Presidential candidate and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) joined a chorus of Republicans in opposing President Obama’s proposal to help college students and graduates get out from under crushing student loan debt. She followed former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) and pizza magnate Herman Cain (R) in announcing her opposition last night at an education forum hosted by News Corporation and the College Board in New York.

Gingrich called the plan a “Ponzi scheme,” while Cain claimed the student loan industry should be managed by the states. Bachmann, however, took a different stand, saying Obama’s plan was an “abuse of power” that would create a “moral hazard” for the nation’s college students:

“I believe it is abuse of power from the executive to impose via an executive order a wholesale change in the student loan,” Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman, said during an education forum in New York put on by The College Board and News Corp.

Bachmann said the change creates a “moral hazard” when it comes to student debt.

“There is a morality in keeping our financial promises, and I don’t think we should push that off onto the taxpayer,” she said. “The individual needs to repay and be responsible for repaying their student loan debt.”

The “moral hazard” that would result in not keeping “our financial promises,” however, isn’t based on the actual plan Obama proposed, since it forgives very little debt that students owe, and only then after borrowers have been paying their loans for twenty years. (The old requirement for forgiveness eligibility was 25 years.) Mostly, the plan lowers monthly payments — by hundreds of dollars for many students — by putting a cap on the amount that must be paid back each month.

As for it being an abuse of power, Obama’s executive order doesn’t create a “wholesale change” in student loans, it merely accelerates the implementation of a law passed by Congress last year, putting it into effect in 2012 instead of 2014.

Instead of providing a credible, truthful reason to oppose the plan, Bachmann has chosen to join her Republican colleagues in their continuing effort to make it harder for low- and middle-income Americans to go to college. Student loan debt is expected to top $1 trillion this year and tuition costs are rising across the country, but the GOP’s method of addressing such problems includes cutting billions in funding for Pell Grants and opposing multiple student loan reforms.

Republicans have made quite the show of disparaging the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, calling for its repeal, refusing to provide regulators with the funds to implement it, and blocking nominees for key regulatory positions. Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ) took the latest step in that campaign yesterday, introducing a bill that would repeal an important Dodd-Frank safeguard for the financial system.

One of the key factors that led to the housing bubble’s boom and bust was the ability of subprime mortgage lenders to make a loan and then turn around and sell the entire loan to Wall Street. As the Center for Public Integrity wrote, “lenders were selling their loans to Wall Street, so they wouldn’t be left holding the deed in the event of a foreclosure. In a financial version of hot potato, they could make bad loans and just pass them along.” This fueled a dramatic decline in lending standards and gave subprime lenders every incentive to push loans onto people, since the lenders could divorce themselves from all the risk associated with a loan that didn’t pan out.

Dodd-Frank requires that lenders retain at least five percent of their loans, so that they have some “skin in the game.” Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee — following Financial Service Committee Spencer Bachus’ (R-AL) call to “serve the banks” — want to the repeal that requirement:

[Garret's] bill would eliminate a provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that requires financial firms to retain “skin in the game” by holding some of the risk from mortgages they packaged into bonds.

Garrett said he hopes to move his bill through his subcommittee in short order, as the full committee begins to consider other GOP housing bills as they advance to the House floor.

Banks have been quietly trying to nix this portion of the law, after they were unsuccessful in getting it out while Dodd-Frank was being debated. The banking industry said that it was counting on “better outcomes” with Republicans running the House of Representatives. This is just one more way in which that attitude is turning into reality.

Back in September, as the GOP was getting all riled up over the faux Solyndra scandal, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said that “for the federal government to be out there picking one company over another, one type of energy source over another, I think is wrong.” Evidently, though, his attitude toward energy subsidies does not extend to nuclear plants in his home state of Ohio.

As Bloomberg reported today, despite his professed view on energy subsidies, Boehner is backing a $2 billion loan guarantee for an enriching plant run by USEC Inc., saying that failing to provide the guarantee would “betray” Ohio’s workers:

House Speaker John Boehner attacked the Obama administration for financing failed solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC, saying government shouldn’t pick winners and losers. That hasn’t stopped him from demanding that the U.S. make a winner of a nuclear-fuel plant in Ohio, his home state.

Boehner is backing a $2 billion Energy Department loan guarantee sought by USEC Inc. (USU) for its American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, aimed at enriching uranium for commercial nuclear reactors. [...]

