State of My Union

Posted on February 4, 2010
Filed Under Politics, The Youth Vote | By Ashley Singh

obama2.jpgWhen I watch the State of the Union address, I rarely expect to hear anything that is relevant to me as a young American in this country. Whenever I watched Bush do the State of the Union address, or speak for that matter, I never felt like he was talking to me. But from the moment I watched him speak at Invesco Field on that cool August night, I knew Obama was talking to me. It’s probably because he’s such a great orator or because I feel like with him as president my thoughts and my views are represented even more than they were with Bush as president. My parents say it’s because I want to change the world, but I say it’s because the world needs changing.

I wrote a post in August 2009 called Free Health Care? Or Free College?, in which I referenced President Obama’s education plan. He said,

“We need to put a college education within reach of every American. That’s the best investment we can make in our future. I’ll create a new and fully refundable tax credit worth $4,000 for tuition and fees every year, which will cover two-thirds of the tuition at the average public college or university. I’ll also simplify the financial aid application process so that we don’t have a million students who aren’t applying for aid because it’s too difficult. I will start by eliminating the current student aid form altogether—we’ll use tax data instead.”

Well, this was just the beginning of his plan for higher education.

In his State of the Union address last week, the president announced his plan for college graduates

“to pay only ten percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after twenty years—and forgiven after ten years if they choose a career in public service. Because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college. And it’s time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs—because they too have a responsibility to help solve this problem.”

This plan is said to cost the government roughly $1 billion, while his proposal for Congress would “eliminate the federal system that provides subsidies to private student loan companies, saving the federal government an estimated $87 billion over 10 years.” The president wants to use that money to increase grants and lower interest rates for students.

So as a soon-to-be college graduate, I for one support this plan. I think it’s really great that the president is doing something that will benefit me directly, and he has me in mind in his decision-making process. This was my goal when the whole election season began in 2008—to be represented in my government; after all, that’s what the founding fathers intended when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. The government is for the people, by the people, and intended to serve the people, and “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and provide new Guards for their future security.”

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