And no, I’m not talking about health care.
Lost in a news cycle dominated by hawaiian birth certificates, Cambridge police and public option is a story about Obama’s effort to become the biggest provider of school loans in the nation.
But what we learned this week from the CBO is that his plan will save only half of what he claims it would.
I’ll let Stephen Spruiell from NRO take over from here:
But shouldn’t we still support the option that would save money, even if it would save less that the administration claims? The answer is that getting the government out of the student-loans business altogether would save taxpayers the most money, but that’s not even part of the discussion. Government-subsidized financing for college has become a middle-class entitlement. We wouldn’t be facing this choice if the government hadn’t first subsidized private lenders and then set up a “public option” to “compete” with them.
This is the very choice that Obama wants to force on health care. If Congress enacts his health-care agenda, chances are good that some future Democratic president will point out how much we “waste” by subsidizing private coverage and how much we would “save” if we just forced everyone to take the public option. And, as is the case with Obama’s student loan plan, the bulk of those savings would be chimerical, based on accounting tricks. Lost in the debate will be the notion that the government shouldn’t have intervened in the first place.
