Here’s today’s theoretical question: What’s lower than whale manure? Answer: The national approval rating for Congress if they don’t get this student loan nightmare sorted out by the July 1 deadline, and the interest rate on 7.4 million student loans doubles from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.
According to the folks who track these things, this Congress set an all-time record last January by tallying its lowest approval rating in the nation’s history — when only 21 percent of respondents to a Gallup survey said they approved of the job our lawmakers were doing. By the next month, it was down to 10 percent. For reasons almost nobody can understand, it was up to 17 percent earlier this month, but look for it to go back down dramatically over this student loan fiasco. Is a negative approval rating even possible? Our senators and U.S. representatives might find out.
The minutiae of this issue have been covered exhaustively, so I won’t go into it all again. But in a nutshell, here’s the situation:
At a time when the cost of a college education has doubled in the last decade, 50 percent of the students who’ve graduated from college in the last few years are unemployed, or underemployed — the barista serving up your Toffee Nut Latte or Espresso con Panna may well have a Ph.D. in philosophy, or any of the other arts and humanities disciplines where recent graduates are foundering in the job market.
But even if they’re jobless or severely underemployed, they’ve still got to pay back their student loans, or in many cases, their parents who co-signed the loans will have to pay. The national average of student loan debt is between $25,000 and $30,000 per student, but debts of over $100,000 are common. At this point, student loan debt in this country is rapidly approaching $1 trillion and will soon surpass even credit card debt as the largest debt category in the country.
The interest rate on many of those loans was temporarily reduced to 3.4 percent by Democrats in 2007 for about 7 million lower- to middle-income undergraduates with subsidized Stafford loans. If that reduction expires July 1 as scheduled, it could have disastrous consequences for the struggling national economy, not to mention for those graduates and families trying to figure out how to make payments on $100,000 in student loans while making minimum wage flipping burgers or waiting tables.
Of course, everyone says that it’s imperative that we extend the interest rate reduction, but as usual, the people who control the purse strings can’t agree on how to pay for it. The Senate, most Democrats, and the Obama administration, beating their single, tattered war drum, want to tax the highest wage earners and industries like big oil at a higher rate to help cover the tab. There’s a bill in the Senate that would do just that. The House Republicans, meanwhile — beating their own solitary and threadbare war drum — want to take the money from health care programs, which they’ve been assaulting with singleminded tenacity since Barack Obama took the oath of office.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill — 215 to 195 — that reflected their funding demand, but the bill won’t make it through the Senate, and even if it does, the Obama administration has promised to veto it.
“That’s the work of Congress now,” U.S. Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vermont) groused to The New York Times. “They go to their trick bag, which is to eviscerate the health care bill. We go to our trick bag, which is to vilify the oil companies, and nobody in the country cares. But what they do care about is getting whacked because they can’t pay college costs.”
Both sides are currently barnstorming the country as they point their outraged fingers at the other guys in a vitriolic and heated attempt to deflect the blame — but I suspect there are at least 7.4 million worried folks looking at significantly increased student loan payments who don’t give a tinker’s damn about all that. All they see is one more instance where squabbling national politicians are able — and willing — to send our country into a tailspin and cause untold suffering in order to advance their own political agendas.
Have these folks never heard of compromise? Of negotiation? Where’s Solomon when you need him?
Using the disgraceful showdown over the national debt ceiling as an example, here’s what’s likely to happen. Between now and late July, everyone who owes money on a student loan will spend a lot of sleepless nights. The media will carry a million stories about the bad things coming down the pike if the rates are allowed to go up. The blame game among the politicians will increase in vitriol and hysteria. And at the last possible minute, they’ll agree to some temporary, stop-gap measure that pleases no one and guarantees that the whole thing will have to be revisited in the near future. There will be no solution.
For a solution, we could look back to the work of the late, great Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko, whose four-word exhortation in situations like this was elegant in its simplicity: “Throw the bums out!” And judging from the approval rating numbers, that would be all the bums. Will that happen? Probably not. Do I want that to happen? Probably not. Fact is, I really like some of the bums and think they deserve another chance. But like so many others, I’m angry, and conflicted, and that’s how I feel today.
At lease one thing is certain. Come November, there’ll be a pretty compelling reason for at least 7.4 million ticked-off student loan holders (and their families) to eschew their usual lethargy on Election Day and hie themselves to the polls to express their displeasure. They’ll likely have lots of company — women, Latinos, immigrants, people on Social Security and Medicare, the poor, the middle class, people of color. The list is growing by the day. Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].