MNIce in Minnesota
Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 12:01 AM

A federal student loan is government subsidized borrowing. An income tax deduction is NOT a government handout! It is an attempt to define expenses that should be counted against taxable "profit or gain." This gets distorted when Congress plays games with deductions and credits for social engineering purposes - social engineering is not one of the legitimate purposes of taxation described in Article I Section 8 Paragraph 1 of the US Constitution, the strange readings of the "General Welfare of the United States" clause notwithstanding.

As for Social Security and Medicare, if you were allowed to invest the money paid for those taxes in even a below-market average mutual fund, you would have several times more money to retire on than you get from the government. In other words, the government program is a terrible investment, the more so if die at a relatively early age (your survivors get little or nothing of the "unused funds"). If Social Security and Medicare were run correctly, they'd be like the Chilean system of personal ownership of retirement funds. Chile, incidentally, surpasses the United States on the index of economic freedom, and its retirees are generally in better shape financially than US citizens dependent on Social Security.