Some have said that I should not have taken out the federal student loans if I couldn’t pay them back without a hassle. Like everyone else, I assumed all along I’d graduate and receive a call. Plus, before I enrolled and took out the loans, I was told that Concordia U and seminary students hardly ever defaulted on their student loans. Now I found out too late that the Dept of Education and higher education are in cahoots, so what’s reported as the default rate is only those who defaulted within two years or so after graduation. With the six-month grace period and easily approved deferments, it would be hard for anyone to default in the first two years! The real default rate per school is kept top secret, but overall one out of five student loan debtors default. One reason Americans owe more on student loans than on credit Cards is student loans can’t be discharged through bankruptcy.
The main reason that other countries have less expensive education is that other countries collect more taxes from their corporations, and these taxes go to fund education at all levels. In the US 81% of US govt revenues comes from income and payroll taxes, which is twice as high as other industrialized countries, and likewise, the US has half the effective rate of taxation on corporations and the very wealthy as other countries. So while the mood in the US is anti-taxation, only the rich and corporations receive dramatically lower tax rates since they have lobbyists.
Links:
The True Default Rate for Federal Student Loans, July 20, 2010
Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that 1 in 5 students graduating in 1995 have since defaulted on their student loans. Second: The American Public was, for decades, exposed to consistent, repeated claims by the universities, student loan companies, and even the Department of Education that the default rate was low (between roughly 4 and 7 percent) during the same time period….The fact that the recovery rate for defaulted federal student loans is 123 percent (compare this with the 20-30 percent rate for credit cards) should provide a clue.
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Student Loan Default Rate Is Continuing to Increase
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: September 13, 2010
The default rates represent a snapshot in time, examining only borrowers whose first loan repayments came due from Oct. 1, 2007, to Sept. 30, 2008, and who defaulted before Sept. 30, 2009. Those who defaulted later were not included in the data; over time, default rates increase substantially.
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US Govt makes money off of student loan defaulters, Aug 6, 2010
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Search school’s default rates (but only first two years of repayment period are shown): http://www.nslds.ed.gov/nslds_SA/defaultmanagement/search_cohort.cfm
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7 Things They Don’t Tell You About Student Loans
By Jane Bryant Quinn | Dec 7, 2010
The default rate is much higher than the government leads you to believe….You have no idea how fast an apparently modest student loan can build, if you skip payments.
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The Student Loan Scheme
Concordia Ft. Wayne library and food pantry expansion costs:
The library addition is part of a $15,000,000 capital campaign that also includes $5,000,000 in added endowment and $2,000,000 for a family life center to house the Food and Clothing Co-op following construction of the library.
Student Loan costs for life of a loan calculator
See also Table 2 here:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/revenue.cfm
CEOs and board members are often paid in stocks, and capital gains associated with those stocks are taxed at only 15%:
http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc427.html
You have taxable income or deductible loss when you sell the stock you received by exercising the option. You generally treat this amount as a capital gain or loss.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_pay#Tax_issues
Corporate taxation and excise (“sin”) taxes (cigarettes, alcohol, gasoline, etc) barely are taxed anymore compared to their historical rate, while individual tax payers must assume the burden the corporations and commerce once had. While the statutory tax rate might be high, corporations have received tax breaks and deductions and credits so their “effective” tax rate is the lowest of any industrialized nation—27th out of 27:
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_welfare/real_tax_rates_plummet.php
Corporate taxes paid for more than a quarter of federal outlays in the 1950s and a fifth in the 1960s. They began to decline during the Nixon administration, yet even by the second half of the 1990s, corporate taxes still covered 11 percent of the cost of federal programs. But in fiscal years 2002 and 2003, corporate taxes paid for a mere 6 percent of federal expenses.
Only 12% of US federal revenue comes from corporations as of 2009, up from the start of the decade, while payroll and income tax account for 81% of US federal revenue:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numbers/revenue.cfm
In Canada only 41% of federal revenues come from personal taxes, half the US rate:
http://www.moneyandwealth.ca/222/source-of-canadian-government-tax-revenue/
US barely taxes its corporations compared to other industrialized countries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
…the U.S. ranked 27th lowest of 30 OECD countries in its collection of corporate taxes relative to GDP, at 1.8% vs. the average 2.5%.[27] Bruce Bartlett wrote in May 2011: "...one almost never hears that total revenues are at their lowest level in two or three generations as a share of G.D.P. or that corporate tax revenues as a share of G.D.P. are the lowest among all major countries. One hears only that the statutory corporate tax rate in the United States is high compared with other countries, which is true but not necessarily relevant. The economic importance of statutory tax rates is blown far out of proportion by Republicans looking for ways to make taxes look high when they are quite low."[28]
The personal plus corporate taxes together amounted to only 40% of German state revenue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Germany#Tax_revenue
Lutheran Seminary Fraud, May 16, 2011
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bruce-church (http://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Go to Canada Now Rather Than Later":
The last item/line in the above post is missing the link. Here it is:
Lutheran Seminary Fraud, May 16, 2011:
http://ichabodthegloryhasdeparted.blogspot.com/2011/05/lutheran-seminary-fraud-students-are.html
