Conservatives angry over Pell Grant funding in Boehner debt bill

[The Straight Story]

Conservatives angry over Pell Grant funding in Boehner debt bill
By Alexander Bolton - 07/28/11 06:13 PM ET

House conservatives who have stalled legislation to raise the national debt limit are angry that it includes $17 billion in supplemental spending for Pell Grants, which some compare to welfare.

Legislation crafted by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to raise the debt limit by $900 billion would directly appropriate $9 billion for Pell Grants in 2012 and another $8 billion in 2013.

This has shocked some conservative House freshmen who say they were elected to cut spending, not increase it. Some House Republicans think of it as being akin to welfare.

“I really don’t understand why we’re increasing spending in a bill supposed to be cutting spending,” said Rep. Andy Harris, a freshman Republican from Maryland. “It was negotiated without the input of a lot of members.”

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/174253-house-conservatives-angry-over-pell-grant-funding-in-boehner-debt-bill

[Booster]

1. The party of NO - nothing for the people.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

2. Who wants to send their children to college anyway, right????

:eyes:

[TDale313]

3. I. Hate. These. People.

"Gots mine. Screw the rest of y'all."

[sendero]

10. Can't have any uppity negroes..

... getting an education now can we.

Yeah, I hate them too.

[Ishoutandscream2]

4. I went to college on Pell grants. Raised by single mom

we didn't have a pot to piss in (an expression my granddad had). Those fuckers would have considered my mother a welfare queen. Fuck them!

[Guilded Lilly]

5. These people have really scraped the bottom of the humanity barrel. Period..

[Art_from_Ark]

6. I hope all those Republican House freshmen

are tossed out on their ass in the next election. They seem to want to make the USA a rigidly-structured class-based society with them at the top. Pffffffft.

Pell grants are "welfare" only in the sense that they help to promote the general welfare of the country.

[elocs]

7. K&R

[w8liftinglady]

8. I went to nursing school on the Pell Grant.

A single mom on welfare in the early 80's.
I think they've gotten their money's worth.

[trotsky]

9. Really, we joke about how stupid Republicans are. But they REALLY ARE STUPID.

A Pell Grant helps someone get an education, which helps them get a better job, which means they will earn more income, which means THEY WILL PAY MORE IN TAXES. They are guaranteed to "pay back" the Pell Grant, PLUS MORE. This is absolutely insane, they are so Koresh-damned stupid.

[chill_wind]

11. A Sickness that Knows No Name (David Atkins, Digby)

So this is what it comes down to. Spending a few billion on giving kids the prayer of being able to afford to go to college given skyrocketing tuitions is just too much for the Tea Party brigade. Money for college is just the same as "welfare." Before you know it, those strapping young college kids will be driving Cadillacs and eating T-bone steaks, the lazy freeloaders. Far better that they stay in the menial labor workforce, as the hired help for America's "job creators," while we merrily piss away trillions of dollars on pointless wars for oil overseas.

Back in the days before euphemisms came in vogue for such things, they used to call that moral evil. Nowadays a professional psychiatrist might call it antisocial personality disorder, except that we know there aren't that many actual clinical sociopaths out there. What it is, is a culture of sociopathy, made possible by a 30-year-long echo chamber of right-wing radio, Fox News, corrupted church propaganda, and astroturf think tanks. Back in the days before the conservative echo chamber, it used to be deeply embarrassing to hold these sorts of views. Now, the more extreme your devotion to the sociopathic line, the better proof of your membership in the right-wing cult.

But it's not just that: they're deeply stupid as well. Without getting into the fact that spending on education is an investment in America's future potential, and that anyone who did what Tea Partiers claim to want and "ran government like a business" would instantly see that such investments must be made, the numbers don't add up, either.

As Dave Dayen tweeted, the increase to Pell grants in Boehner's bill is more than made up for by cuts to student loans elsewhere. In fact, the sum total of the elimination of certain student loan subsidies combined with increases to Pell grants actually saves the government money long-term. Per the CBO analysis of Boehner's bill (see Chart 3 at the end), the $17 billion in increases to Pell grants are offset by $22 billion in cuts and savings elsewhere. And yet that is what the Tea Party crowd is willing to scuttle a political negotiating chip and John Boehner's sorry career over, in a bill that won't even get past the Senate, anyway.

What's the clinical term for mass delusion combined with immorality and abject stupidity? I'll leave that to the sociologists and mental health professionals to decide.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/sickness-that-knows-no-name.html

[dana_b]

12. of course they're angry. They want young people to be as stupid as they are. n/t

[gratuitous]

13. Andy Harris is complaining about this?

How about you start paying for your own health insurance, Mr. Harris? That would save some money. Harris, for those who may not remember or who missed the story, was the newbie congressman at the orientation meeting who couldn't believe that he had to wait 30 days for his employer-paid health insurance to kick in, and whined about how unfair that was.

[hifiguy]

14. These treacherous cretins should be

marched into a gigantic sausage grinder. Maybe they'd be useful as hog slop. They are certainly a waste of oxygen in their current forms.

From the article:

Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) has compared Pell Grants to “welfare”.

"So you can go to college on Pell Grants — maybe I should not be telling anybody this because it’s turning out to be the welfare of the 21st century," Rehberg told Blog Talk Radio in April. "You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy assistance, Section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don’t have to graduate from college.”


This is the kind of subhuman shitbag that holds the destiny of millions of people in its hands.

[Blasphemer]

15. They have no desire to see anyone who is not in the top 1% achieve anything

That is the bottom line. It has nothing to do with government spending and everything to do with keeping people who are low-income in their place. There should not be a single elected representative who is against a program that helps students complete a college education. These people truly want to kill the American dream.