Ted Cruz on student loans he blocked
This guy is a real piece of work. Speaks in third person, covers his student loan pitch, and never mentions the wife's job at The Squid (temp leave from GS). No Elmer Gantry here.
Ted Cruz invokes his student loans, but will he help others with theirs?
By Jillian Berman Marketwatch.com
Published: Mar 23, 2015 5:37 p.m. ET
When Texas Sen. Ted Cruz kicked off his campaign for President on Monday morning, he wanted the audience of college students gathered for his announcement at Liberty University to know he is just like them.
While recounting his biography (inexplicably in the third person), Cruz told the crowd: “He took over $100,000 in school loans, loans I suspect a lot of y’all can relate to, loans that I’ll point out I just paid off a few years ago.”
Cruz may feel their pain, but that doesn’t mean he’s making it any easier for others to pay their loans off.
In fact, Cruz was one of many Senate Republicans who voted last year to block a bill that would have allowed more than 25 million Americans to refinance their student loans at lower interest rates. Republicans opposed the bill, called the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act, because its Democratic backers proposed using a boost in taxes on the wealthiest Americans to cover the cost of allowing millions to refinance their loans, political blog The Hill reported at the time.
The Cruz campaign didn’t immediately respond to our request for a comment.
As the Washington Post points out, Cruz’s nod to his debt on Monday was part of a larger narrative about the presidential hopeful as someone who came from little means, struggled and eventually achieved the American Dream. Student debt is an issue that’s likely important to many potential voters, given that about 40 million Americans are saddled with student loans worth a total of more than $1 trillion.
Still, some in the audience didn’t totally buy Cruz’s pitch, according to a sampling of messages on Yik, Yak, an app that allows people within a given location to communicate anonymously. As Business Insider pointed out, a user in the Liberty area wrote, “Thats right, mention paying off debt so you seem accessible to the college crowd.”
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
~ Thomas Sowell
AI
