I’d mock it, too, if I heard Hillary say such a thing. If she really wants to do away with the horrendous paperwork of applying for college student-aid, she needs to get the government out of the business of subsidizing education loans. She can let the markets handle it and keep the paperwork simple, or she can have the government involved and the paperwork complicated. There really is no other method.
If you let the markets take care of it, lenders don’t need all the information that the government does. Yes, they do need to know some things about your finances, in order for you to convince them that they’ll get their money back. But they don’t need to know all the details that the government needs to know to keep cheaters from getting government money. In order for government to be fair and equitable in handing out money, it needs to know all sorts of things about us that are really none of its business.
Hillary believes, to the core of her political being, that what changes people’s lives are government programs. Her command of detail about these is prodigious, at times jaw-slackeningly so. And this often leads journalists to underestimate the effectiveness of her laundry-listy rhetorical métier. At her final speech in New Hampshire, I watched a well-known national columnist walk up to Doug Hattaway, one of her strategists, and mock a portion of her speech in which she promised that she’d do away with the horrendous paperwork involved in applying for college student aid. Hattaway simply shrugged and said, “She probably wouldn’t keep saying it if it didn’t get huge applause everywhere she goes.”