-By Warner Todd Huston
Well, who could possibly have predicted that when Obama wildly inflated the number of student loans he was going to give out would result in the program going wildly over budget, and by more than the whole budget of NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency combined?
Politico recently looked into Obama’s absurd student loan debt bomb and noted that buried in the President’s budget proposal is the proof that his student loan takeover is already $21.8 billion in debt.
Why did this program suddenly explode in debt? As Politico noted, “The main cause of the shortfall was President Barack Obama’s recent efforts to provide relief for borrowers drowning in student debt, reforms that have already begun to reduce loan payments to the government. For more than two decades, budget analysts have recalculated the projected costs of about 120 credit programs every year, but they have never lowered their expectations of repayments this dramatically.”
This shortfall is a greater amount than the budgets of NASA, the EPA and the Department of the Interior combined! And it all goes right to the national debt because it is a “entitlement program.”
Student loan defaults increased last year, too, so it isn’t like this plan helped anything–at least from a budgetary standpoint–like Obama said it was going to do.
Worse, this mess increased the federal budget deficit by 5 percent, a budget that is already hier than any time in history.
The White House admits that this is a big shortfall but claims that his program will magically re-align itself next year and the deficit will disappear. He obviously has some magic fairy dust somewhere in reserve.
Ed Morrissey also points out another outrageous point about this massive debt. “In FY2008, the budget for the Direct Loan program was $500 million,” Morrissey said. “Now that the DLP is the only game in town, the annual shortfall in DLP is 430 times the annual budget in FY2008.”
Now remember this, too. Obama claims that his “free college” for everyone will merely cost a tiny $60 billion. Since he said that his school loan program would only cost $500 million, how far out of whack do you imagine his “free” college budget will get in its first year?
Yeah, think about that.
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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
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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