Romney Hood: Education plan takes from the poor and gives to the rich

Mitt Romney showed his hair briefly at a West Philadelphia charter school this morning to tout his plan for education, which he calls "the civil rights issue of our time." You could make that argument, but Romney has a bizarre way of addressing that. Like, do you remember that time when Martin Luther King marched on Washington so that bankers could get a bigger cut of fair housing programs for America's poor? Me, neither.

Even by the ultra-cynical standards of the Romney campaign so far, the presumptious nominee's education plan is pure snake oil, his latest "Romney Hood" scam that takes even more from the poor and the middle class and gives to his rich NASCAR-team-owning friends:

Of course, tuition increases and growing debt are a phenomenon several decades in the making. And Romney's plan would make the problem decidedly worse in two important ways, giving federal money away to Wall Street banks and predatory for-profit colleges, two industries to which Romney has extensive ties.

How? The most egregious case is Romney saying he'll undo "Obama's nationalization" of student loans. That might sound nice on the Rush Limbaugh show but all Romney really wants to do is take money that's now going -- thanks to the Obama initiative -- to needy students as Pell Grants and hand that money back to private bankers. The public benefit? There is none.

The other plan would reverse what little progress has been made in regulating the scammiest of the for-profit colleges -- the ones that use boiler-room tactics to woo students, loads them up with loans that they can't repay and send them into the world ill-prepared for getting a job. The tepid, watered-down rules put in place by the Obama adminsitration offer a small measure of protection to students and to you, the taxpayer. But Mitt Romney doesn't really want to protect either your children or you, the taxpayer, who foots the bill for student-loan defaults. He wants to protect his rich friends who own for-profit universities.

I happen to think that almost everything in Romney's education plan is wrong-headed but at least some aspects -- like the role of charter schools -- are worthy of a vigorous public debate in the fall. But Romney's proposals on student loans and for-profit colleges are not. They are brazen daylight robberies of the ever-shrinking middle class.