Auschwitz, built on Polish territory by the Nazi regime in Germany

Fear…the Republican Party appears to be enamored of fear. Representative Roscoe Bartlett, a Republican from Maryland, decided to attack federal student loans while speaking at Allegany College. Bartlett used the ‘slippery slope’ argument that federal student loans would lead to a Holocaust. Bartlett stated:

Not that it’s not a good idea to give students loans, it certainly is a good idea to give them loans. But if you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad. You could. There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other [inaudible]. The Holocaust that occurred in Germany — how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope.

Republicans have been attacking federal student loans because they fear that education will lead to upward mobility among the students who take them. What is more, Bartlett is completely wrong on this front given that spending on education is Constitutional.

ThinkProgress noted that:

Two-thirds of American students currently go into debt in order to get a college education, with 10 percent of those borrowers owing $50,000 or more. But Bartlett and House Republicans still voted this year to eliminate Pell Grants for more than one million students, and the GOP has promised to undo the student loan reform signed into law by President Obama, which would take federal education funding away from students, giving it to bank middlemen instead.

Of course, the Republicans want to undermine everything that will or could lead to a stronger economy because their lords and masters such as the Koch Brothers are busy running out of places to move their factories in order to take advantage of cheap labor.