March 25, 2010; Wall Street Journal | When it comes to the Democrats, President Obama, and what it perceives as the administration’s anti-business stance, you can always count on a howl from the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page, even if the action getting attention might help out some nonprofits.
Giving commentators a headache this time is what the newspaper’s editorial writers claim will be a “huge gift” from Washington to nonprofits that originate student loans. The Journal says that as part of the reconciliation process to change the health-care bill, a plan “hitched to ObamaCare” will ban private companies from originating federally guaranteed loans. The Journal calls a “fairy tale that cutting out the private-lender middlemen will save billions every year as students borrow directly from the feds.”
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Rather than saving money, the editorial writers show their deeply conservative stripes, charging that the change is nothing more than another anti-business strike by the administration and its Democratic supporters in the Senate. The editorial states, “While Democrats are eliminating a revenue stream at for-profit companies, they are simultaneously creating another one for a handful of favored nonprofit companies.” Later, it adds, “And you thought Democrats didn’t like business.” I guess that’s what you call a difference of opinion.—Bruce Trachtenberg
