high-priced lobbyists to demand that legislators increase grant and loan programs, and that states increase their subsidies to public schools.

Instead, the Bush administration demanded cuts in student loans, and the right-wingers who control Congress voted for the largest cut ever, even as they insist on cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans. This doesn't make sense and isn't popular. So the Republican leadership misled Americans about what they have done. Republican legislators have been on TV parroting the claim that the cuts will provide ''significant new benefits'' to students by lowering fees and simplifying the application process. What they don't admit is that parents and students, already struggling to make ends meet, will end up paying thousands of dollars more in higher interest rates.

Educating the next generation isn't a time for political posturing, for clever spin, for misleading parents and kids. Make the choices clear. And let Americans decide whether the choices by the current crowd in power make sense for America.

mailto:jjackson@rainbowpush.org

[Chi-townChief]

An interesting lesson indeed; with what I've paid in taxes in the past 35 years, I could probably have paid for at least a dozen college educations.

[Darkwolf377]

Educating the next generation isn't a time for political posturing

The sure sign of a political-posturer: He says it's not the time for political posturing.

[Rakkasan1]

if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention to 'gettin some' Action Jackson!

[edcoil]

"Let's be clear about the choices we're making as a country"

Lets stop taxing the hardworking and giving the lazy a free ride.

[traviskicks]

    Here is a picture of Jesse Jackson marching with N.O.W. (National Organization of Women, a liberal feminist group) members against Welfare Reform, along with the results of the reforms they opposed. State Reform took effect around 1992-1994 and the National Bill was passed in 1996. The Republicans swept the house in 1994 promising a ‘Contract with America’. People are the same the world over. It is the political structure and governmental interference that make all the difference. Get Government out of people’s lives and they will succeed. To believe people cannot succeed without government ‘help’ is to subscribe to what President Bush calls, ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’. The reason they aren’t succeeding is BECAUSE of the government help, which only serves to subsidize poverty and single motherhood! For some reason, saying these things and passing bills that help millions of people out of poverty is said by the left to be ‘cruel’, ‘hardnosed’ and ‘racist’.

Where is Jesse on school vouchers and charter schools, which most blacks support?

[Jack Black]

WHY pray tell are tuitions out of control, particularly at public schools? That's the real issue. Put some fiscal conservative governors in charge, boot out the in-crowd, affirmative action loving regents who run these schools and put some hard nosed bean counters from private industry in to fix these places. It used to be that most states had an elite university and a tech university. Get back to that and graduate competent dentists, agronomists, geologists, and other useful skilled professionals. Dump all the absurd Lesbian studies stuff.

Drop the pretense of near greatness from what will never be elite schools. Dump the whole tenure concept from public schools. It is incompatible with taxpayers paying for educating skilled professionals at low cost. Move to 401-K for all university employees, just like the rest of us in the real world suffer with.

[Darkwolf377]

Don't even get me started on tenure.

Jesse never addresses the basic question you ask: Inflation isn't out of control, and isn't keeping up with the rising prices charged at these schools. Where's the money going, Jesse? Think hard, you can figure it out: Expanded number of classes, and higher salaries.

[Rakkasan1]

come on now, Uncle Jesse works hard to extort the kind of money he does.

[misterrob]

Not so much in this case as we are talking about people going to school. However, the universities costs' are spiraling out of control and that's due to a few reasons:

Government subsidies means they can charge more as federal and state aid picks up the tab.

Debt which allows people to borrow more money that colleges can charge more for tuition.

The "not for profit" mentality where cost containment is not an issue.

Housing costs that are obscene. 2 kids in a 12 x 12 room that costs $5K each for a semester?

[Still Thinking]

Um, Jesse, thanks to you and your jerkoff Democrat friends (and George Bush) the only people who CAN receive a tax cut are those with high incomes because of the strongly "progressive" loot-and-plunder rate structure. So shut the hell up about "tax cuts for the wealthy" every time anyone dares try to cut rates. It's your own fault and the fault of those who believe like you.

[Still Thinking]

Our leaders should be summoning the nation to a major effort to ensure that college education is affordable.

True statement, wrong conclusion. Having the government pay for anything for large numbers of people is the worst possible way to make it "affordable". The cost of anything the government pays for, spirals out of all control.

[Angry_White_Man_Syndrome]

What a load of crap. I am currently going to college, working full time, and supporting my wife and 3 kids. I am paying my way with tuition assistance from work and my GI Bill. If a kid wants an education bad enough they will find a way to pay for it.

I had the choice at 18 to go to college with my parents help. However, they were also paying for my older sister to go to school and if I went she would have to go to work. I choose instead to join the Navy. I served 10 years and got out for a job paying twice as much. Once I finish my degree I will make even more with no debt at all.

[ncountylee]

The NEA is a major contributor to the poverty pimp.

[DustyMoment]

If the current leadership has its way, Congress will pass more than $100 billion in tax cuts early this year, the vast bulk of which will go to the very wealthy.

I'm outraged - OUTRAGED, I tell you!! How dare the Congress allow us to keep more of our money??

My Congressperson is going to hear about this - with my thanks!!!