“In the midst of the Solyndra controversy that has raised serious questions about the Obama administration’s oversight of taxpayer dollars, hundreds of Southern Ohio workers stand to lose their jobs if the Obama administration reneges on the president’s promise to support an energy project in the small town of Piketon, Ohio,” Boehner wrote. “I urge the administration to not betray the citizens of Ohio.”

Boehner is far from the only Republican using Solyndra to score political points while asking for loan guarantees at the same time. In fact, Republican House members host $11.8 billion in loan guarantees in their districts.

According to Bloomberg, “USEC’s political action committee has given $10,000 to committees supporting Boehner since 2010.” It’s telling that he believes failure to provide a loan guarantee is a betrayal of workers, while pushing budget cuts that cost hundreds of thousands of workers their jobs is responsible governance.

The negative attention garnered by Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) assertion that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” and “monstrous lie” to America’s youth apparently wasn’t enough to keep his fellow Republican presidential candidates from making similar claims about other proposed programs. Speaking at an education forum hosted by News Corporation and the College Board in New York last night, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich nodded to Perry while calling President Obama’s proposed plan to help college graduates who are buried under student loan debt a “Ponzi scheme” that will “bankrupt the country,” CNN’s Ashley Killough reports:

Gingrich, however, called for the privatization of the student-loan program, arguing the president’s plan would bankrupt the country “by promising to every young person, ‘You won’t have to pay off your student loan as a student.’”

He said the plan appeals to students now, but by the time they will “have to pay off the national debt” as taxpayers when they’re older, Obama will be long gone.

“It’s a Ponzi scheme even by Gov. Perry’s standards,” Gingrich said, also making a quip referring to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who’s repeatedly described Social Security as a Ponzi scheme.

Obama’s plan, which would lower monthly repayment costs for millions of college graduates, has been met with resistance from congressional Republicans and presidential candidates alike. Still, Gingrich’s attack is truly bizarre, given that nothing about the plan even remotely resembles a Ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, American student loan debt is expected to surpass $1 trillion this year, a record high that amounts to more than Americans owe in collective credit card debt. The issue has been one of the driving forces behind the 99 Percent Movement, as student debt has piled up due to rising tuition costs at both public and private colleges and universities.

Even in the face of those numbers, the opposition shouldn’t be shocking, as Republicans continue support policies that make it harder for low- and middle-income Americans to attend college. The GOP opposed efforts to reform the federal student loan program, demagoguing changes that ended the practice of letting banks act as unnecessary middlemen in the federal loan process as a “Washington takeover” of the student loan industry. And after including massive cuts to the Pell Grant program in their budget, party leaders now argue that such grants actually make it more expensive to go to college, claims that are demonstrably false.

President Obama’s announcement earlier this week that he would use executive authority to make some changes to the federal student loan program has elicited quite the negative response from the GOP. House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN) said that the plan to reduce students’ debt “means more debt for students, more debt for taxpayers, and more red ink on the government’s books.” Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) responded to the plan by saying “the president should stop campaigning and start working with Congress to get the results that the American people expect,” while the conservative media simply derided the plan as a gambit to “buy votes.”

However, those GOP’ers haven’t gone as far as the party’s presidential candidates, who evidently believe that the federal government should get out of the student aid business entirely. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), for instance, said that he’d phase out the federal student loan program entirely. Former pizza magnate Herman Cain, meanwhile, said that he doesn’t believe in any form of federal student aid whatsoever, believing that such aid is better off left to the states:

I believe that if a state wants to help with college education, then they should do that. Secondly, you have people living within communities within states that are willing to help fund those kinds of programs. So I do not believe that it is the responsibility of the federal government to help fund a college education because herein, our resources are limited and I believe that the best solution is the one closest to the problem. The people within the state, the people within the communities, ultimately, I believe, are the ones who have that responsibility. [...] If you want an education, a college education in America, I believe that people can get it if they are determined to get it. They might have to work a little harder. They might have to work a little longer, but the fact that we have so many options for people to get an advanced education in this nation, I think it is one of the big pluses that we have, that we offer our young people, that a lot of other countries do not offer.

Watch it:

Aside from the obvious logistical problems posed by devolving student loans and aid to the states (Would students receive grants from their home state or from the state in which they attend school? What if a student’s parents want or need to move midway through a student’s college years? Would she lose her aid and have to get it from either her or her parents’ new state?), federal student loans and programs like Pell Grants have helped millions of Americans access higher education.

Without federal aid, students would be pushed into riskier, more expensive private student loans, even as student loan debt is en route to eclipsing $1 trillion for the first time. Instead of trying to grapple with ever-rising student debt, the GOP just wants to make it someone else’s problem.