Chris Christie Locks Down Voters Who Love Student Loan Debt

Chris Christie knows how he'd win a presidential election between himself and Bernie Sanders, just in case that particular combination comes up:  Let the free market fix everything, the way it always does. Ha! That'll teach Bernie Sanders, with his socialist call for four years of government-supported college education for all students attending state colleges and universities (no, it's not "free," so save your cranky comments, cranks).

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On ABC's This Week Sunday, Christie explained to George Stephanopoulos that we don't need to tax Wall Street to pay for college. All we need to do to make college affordable for everyone is to itemize the cost of college education, because right now, the "consumers" have no say in what they get.

“My alternative is we have to start to put market forces on these college costs,” Christie replied. “I pay for two college tuitions right now, one at Princeton and one at Notre Dame. And I can tell you that they’re the most opaque bills you’ll ever see in your life.”

“If you got that bill for dinner with that little of that detail, you wouldn’t pay it,” he insisted. “And secondly, we need to start to say unbundle that. So if a child doesn’t want to pay for all of these different things in college, they should be able to select it.”

Leaving aside that Princeton and Notre Dame, both private schools, wouldn't be affected by Sanders's plan anyway, or that itemized bills haven't exactly made hospital stays inexpensive, we need to remember that the market is magic, and if you can opt out of expenses you don't want to use, everything becomes affordable. So business majors won't have to pay for the African American Studies program, and everything will even out, because then students who want to major in something useless like sociology can pay more than students in popular majors, who can get volume discounts.

Christie didn't seem bothered by Stephanopoulos's suggestion that maybe there was a bit of a double standard at work here, since Christie's father went to college on the G.I. Bill, because Christie's dad earned that shit:

“You talked about your dad and what he got on the G.I. Bill. Studies show that there’s a seven to one return on that kind of an investment,” Stephanopoulos reminded the likely candidate. “Why not for all Americans?”

“It is available for all Americans,” Christie insisted. “We have grant programs that are very broadly used. We have loan programs that are very broadly used.”

“And by the way, my dad went for six years at night,” he added. “He worked all day to help to put himself through college.”

It's so inspiring, really, how his dad got government assistance, but it didn't make him a leech like everyone else, just like how Ben Carson's mom got welfare and food stamps, but she was never dependent on government.

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This has been an exciting new theme for Christie, who argued last week that student debt is good, because it builds character or something. In a speech at Iowa State University, Christie said we need “a system where we all need to take personal responsibility to grasp the opportunities in higher education, but also one where we can get a leg up when we need it.” Taxpayer-funded college is a terrible idea, he explained:

That is a typical liberal approach. It is wrong ... If college graduates are going to reap the greater economic rewards and opportunities of earning a degree, then it seems fair for them to support the cost of the education they’re receiving.

And all we need to do is to let the magic of the market run free, and college will become affordable! We can hardly wait for Chris Christie and Bernie Sanders to win their parties' nominations, so they can debate that one.

[ RawStory / Politico ]