Bad Deeds for 5-2-2012

Republican Congresswoman Says She Has Very Little Tolerance for People With Student Debt – Republican congresswoman Virginia Foxx told a radio interviewer last week that she has “very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt, because there’s no reason for that.”1

Oh really? So it’s your fault if you have student debt?

But Foxx isn’t just any member of Congress. She’s the CHAIR of the Higher Education & Workforce Training Subcommittee in the House. That’s right, she controls policy on the issue of student debt, and she thinks you’re a loser and a whiner if you have student loans.

Foxx went on to say: “I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money.” This was in 1968 at UNC Chapel Hill, when seven years of college cost about $46,100 TOTAL (adjusted for inflation). How much would her education cost now? $141,820. An in-state student at UNC Chapel Hill now pays triple what it cost when Foxx went to school. And, by the way, the minimum wage was 38% higher in 1968 than it is now, in inflation-adjusted dollars.2

What’s even worse is that Foxx sponsored the “Protecting Academic Freedom in Higher Education Act,” a bill to strip away federal regulation of for-profit colleges — colleges that notoriously prey on lower-income students, have disturbingly low graduation rates, and leave their students with higher-than-average levels of debt.3 And no wonder: Foxx’s top campaign contributors are the for-profit colleges themselves.4

Sources:
1. Youtube: Virginia Foxx on student loans
2. National Center for Education Statistics: Average undergraduate tuition and fees, 1964-2007
3. National Bureau of Economic Research: The For-Profit Postsecondary School Sector
4. OpenSecrets: Virginia Foxx’s Top 20 Campaign Contributors

Rick Perry’s Plan to Take Away Health Care Coverage From More Texans – Currently, 1-in-4 Texans lack health care coverage, the highest rate of uninsured in the nation. Rick Perry isn’t trying to make it any better – he is planning on making it worse. Perry and his fellow conservatives in the Texas Legislature are pushing a health care plan that would end health care coverage for more than 2.5 million Texans. Meanwhile, the Affordable Care Act – signed into law by President Obama two years ago this Friday – would expand health care coverage to nearly 4 million more Texans.

Pastor Says Parents Should Punch ‘Girly’ 4 Year Olds – Sean Harris, pastor of a North Carolina Baptist Church, has been captured on audio urging parents to punch 4 year old boys if they ‘act girly’ and to ‘break their limp wrists’. Harris said:

“So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.”

“Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.”

In His Own Words: Romney Would Not Have Pursued Osama bin Laden in Pakistan – Romney’s own statements in 2007 make it plain and clear that he would not have pursued bin Laden or ordered the military operation that finally brought him to justice., When asked about bin Laden, Romney said, “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth, spending billions of dollars just to capture one person.” He said the country would see “a very insignificant increase in safety” because another terrorist would rise to power.

Romney opposed taking action against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan, dismissing then-Senator Barack Obama’s promise to strike terrorist targets inside Pakistan if necessary. “I do not concur, ” he said, adding “I don’t think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort.”, Romney added that the President’s pledge to strike at al-Qaeda was “ill-considered. ”

Romney’s Record: Outsourcing American Jobs and investing Overseas – Mitt Romney’s record does not match his rhetoric when it comes to creating American jobs. The map at the link above shows where Romney outsourced jobs and where he opted to invest his own money.

Regards,

Jim