Rep. Virginia Foxx On People With Student Loans: ‘I Have Very Little Tolerance’ For Them
Disgustingly enough, she’s the chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training. She was one of 11 members of Congress to vote against the $51 billion aid package to victims of Hurricane Katrina, was also one of only 33 Republicans to vote against the extension of the Voting Rights Act in July 2006, was against the Matthew Shepard Act, and said that “we have more to fear from the potential of the Affordable Health Care for America Act passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.” So basically she’s not only an idiot, but a Class A shitty person.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) took on a unique enemy during a radio interview yesterday: people with student loans.
Though many politicians sympathize with those who are saddled with exorbitant student debt, Foxx, who chairs the House subcommittee on higher education, had a different take. Appearing on G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, the North Carolina congresswoman recounted her own experience paying for college, where she worked her way through and graduated after seven years. Foxx then pointed to her own experience as justification for why she has “very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt.” “There’s no reason for that,” she concluded:
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. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting 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.
(click the link to listen to a video)
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.
