By Ryan Manheimer
“Reality exists as an objective absolute — facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.” These are Ayn Rand’s words and my strongest conviction. Lately, government and higher education in parallel have been ignoring reality at a terrible cost. Our national debt exceeds $16 trillion. Student loan debt has outpaced credit card debt. Our government and our college students spend money they do not have.
Social Security is broken. People cannot work for 35 years and expect to retire comfortably for 25 years. Modern medicine is wonderful and makes our lives longer. However, that means we need to work longer, too. Public workers with pensions are collecting those pensions for a longer time once they retire and bankrupting state governments. Meanwhile, Social Security and Medicare are bankrupting the national government. We need leadership that understands this and is willing to make the hard choice to reform Social Security and Medicare. We need Romney/Ryan.
College costs have skyrocketed. We all know that. Half the people I know here picked TCNJ over a private school that charged upwards of $50,000 a year. We are the smart ones. Fifty percent of college graduates do not find employment or are underemployed. Good luck paying off all that student loan debt with an unskilled job you could have gotten right out of high school. It is irresponsible and foolish to spend upwards of $200,000 on college and go into over $100,000 in debt for a useless degree that makes you no more qualified for a job that a high school student; but people do it. My own cousins do it.
That kind of irresponsibility means paying student loans for the rest of your working life. That debt weighs you down. It holds you back. The government’s debt does the same thing at a national level. Romney and Ryan will turn the government around. Many of us made the responsible fiscal decision to come to TCNJ to avoid crushing student loan debt. Romney/Ryan will make responsible fiscal decisions to reduce the deficit and lower the national debt.
