http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/07/01/student-loan-rates-double-as-calendar-turns-to-july/

One of the last great middle class welfare giveways has taken another hit as student loan interest rates double today. (Ignore the usual Fox spin).

Since WWII, the working class gateway to the middle class, and the bourgeois subsidy that guaranteed their prosperity, has been the cheap college education. There has been a trifecta of government financial support (for those who could afford the price of admission): outright government grants for higher education, inexpensive high-quality state universities and the GI Bill; are dwindling. I could never have afforded my own schooling (and my comfortable middle class lifetstyle) without that financial troika to help pull me through.

For a while, government guaranteed loans (a thinly- disguised pork barrel for the financial industry) partially made up the difference, but created a national student debt that now dwarfs consumer credit card liability.

But Sunday’s doubling of the interest rate closes that escape route from wage serfdom just a bit more. Pretty soon, the college degree will go the same way as health care and home ownership–reserved for those who can afford it up front, or those willing to sell their soul to the company store.

And where will America get all those scientists, engineers and technicians that it desperately needs to compete in the new world marketplace without shelling out an arm and a leg for them? Fear not, a vast reservoir of Asians and assorted Eurotrash from the impoverished economies across the pond, all university-trained at government expense in their own countries, are willing to work for peanuts in America’s industries and laboratories. The immigration law will give them special preference, I’m sure. Smart Americans with the resources to send their kids to Ivy League schools will encourage them to enter useful, productive and rewarding professions, like Law, Finance and Marketing. STEM? Save that for the Guptas, Real Americans don’t do math.

Next in line: Social Security and Medicare. If we stop lavishly bankrolling old people, maybe pretty soon there won’t be quite as many of them.