Every sentient, literate adult knows that the current spike in gas prices is 90 percent due to forces completely beyond the control of Congress, the White House or even “Big Oil” itself. The laws of supply and demand determine gas prices in the same way those laws determine the price of eggs, acid-washed blue jeans and Kanye West downloads.
What determines the price of college tuition? It certainly isn’t the quality of the product — as copiously demonstrated in David Horowitz’s new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
The two big topics on CNN last week were (1) high gas prices and (2) the high cost of college tuition. (Also some story that I think was about an angry Hispanic lacrosse player who vanished from a cruise ship during Bush’s low poll numbers.)
CNN reports that college tuition has risen an astonishing 40 percent since 2000. (And nearly 1000 percent since 1970.) But the proposed solutions to the exact same problem — high prices — were diametrically opposed in the cases of gasoline and college tuition.
The only solution to high gas prices considered on CNN was to pay oil company executives less, perhaps by federal law or order of the president. But no one ever suggested that the solution to the high price of college – far, far outpacing inflation — was to pay professors less. In that case, the solution was for the government to subsidize college professors’ salaries even more than it already does.
Why doesn’t CNN report the crisis in college tuition the same way it covers high gas prices? To wit:
Coming up, soaring prices at the colleges. Who’s to blame? How can you keep your child in college and cash in your wallet? And Harvard outrage, big education makes big bucks, but we pay the price. So should President Bush limit tuition costs? …
To our top story now. It seems like a summer ritual. Rising college administration salaries mean rising tuition prices. But this year, sticker shock at the tuition window is fueling more concern than ever. And it has many people asking where is it going to end?
JAMIE COURT, CONSUMER RIGHTS ADVOCATE: Every time you see the price of tuition go up, you can hear “ka-ching, ka-ching” in the bank accounts of college professors and administrators.
Other than the product being discussed, that’s how CNN reports on gas prices.
Why not subsidize the oil companies and put a cap on the price of college? Oil companies provide a product essential to allowing 300 million Americans to live, whereas colleges are designed to do nothing but turn young people into group-think liberal parasites.
As economist Richard Vedder of Ohio University has demonstrated, every time the government subsidizes college tuition through tuition tax credits, college tuition rises by the precise amount of the tuition tax credit.
Can Congress please investigate the “shameful display of greed” by college professors?
Hardworking taxpayers who can’t afford gas are forced to pay more in taxes because liberals think it’s extremely important for young people to be taught that America is the worst country in the world and that bond traders in the World Trade Center on 9/11 deserved to die.
Maybe with a little less subsidized tuition, colleges couldn’t afford luxuries like (fake-Indian) Indian studies professor Ward Churchill. He makes $120,000 a year as a department head at the University of Colorado, in addition to many speaking fees paid to him by other institutions of higher learning, all subsidized by taxpayers.
In addition to providing a vital product, former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering.
Churchill doesn’t have a Ph.D., not even one of those phony ones you have to buy on the Internet before you can host your own show on Air America Radio. He does not produce a product that allows New Yorkers to eat without turning 90 percent of the city into farmland.
Rather, Churchill’s highest academic achievement consists of having a B.A. in communications and graphic arts. At least those are the only parts of his resume that haven’t already been proved false. (And I believe it because no one would make that up.)
Churchill’s written oeuvre consists of rants about how the Americans who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 deserved it:
“Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. … If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”
And thus, Churchill joined the ranks of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Faulkner and other great writers who employ the phrase, “Gimme a break.” Perhaps he expresses himself better in graphic arts.
American taxpayers subsidize the most cretinous, idiotic, hate-filled lunatics in the universe — and liberals are demanding that we direct our hate toward people like Lee Raymond who allow us to go to the bathroom indoors.
How about Congress having weekly hearings on the price of college and the ridiculous salaries of professors like Churchill? Horowitz has already provided the witness list for the first two years.
COPYRIGHT 2006 ANN COULTER
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