Zaid Jilani at The Intercept writes—House Republicans Want to End Student Loan Forgiveness for Public Interest Jobs:
WHILE SENATE REPUBLICANS last week hashed out the details to pass a bill that would hike taxes for the middle class in order to slash them for corporations, House Republicans unveiled a higher education bill that would broadly reshape how the federal government pays for and regulates college — by cutting back on various student aid programs while also lifting current regulations that require for-profit colleges to meet certain thresholds to receive tax dollars.
Reps. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., and Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Friday introduced the bill, titled the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform, or PROSPER, Act. Foxx, who chairs the committee, and Guthrie are the point people for House Republicans when it comes to higher education policy and will now start looking for co-sponsors for the bill, which has a long road to passage. [...]
The bill would, for instance, completely eliminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which forgives student loans for borrowers who work for a nonprofit or in a state, local, or federal government job and make 120 qualifying monthly payments over a period of 10 years. More than half a million borrowers have utilized the program since 2007 to help them deal with student debt. Gregory Crespi, a Southern Methodist University law professor who studies the program told the ABA Journal that roughly a quarter of jobs in the U.S. economy would be considered public interest jobs. [...]
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QUOTATION
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
~~Isaac Asimov, ”A Cult of Ignorance,” 1980
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2015—A reminder that leading conservative figures just can't stop scamming their own supporters:
Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves that Mike Huckabee is a presidential candidate today—sort of, anyway—partly based on his willingness to cash in on his true believers by marketing crap and hokum to them for money. Mother Jones has a deeper dive into one particular group the ex-governor sold his mailing list to, a group that preys on conservative fears with a hodgepodge of investment advice, "secret" health tips, and the usual. He's not the only one: a good part of the conservative machine is built on bilking their own supporters.
Gingrich sent out more than a dozen Agora-related emails after he dropped out of the 2012 race, including one from an investment newsletter warning that Obama might seek a third term (sell, sell, sell!). In April, [Ron] Paul appeared in a 51-minute video for an Agora subsidiary in which he argued that the United States was on the verge of martial law and societal collapse. [...] Agora's emails skirt the line between spammy and scammy. An email sent last year to followers of the popular right-wing site RedState on behalf of the Health Sciences Institute claimed that the Obama administration was blocking a miracle cure that "vaporizes cancer in six weeks."
You know, there has for hundreds of years been a surefire way to tell whether a particular health cure or supplement is a total and complete scam. If the claim is that actual experts don't want you to know this secret because it'll just make you too darn healthy and they'll have to all give up and wash cars for a living, that is the defining characteristic of a scam.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, WI & MI Gop's assault on democracy continues, and NC wants back in. GHWB funeral keeps Trump mostly quiet. Flynn sentencing memo drops. Epstein settles. Saud family feud story concludes. Stakeholder vs. shareholder debate reemerges for 2020.
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