What Progressive Victory Looks Like: Ending Corporate Welfare To Help Regular Americans
This week was actually big victory for progressivism. Not in health care, but in student loan reform. Finally, a wasteful and worthless corporate welfare program was eliminated. The taxpayer dollars that were being thrown away on private profits will now be redirected to help low income students attend college and pay down the debt. This is what progressive victories look like.
One can have a legitimate argument with libertarians about what the scope of the government should be. Should the government try to help poor kids attend college, should it try to provide everyone with basic health care, should the government try to stop global warming, should the government build highways, etc. But once the decision is made that the government should try to do something, the work of progressivism is to make sure the government achieves that goal in the best, most cost effective manner possible. To make sure it is done in a way that most benefits regular Americans (or at least minimizes the damages as much as possible) while making sure the program is a cost effective use of taxpayers’ money.
This is what the student loan reform portion of the reconciliation bill did. It has been abundantly clear for years that the direct student lending program provided the same loan services at a much cheaper cost to the taxpayers than the weird private/public government guaranteed FFEL program. The FFEL program was corporate welfare at its worst, a program where the government gave private banks huge amounts of money to do something the government could do itself for much cheaper. The FFEL program should have been shut down years ago, but big money lobbyists and their friendly senators kept it alive for far too long.
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