Boehner Bribed to be Republican!

Pretty serious charges against the new GOP leadership over at TNR. Kim Clark pens a piece called "Loan Shark" which alleges that the new GOP leader is in thrall to lobbyists just like his predecessor.

Now, I was a Shadegg man, and would have preferred somebody with zero ties to lobbyists, but I don't know that Diogenes could find such a man in Congress.

Clark offers evidence. It seems Rep. Boehner has collected contributions from the higher-education-lending industry. And -- dang it all -- the new bill out of the House has provisions that would be favorable to....REPUBLICANS!

The platitudes apparently resonated. Boehner won. But anyone wanting proof that Boehner is no reformer need only look at the changes to federal student-loan programs that he just helped push through Congress as part of this year's budget reconciliation bill. The alterations reduce government subsidies for student loans by $13 billion over the next five years. One of the key provisions: higher fixed interest rates that will increase the payments of students and their parents by hundreds of dollars a year.

Not subsidizing the interest rate? You think he just hates kids, but Clark knows it is based in graft and corruption

[...] more than half a million dollars went to just two men: the chairmen of the subcommittee and committee that handled the changes to the student-loan program. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of Santa Clarita, California, chairman of the Twenty-First Century Competitiveness Subcommittee, collected the most: $262,000. Boehner, who headed the House Education and the Workforce Committee until stepping down to assume his new leadership post, came in a close second with $236,000. Sallie Mae, the nation's largest educational lender, has been the single biggest donor to Boehner's PAC since 1989, contributing a total of $122,000, according to CRP data.

Of course, many of the provisions were not favorable to the lenders, but where there's smoke there's fire! Why, President Clinton had a perfectly good program that took over all the application, risk and administration -- just have the gub'mint do it, they're very good at borrowing money.

Congress could have achieved the same or even greater savings without forcing already financially pressed students and their families to shoulder even more debt had it been willing to take some business away from Sallie Mae and other lenders. Congress could have expanded a Clinton-era program in which schools forward loan applications directly to the federal government, rather than to middlemen. Several GAO and CBO studies have found that the direct-lending program costs taxpayers much less than extending loans through lenders like Sallie Mae. Government watchdogs have estimated that every dollar loaned through these middlemen costs the federal government at least 9 cents. The government, of course, can borrow more cheaply than businesses can. And it doesn't have to pay investors dividends or CEOs eight-figure pay packages like the $95 million taken home from 2000 to 2004 by Sallie Mae Chairman and former CEO Albert Lord.

So let me get this straight. A Republican adjusts a Federal program to have less involvement, pushing more administration and risk to the private sector, and setting a realistic interest rate for those who choose the program. And TNR sees this as proof of corruption.

It's going to be a long election cycle. If the Democrats want some free advice from jk -- as wrong as they are on this -- this is a good issue. Give away the store on student subsidies. The soccer moms will swoon and the moderates will see it as "a good investment in our nation." Only stingy old cruel weasels like me will point out that the private sector could likely do it better. And there is not a plurality of me. This is a winner.

Spirit of '94 Posted by jk at February 12, 2006 2:37 PM