Garrett for Wasting Tax Dollars

One of the perplexing things about Representative Scott Garrett is that he chooses to advocate for practices that waste taxpayer money, while slamming waste in other programs. I've written before about Garrett's affinity for Medicare Advantage, which has been documented to cost taxpayers more than it should. Yet Garrett gripes about Medicare costing too much.

Today, Garrett sent an e-mail defending his opposition to reforming Federal Student loans. Here's part of his logic:

On Thursday, the House passed a bill (H.R. 3221) that will, if signed into law, eliminate private loans with federal guarantees, replacing such loans entirely with the government’s Direct Loan program – in other words, removing the optionality of the public option – at a cost of $1 trillion over the next ten years.

What Garrett conveniently fails to mention is that enacting this policy is actually saving taxpayers billions. From the CBO:

H.R. 3221 would make several changes to the federal student loan programs, including the Federal Perkins Loan Program. As shown in Table 2, CBO estimates that, on net, those changes would reduce federal costs by $40.7 billion over five years and $74.8 billion over 10 years.

So once again, we have Garrett defending taxpayer money flowing into private hands at a higher cost than we should be paying for the service we're receiving.

Adding insult to the injury of honest debate, Garrett relates his argument to the health care debate and justifying his opposition to the public option.

The student loan public option should serve as a cautionary and instructional tale for Congress and the American people as we continue to discuss ways to reform the health care system.

Garrett's right, the cautionary tale here is that without reform, we're going to continue spending more than we should. That's fine with Garrett, the question should be put to his constituents, is that okay with you?