Video: Third Debate Rick Berg Vs. Heidi Heitkamp
At this point in the election cycle there’s not a lot of new issues for the candidates to sling at one another directly. The slime slinging will be left up to surrogates from here on out so that the candidates can maintain an above-it-all presence. So tonight’s debate wasn’t really all that inspiring.
We got to hear about how Heidi Heitkamp is against partisanship, except whens he’s for Demcorats cramming Obamacare down our throats without a single Republican vote. We got to hear about how Heidi Heitkamp is for coal and oil and natural gas except when she’s taking money from far-left environmentalists and anti-fracking lawyers and voting to keep Harry “oil makes us sick” Reid and Barack “bankrupt coal companies” Obama in charge of the federal government.
We also got to hear about what a jerk Rick Berg is because he once founded a company that went on to become Goldmark Property Management that sometimes (and this is really stunning, I know) doesn’t give people their security deposits back.
Yada, yada, yada.
But there was one interesting moment. Heidi Heitkamp, departing for a moment from the Republican persona she’s adopted this campaign season, called for an absolute nationalization of student loans even above and beyond what Obamacare did. According to Heitkamp, no for-profit financial institution should be making student loans. And don’t take my word for it. The North Dakota Democrat Party proudly tweeted her quote:
“Student loans should not be a for profit entity…we can’t grow our economy on the backs of North Dakota students…”-Heidi
— ND Dem-NPL (@nddemnpl) October 26, 2012
Student loans are already essentially an entitlement, and you can’t get a loan these days without going through the federal government. Now Heitkamp would remove student loans from the private sector entirely?
Wow. That’s pretty radical, and exactly the sort of thing that has created our higher education bubble in this country. Tuition is out of control precisely because we’ve made higher education finance an entitlement. Because we’ve removed profit motive, everybody gets a student loan. Because everybody gets a student loan, everybody goes to college including a lot of people who have no business being in college in the first place.
Anyway, here’s the audio of the debate. I was about 10 minutes late starting my recording, but the rest is there.
