Student loans are the life blood of many college students. Tuition is skyrocketing yearly and cost of living expenses suck students’ bank accounts dry, often before mid-terms.

Which is why the federal government’s plan to cut student loan funding by $12.7 billion is so perplexing. As the U.S. House of Representative prepares to take up debate on an edited version of a deficit reduction bill, which was halted in the Senate after passing the House in December, they would do well to remember that not all college students are as privileged as their families. Many of us are poor and barely scrape by.

Cutting education funding sends the message that education is not important enough to be well funded.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to siphon government funds at astronomical rates – this, of course, despite the fact that Americans were promised Iraqi oil would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction and not the American taxpayer.

An article in Tuesday’s Northern Star noted the bill’s main goal was to reduce the Department of Defense’s budget. How does cutting the Department of Education’s funding reduce the budget of the Defense Department?

The same article stated about $3.75 billion in “savings” from the funding changes in this bill would be reinvested in a new Pell Grant program.

More Pell money is nice, but hardly makes up for severing the aorta of the student loan program. It’s almost like a doctor cutting off the wrong leg and then making up for it by attaching one of your arms as a replacement.

This legislation also promises to prohibit loan consolidation after a student graduates.

No early consolidation, less student loan money and a faux fix to Pell Grant program adds up to a plan more disastrous than the Maginot Line.

Oh well, perhaps the United States can use the money to make some really big bombs and then we can drop them on the freedom-hating masses. We don’t need no edumukation anyway.