By Baylee Pulliam–
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John Boehner said in an Oct. 31 McConnell Center fall lecture series speech, that the nation’s lagging economy remains a threat to college students.
“If you’re a student at the University of Louisville or some other university, no one has more at stake than you do,” Boehner said.
The lagging job market “is something that millions of young Americans are facing today,” Boehner said, referencing the national jobless rate, which was roughly 9 percent on Nov. 4, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Boehner added that the outstanding public national debt, which according to the U.S. Treasury totaled nearly $15 trillion as of Nov. 5, “nearly exceeds the entire size of our economy.” He said the nation is threatened by future credit downgrades.
“Because of government’s seeming inability to focus on some of these challenges, confidence in our nation’s governing institutions is at an all-time low,” Boehner said. “Faith in our government has never been high, but it doesn’t need to be this low.”
Across Floyd Street from the Student Activities Center, Occupy Louisville protesters picketed during Boehner’s visit, holding signs and shouting “Pass the bill! Jobs now!” The protesters have held camp at Jefferson Square since early October, following a wave of similar national protests disavowing corporate and governmental greed.
“I understand people’s frustrations,” Boehner said. “The economy is not producing jobs like they want.”
Another problem, Boehner said, is that the U.S. “owes every child a chance at a decent education, and that’s not happening today.”
The problem, he said, is America’s education system is outdated, with many policies dating back over 100 years.
Boehner said modern challenges unaccounted for in those policies have resulted in “only about half of America’s kids getting an education.” He said the low rate could be detrimental to the country’s ability to compete on the global stage.
Boehner said the solution to the low education rate and high national debt and jobless rate was finding common ground between political parties. He said ‘common ground’ is different from compromise, in that it does not require “violating your principles,” and rather focuses on “finding ways where your agenda overlaps.”
Following the speech, Representative John Yarmuth said “the American people do want compromise. They do want people to say we’ve got problem to solve, and we’ve got to do whatever we can.”
Yarmuth added that Boehner’s discussion on common ground strategy comes after months of the GOP refusing to “give up one inch on any policy matter.”
However, freshman political science major and McConnell Scholar Sean Southard, who was in attendance on Oct. 31, said he was impressed with the idea of Boehner’s common ground strategy.
“Now if [the parties] could only apply that to higher education [funding], we’d be off to a good start,” Southard said.
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Photo: Michael Baldwin/The Louisville Cardinal
