Reducing Technical School Subsidies, While Increasing Law School Subsidies

I get a lot of links from other bloggers, and while I sometimes just link to those accounts, I often dig a bit cheaper, to make sure that they are getting the story right.  (This is, after all, one of the virtues of blogging: the more links you have to your sources, the easier it is to make sure someone has the story right.)

Hans Bader over at OpenMarket.org makes the argument that:

The economy remains slow, recovering from the recession at an unusually low rate, partly due to economically-harmful Obama administration policies. “U.S. stocks fell, dragging the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index lower . . . after employers added fewer jobs than forecast in March,” reports Bloomberg News. As one columnist notes, “Were it not for people dropping out of the labor force, the unemployment rate would be well over 11%.”

Under the Obama administration, the Education Department has poured increasing amounts of financial aid into law schools, while seeking to cut vocational education needed to train certain kinds of skilled factory workers who are in short supply, impeding the expansion of factory operations that would also provide jobs to many unskilled workers. As the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal notes, “Law students . . . are treated generously as future professionals and able to borrow, with virtually no cap, significantly more money than undergrads. . . For several decades, most higher education loans were made by private lenders with the federal government providing guarantees against loss—and, in some cases, interest rate subsidies.”

I have previously blogged about how the Obama Administration has been pushing for cuts in federal subsidies to non-profit technical and trade schools, so I wasn't surprised, but subsidizing law schools?  Sure enough, the ABA Journal article does make that point: that the federal government is encouraging, with its astonishing subsidies, the production of more lawyers at a time when many new law school graduates can't find work, and therefore can't pay off those student loans.

This is crazy.  Like subsidizing companies that are about to go bankrupt because they can't compete in the market place, while trying to punish companies that actually sell a product that people want: oil.