By David Thigpen

For those of you looking to receive a student loan, you might have noticed it is getting a little harder these days. Most people point to the housing crisis as the sole cause of this decline, but they are wrong.

Our brilliant Democratic congressional leaders bear part of the blame for this. Last fall, before the credit market started to go south, our leaders decided to cut the returns companies received on Stafford loans by 70 basis points and the return on loan consolidation by 65 basis points. In a market in which it was easy to package student loans in securities and sell them on the open market, this was fine, but with the new investment skepticism, the legislation has made student loans a net loss.

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, a third of the top 100 student lenders have either left the market entirely or suspended their operations indefinitely. There have also been reports from Sallie Mae that it loses money on every student loan. In an ideal world, the person responsible for this mistake would fess up and work to fix the problem, but this is far from an ideal world.

Rather than fess up to the mistake, Education Chairman Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., decided that we need to pass legislation giving the Department of Education the ability to purchase loans from lenders, increasing demand for student loans artificially. Before the legislation which caused this problem was passed, this portion of the student loan market was relatively self-sustaining. No additional tax dollars were required to keep it afloat. It stands to reason that Miller could save the government some money by just undoing his mistake, but he chose to cover it up instead.

To speed the cover-up of the mistake, some of Miller's Democratic counterparts in the Senate wrote to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, urging him to use student loans as collateral as a part of the fed's term-lending program. That would mean even more taxpayer's money is spent to cover up a mistake the Democrats made in their legislation.

In light of all of this, I wouldn't trust the Democrats to pick up my garbage. You even see this irresponsibility in their presidential contenders.

In the last Democratic debate, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., continued to say he would raise the capital gains tax even after he was told by the moderator every time the tax has been raised total taxes collected had dropped. Obama said that it should be raised out of fairness.

Obama also said we should raise the cap on how much income can be taxed for Social Security. This is the same person who in the same debate said he wasn't going to raise taxes on the middle class. What does he think he is doing by raising the tax on capital gains and raising the cap on the taxable income for Social Security?

Both of these would be a tax on the lower and middle class. Most of the people invested in the stock market are not wealthy. They might be more comfortable than some, but they aren't rich by any stretch of the imagination.

Raising those two taxes is a tax hike on the middle class. If the economy is as bad as the Democrats are saying it is, why do they want to raise our taxes?

The reason is incompetence. They screwed up the student loan market, and they'll screw up our taxes and government if we give them the chance. We don't need these incompetent people in the White House.