Representative Virginia (Crazy like a) Foxx (R-NC) has no sympathy for people with student loans [View all]
FOXX: I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. [...] I have 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. . I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.
Despite Foxx’s implication, these loans are not taken out frivolously. They are taken out because of the soaring cost of college. In other words, because the price of college is so high — and House Republicans are working overtime to cut Pell grants for one million low-income students — the amount of loans required to pay for it is also high. Indeed, student loan debt topped one trillion dollars last year, orders of magnitude larger than in the decades prior.
Still, Foxx’s distaste for large loans does not appear to extend to the mortgage sector. In Foxx’s 2010 financial disclosure statement, she owned two individual mortgage notes worth up to $250,000 each, from which she earned as much as $20,000 in payments.
http://thinkprogress.org/education/2012/04/13/464154/foxx-tolerance-student-loans/
What Foxx also fails to realize is that while college tuition has far outpaced inflation, minimum wage has failed to keep pace with inflation. Students are squeezed from both ends, but the problem is that "We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that," according to Foxx.
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