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.”
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
