President Obama has gone on a college-affordability blitz over the last week, preaching to choirs of students that his new proposals will make college cheaper and easier to pay for. Whether this is the beginning of a serious White House push or a sojourn into upstate New York during sleepy August recess has yet to be seen, but one thing is clear: President Obama's proposals as they stand don't deserve a passing grade.
The college tour gained a particularly bad review from Richard Vedder of the American Enterprise Institute, who wrote for Bloomberg:
Much progressive ideology in the Obama era attempts to hand-wave away the role that federal money plays in inflating the cost of much in life, from college to health care. Try as they might, though, the fact is that so much federal money flowing into an industry will help to artificially inflate prices. This is very true for college, as Vedder highlights.
Vedder says that "some of what [Obama] proposes is good in principle," which is true of many Obama policies. But the problem is that President Obama ignores the role of the federal government in the college cost explosion. He unfortunately proposes to make that particular problem worse.
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