Hooray for Washington "grand bargains." The immensely rich won't face a surtax. College students, on the other hand, have to Make Hard Sacrifices.
Republicans and Democrats agreed on much of the budget early in the week, but conflicts over policy riders and extending a payroll tax cut has postponed passage so far. Late Thursday, Congressional budget negotiators were reported to have reached an agreement, with little time to spare: if Congress could not compromise, the government would have shut down at midnight Saturday.
The bill, HR 3671, draws from ideas put forward in Republican and Democratic spending plans earlier this year: it would preserve the maximum Pell Grant at $5,550, but change the program’s eligibility criteria, making at least 100,000 of its 9 million recipients ineligible. The grants could be used for a total of 12 semesters, not 18, as in the past -- a change that would affect an estimated 62,000 beneficiaries and take effect July 1, 2012....
The maximum amount families could earn and automatically contribute nothing toward an undergraduate education would decrease from $30,000 to $23,000. Students without a high school diploma or the equivalent would also be barred from receiving the grants, so students could no longer qualify by taking the controversial "ability to benefit" tests....
To help pay for the grants, the “grace period” on subsidized undergraduate direct loans -- when the government pays the interest for six months after a student graduates or leaves college -- would be eliminated for loans made between July 1, 2012, and July 1, 2014.
I suppose it's good that the Obama administration won out on its "priority" to keep the Pell Grant maximum at $5500. But "it could have been worse," yet again, does not mean "it doesn't stink."
One thing the Occupy movement deserves credit for is that the nastiness of the student loan business has at least, and at last, become a blip on the national-conversation radar. And, predictably, the response from the government is to make student loans a little bit rottener.
This isn't even close to the worst thing in the budget/payroll tax Grand Bargains, but it's nevertheless depressing. The function of our government is to make life worse for everyone except the absurdly privileged -- we knew that already, but they're determined to keep hitting us over the head with it.