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June 13, 2003

Bush Cuts Aid to College Education

The best way to measure Bush's policies is to see what he does with executive orders and administrative decisions, places where he doesn't have to compromise.

And those are all about slashing support for education and those in need.

Take financial aid for college. Oh yeah, he already did, using not surprisingly a bureaucratic lie introduced into the financial aid formula:

Whether furnished by colleges, states or the federal government, the vast majority of the nation's $90 billion in financial aid is dictated by a single, intricate equation known as the federal need analysis. Its purpose is to decipher how much of a family's income is truly discretionary and therefore fair game for covering college expenses.

Much like the federal income tax, the formula allows families to deduct some of what they pay in state and local taxes. But, this year, the department significantly reduced that amount, in some cases cutting it in half. On paper, at least, that leaves families with more money left over to pay for college, even though state and local taxes have gone up over the last year, not down.

They claim its just a bureaucratic imperative under the law, but given the way the administration has twisted every other law on the books to come up with anti-labor and anti-enviroment results, one would suspect that the administration's stated fidelity to the spirit of the law is a bit disingenuous.

Just as they left the working poor out of the tax bill, this gives them one more shot to cut financial aid to that same group of families.

Posted by Nathan at June 13, 2003 07:32 AM