-By Warner Todd Huston
They call it a “recruitment tool,” but it is little else but yet another way for Congressional elites to give each other favors on the taxpayer’s dime. As Americans are increasingly losing jobs, even their homes, congressmen are using taxpayer’s dollars to pay off the student loans of their staffers. Worse, this has been going on since 1990.
The law was enacted in 1990 and updated in 2000 with the idea that congress could use this incentive to lure good applicants to congressional staffs.
As a 2002 report on the program states:
More than a decade ago, Congress authorized a student loan repayment program for highly qualified professional, administrative, and technical federal personnel covered by the General Schedule (GS). Section 1206(b) of P.L. 101-510, enacted on November 5, 1990,1 responded to a recommendation of the National Commission on the Public Service that a loan forgiveness program be established for federal service.2 The commission found, in its April 1989 report, that the federal government had serious problems in recruiting and retaining a quality workforce. Student loan repayment is viewed as a way to make government service more attractive to candidates, many of whom have incurred significant student loan debts in acquiring their education.
I like that: “Student loan repayment is viewed as a way to make government service more attractive to candidates…”
It’s more like: Student loan repayment is viewed as a way to pay off our pal’s children and generally dip our hands into the till once again!
It’s just another example of our representatives in Washington laughing at us and treating the taxpayers as suckers. It’s yet another example of how these people imagine themselves to be above us. Why, they are so important that they shouldn’t even have to pay for their school loans.
There are thousands of little perks like this that these elites have over the years bestowed upon themselves all at our expense. It’s high time we started electing people that will reverse these self-awarded perks that our congressmen and senators give themselves year in and year out.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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