You are about to lose money.
Now that we have your attention, let’s discuss why you are about to be fleeced.
President Bush has proposed and is receiving little to no opposition to cutting $1.2 billion in funding for vocational education. The biggest casualty of the cut is the Federal Perkins Loan program, which offers low-interest loans to lower- and middle-class families.
The Federal Perkins Loan program was started in 1965 with the help of federal funding. Bush’s proposal would take back the initial funding – essentially, making the program inoperable.
In turn, Bush’s plan for balancing out the needs of lower-income students is to move more money toward the Pell grants fund, but the maximum amount a student can receive in one year is increased by only $100 dollars – from $4,050 to $4,150.
Unfortunately, Pell grants are awards and not loans. The amount of money awarded through Pell grants does not have to be paid back, but a student is far less likely to receive as much money through a Pell grant than a Perkins or Stafford loan. In addition, students from most lower-income families have a hard time receiving a Pell grant due to the mandatory credit checks. In other words, the most needy students will still be left out in the cold.
In addition to his Perkins Loan cuts, Bush is also lowering the axe on literacy program funding. Didn’t First Lady Laura Bush, ex-librarian, spend the entire first term promoting education and literacy? Are reading skills no longer beneficial? Is the administration going to change “No Child Left Behind” to “None of them children learnin’ one grade more than once?”
So far, Bush’s only justification for eliminating programs outright or cutting their funding is that the programs are not working. If that line of thought was applied to all of Bush’s programs, there probably wouldn’t be any funding for the reconstruction of Iraq or the “War on Terror.”
Say it with us – in your best Napoleon Dynamite voice – Gosh! Flipping deficit-spending, scholarship-reducing, trust fund-favoring idiots.
