Understood and appreciated. As far as the Academy is concerned, many of the graduates are NOT assigned to combat duty. However, I agree that all military members should be compensated for the duty they serve to our country. It should be noted that the present administration has been far more focused on providing for these heroes that the last administration.
In terms of risky loans…I hope your attitude extends to corporate subsidies and TARP. The “fact” that many companies have paid there TARP debt has obscured the actuality that they did so by borrowing from the Federal Reserve. Anecdotaly, it seems like the big assumption here is that no one who receives a loan will repay it. Do you simply mistrust everyone who attends college and borrows money to do that. Having worked my way through college and repaid my loans, I can say that that is a bad assumption made by biased and uninformed (reactionary) people.
I think if were going to get all on a high horse about unsecured and risky debt to the Federal Govt. I think we should be starting at the big bucks, or as they say in business, the low hanging fruit before going after the little fish.
And as for the “All Free America”…how about this… a $10B subside to an already profit earning industry? Doesn’t sound like a good deal to me as a taxpayer. Let’s have a little outrage over that! On a local level, how about wasteful spending on so-called redevelopment agency projects that only line a few individuals pockets.
Quite frankly, if were going to cut spending, I’m with Paul…cut everything…inluding the wasteful spending on companies like KBR, Haliburton, Blackwater and the rest. All the work they are doing at taxpayer expense is only replacing jobs that used to be held by members of our military (and at a much lower cost). Stop military adventurism and wasterful military spending on weapons we don’t need.

US Taxpayer: Last time I looked, teachers and doctors and other non-military persons did not get involuntarily re-deployed every 2-3 years, nor risk life and limb via combat. I think there is premium on risk of death that is factored into the equation here. Additionally, students at the military academies have to be appointed and prior to appointment have to perform at an exceptionally high level in order to get the appointment, and then have to meet very demanding and exacting standards in order to stay in and complete their education. Not so true for alot of teachers and soc sci students. Further the out of control costs of higher ed are directly related to the ease of federally guaranteed loans made available on large scale beginning in the 1990’s. Lastly, anyone who thinks that slushing off your ill-conceived debts –whether they be mortgage, education, credit card, etc — onto others to foot the bill thru a “debt-forgiveness” program obviously misses the point of freedom (to succeed or fail on your own merits) and of personal accountability and responsibility. I can’t give much credence to that level of foolish, short-sighted thinking. “Life aint fair, Nobody owes you nothing, Earn your own keep”. Damn old Gramps was a smart man!

As a follow up to #6:
There are a couple of salient pieces of information here:
– I would assume that there is a qualification for this loan program based on income. We’re not really talking about some deadbeat wealthy person leaching off the system so they don’t have to pay.
– The Ivy League v State U discussion is specious at best. The type of person that would actually be accepted/admitted at an Ivy is probably not the deadbeat personality type your worried about. As I mentioned above, I think the real issue is the abundance of little for-profit startup universities that have NO entrance requirements except for your ability to get loans and grants. Just watch a little late night cable and you can get a good view of these bottom-feeders.
I would also note that #6 assumes that the “value” of a Harvard or Yale education is equivalent to, say, Delta State University (I have nothing against State Universities). I’m not sure how well that would play at Harvard or Yale (or the US Supreme Court, whose members come exclusively from Harvard and Yale).
I can sympathize with folks aggravation level, but having grown up in poverty, and put myself through a 4-year university and repaid my loans, I still think that having the same kind of access to public money that many industries enjoy (banking, oil, construction, consulting and services) through loans, subsidies and other financial vehicles seems pretty fair to me.

Need I remind everyone here that the taxpayers fund 100% of a University education at Westpoint, Annapolis and USAFA? The expectation of the graduates is that they are repaying their debt to the US taxpayer through public service (their military service). Is it really so confusing that we should, say, subsidize the cost of education of a doctor who subsequently provides direct public service, or a teacher?
A lot of folks say that the problem is the out-of-control costs of a University education, to which I would agree. However, are you suggesting that the Federal Government should regulate the tuition at private universities? Certainly their should be salary caps put in place for faculty and staff at public universities. After all, paying a football coach $2M a year is not really a good use of my taxpayer money (or are sports somehow a better value to the taxpayer). I think all senior faculty and staff should be payed equally on a standard scale regardless of discipline. That would keep abuses like that down.
I think a big issue right now is the use of taxpayer money going into all the for-profit “Universities” that have been cropping up (here’s your degree from the University of PO Box 2000!). However I think the big culprit here is not that the Federal Government has made money available to citizens to better educate themselves, it’s that sheisters in the private sector have come out in a feeding frenzy, providing substandard and useless educational experiences specifically to take advantage of the largess. As a taxpayer, I think the FedGov should wholeheartedly wipe out this group of leaches that is bleeding us dry for their own benefit.
One last note…as far as useless degrees are concerned; would you put MBA on that list as well? We have a lot of those folks, more than enough. And anyway, as a business owner, I have seen that B-School does nothing to help create successful business people. How about lawyers – there’s a lot of them too…not sure we need anymore for a while.

I agree with all of this. However,you are missing a big one here. It’s not only that the cost has gone up, but also that the value – on average – has gone down. Millions of students are being graduated who have acquired very little in the way of skills that society values. This is can be attributed to the broad degradation of academic standards, the enormous amount of time diverted for inculcation of political correctness and the rise of worthless majors such as sociology, race and gender studies etc. For awhile, the gatekeeper function of higher education has masked this fact and maintained the price point of a college education in the face of the degrading value equation. Now that it stands revealed by the slack labor market – and can be seen every day in the faces of the OWS protesters – government proposes to step in to subsidize this dysfunction further. The institutions that deliver higher education are structurally misaligned with the needs of the economy and society and are in need of massive reform. IBR only postpones the reckoning. This state of affairs is reminiscent of the late Middle Ages when Europe needed scientists, engineers, managers, economists and statesmen while universities produced only theologians. Then, it was an ossified religious hierarchy that stood in the way of change, now it is the ironically self-styled “progressives” who do so.

#1 above misses an important point. Not only does IRB not fix the problem of kids paying too much for college, it exacerbates it by relieving the students of the economic burden of their purchase! If other people (taxpayers) are picking up the tab, then what motivates the student to demand value for money? This is parallel phenomenon to the ones that have driven excessive healthcare costs and housing costs in the US market.