Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s strange belief about the ability of women to prevent pregnancy in cases of rape is apparently not just a matter of a particularly extreme form of pro-lifery. He’s got a lot of really unusual ideas.
According to a piece by (former Monthly intern) Brian Beutler:
In April, Akin cited a law Democrats passed in 2010 that saves billions of dollars by preventing private banks from profiting, risk free, on federally backed student loans as an example of the notion that “America has got the equivalent of stage three cancer of socialism, because the federal government is tampering in all kind of stuff it has no business tampering in.”
When offered the chance to clarify, he declined, saying “I called a spade a spade.”
This law, by which federal student loans go directly thought students, rather than through banks, will would save taxpayers $60 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Listen, in order to use the term “stage three cancer,” even rhetorically, the thing you’re describing has to be both spreading and objectively bad. Direct lending is a policy change that saves taxpayers a lot of money. That’s not a “cancer”; that’s a good thing.
