This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 4th, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

It is often asserted that taxpayer support for higher education is dwindling and

dangering the nation's economic future enforcing

higher tuition prices, but that's far from the truth.

Representative Virginia Fox chairs the House Subcommittee on Higher Education.

She spoke at a Cato Capital Hill briefing last week.

As most of you know, and it's been in the news that yesterday President Obama announced

he was going to unilaterally change the federal student loan program.

He promised students that they could only pay 10% of their income toward their loans and

that after 20 years, any remaining balance would be forgiven.

He also said the students who consolidated a privately funded federal subsidized loan

into a federally funded direct loan could see their interest rate reduced by half a percentage point.

He touted that he was doing this because Congress had refused to act.

I think as probably most of you are aware, the President's going to try to repeat Harry Truman's

situation where he ran against the do-nothing Congress.

Now, all of you are pretty young, but you might want to read McCullough's book on Truman.

It's pretty good.

But he decided he's going to take on the function of both the executive and the

legislative branch and the Constitution be damned. What he failed to

highlight is that his new proposals are not new. He is simply expediting provisions that are already on the books.

These are provisions, I might add add that we have no reliable data on and how they will

function in real life and what impact they will have on the taxpayers who fund them.

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