CREDO helps you tell your Congressfolk to support S. 897, the Bank on Student Loan Fairness Act. S. 897 would chop the federal student loan rate for the upcoming academic year from 3.4% to 0.75%, the rate at the Federal Reserve's so-called "discount window," which often makes short-term loans to banks. Turns out S. 897 also looks to the short term (it only covers loans for students starting school during the 2013-14 academic year), but the slashed rate will help them stay out of debt, since tuition rates have risen much faster than inflation for decades now. And lately it's occurred to me that one of the main drivers behind the fivefold increase in student debt must be parents who only make enough money to survive, not to save. Those who'd tell you household income has only gone up since the Reagan era forget not only that most pre-Reagan households had one income while post-Reagan households had two, but that wages haven't been outrunning inflation for some time. Obviously we'll need to correct all of that, too, lest we become a society of wage-slaves.
Meanwhile, the Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to support H.R. 1150, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. Their latest email missive begins: "Imagine your child went to a school that was so crowded and dirty that you had to sprinkle antibiotics on their cereal just to keep them from getting sick. You wouldn’t stand for it, would you? Yet that is what’s happening on industrial farms every day: chickens, turkeys, cows, and pigs are raised in such poor conditions that the only way to keep them from getting sick is to put antibiotics in their daily feed." Of course, you wouldn't stand for your children being slaughtered and sold for their meat, either, but the analogy's otherwise quite accurate: animals grow up in tiny cages where they can hardly move out of the way of their own filth, so they get sick, so they get pumped full of antibiotics -- which then makes bacteria more resistant, and makes us sick. The factory farms who benefit most will hold the low price of meat hostage to our attempts to end their antibiotic addiction. The response? I thought this was a can-do country.
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