Nader on a Greater Education System

Since declaring their candidacies, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain have dominated the media, but the Democratic and Republican candidates are not the only ones running in this year’s presidential election. In an effort to get to know this year’s candidates better, Daniel Colbert of the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily sat down with independent party presidential candidate Ralph Nader to ask 10 questions submitted by college newspapers across the country, including THE HOYA. The questions were voted on by college editors in a collaborative effort to get the answers to the issues affecting students across the United States. Below is a sampling of some of those questions.

The first one comes from the Daily Campus at the University of Connecticut. It's about financial aid. How will you provide financial aid for middle-class Americans who struggle to afford the cost of college tuition? Public universities should be tuition-free, as they have been for decades in Western Europe, including some countries like Finland. ... If they can do it, we can do it. It should be like high school. If you want to go to Harvard or Brown, you pay whatever — although they're going toward tuition-free because of their endowment interests, you know, they're moving in that direction, but it should be that way. It takes about $55 billion a year, and we spend $80 billion in up-front and back-up costs keeping soldiers in Western Europe and East Asia, 60 years after World War II — doing what? Who are they defending? Japan? South Korea, Germany, England, France — against who? Inner Mongolia? Moldova? So if you bring them back, and then a lot of the soldiers can get an education, too. So that's it. Now, absent that, you've got to expand your student loans. They should be completely done by the Department of Education. There should be no Sallie Mae, no commercial student loan companies that gouge you, rip you off and do it, you know, do it after you've signed on ... And by the way, you know, these student loans companies wine and dine ..., a lot of your loan officials — student loan officials, like Duke and Columbia. They had to resign. They take them to junkets, wine and dine, so that they can get an exclusive — actually put their people on campus.

Our next question is from our own paper, the Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia. It has to do with the economy. The United States is almost $10 trillion in debt and counting. How are you going to make sure our generation isn't picking up the tab for your generation's excesses? Well, first of all, you have a balanced budget, except for extraordinary circumstances. You don't deficit finance the Iraq War. Presidents usually raise taxes to fund wars. This reduces taxes on the wealthy, and puts the burden on your shoulders to pay, see? The first step is you cut the military budget, which is very bloated, wasteful, redundant — all kinds of weapons systems costing zillions that were designed for the Soviet Union era of hostility, but they're still in the pipeline because Lockheed Martin and Grumman and General Dynamics want more sales. So you cut that, you cut the corporate subsidies — hundreds of billions of dollars — you've seen what's on the way with the bailout on Wall Street. And that will help produce a balanced budget. Another way to do it is to tax the corporations at the rate they were taxed in the prosperous 1960s, which they are not now. They're taxed far less. But, I'll tell you, any time that you have deficit spending you've got to make sure it's for a strict public purpose, like, let's say you're in a depression and you want to create jobs, so the government goes into deficit spending to rebuild the public works — the schools, bridges, highways, public transit — that's a legitimate use, because that's a real investment. You're gonna get a return on that investment. But wars, subsidies to corrupt, mismanaged corporations, that's not appropriate use of tax money anyway, much less deferring the burden on to the next generation. And I call Bush the biggest baby-taxer in American history, because when he does deficit spending, he's taxing the kids.

The next question's from the Daily Bruin at the University of California, Los Angeles. It's about student loans. The economic crisis has forced many banks and lenders to close their doors to students seeking loans, forcing some students to take on part-time and sometimes even second jobs. What are your plans to help regulate and to maintain a steady level of lenders available to students so that their focus can be primarily on their studies and not on the costs of college? I want to eliminate the commercial lenders. They've disgraced themselves, they've enriched themselves. You can see what the head of Sallie Mae paid himself over the years. He set up his own golf course. So no, this is a public function and it should be done with public funds until the day when we have no tuition at public universities. Again, the distinction between Harvard, Yale, and you know, the University of California. When I made this point about two weeks ago at a university, a person stood up in the question period and said, ‘You know, I've just finished my graduate degree from a university in Finland, and I’d just like to tell everybody here that what it cost me in my senior year was 56€, which is about $83.’ If Finland can do it, why can't we do it? So you'll notice the premise there is not that it could be tuition-free. It should be tuition-free. It's like high school. It should be like high school.

Well, the next question ought to be right up your alley. It's about tuition costs and it's also from the Daily Bruin. Many universities are raising tuition fees for students because of a decrease in state funding. As president, how will you combat this obstacle to higher education, and what can be done at the national level to ease the financial burden on students? Well, you see it's good it's U. Cal, Berkeley, because there's a retired physics professor, I think it's Charlie Schulz, who has his own Web site, who has been monitoring the budget. Most people don't even understand university budgets, because their not micro enough, they're not detailed enough. Like you have a departmental budget, but what, you know, detail? And he's the only one I know in the United States that takes it apart, year after year. And he makes these presentations, and they just completely ignore him. And his point is that students are cross-subsidizing corporate research. You know, when they come into these agreements — you know, I think Novartis is on campus there, and BP is about to be on campus — that, when they say, well, we're going to put billions of dollars in the next 10 years, these corporations, but there's a cross-subsidy. So there is an argument that the more commercial research is conducted on campus in these partnerships, they have to have elaborate laboratories, elaborate this, because they compete against one other — Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley — that they're shifting significant costs on the student, in terms of tuition increases. So I would suggest that the students there look at Charlie Schulz's Web site and they can see that the tuition at Berkeley should not be as high as it is, if it wasn't for this kind of commercial research.

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