Elections impact, how Obama and Romney change the landscape
Dominic DeCono
The bomb that is the 2012 election is about to drop.
So this, of course, begs the question, what will the fallout look like?
The presidential election between Governor Mitt Romney and incumbent Barack Obama offers distinctly different views for the country and the winner will have drastically different effects on the current younger generation of adults.
Some of the biggest things that younger adults today are concerned about are healthcare, student loan debt, and the economy.
Paul Harasha, a sociology professor at MCC, believes that there are some critically important implications this election will have depending on who wins.
“Healthcare will be drastically affected should Romney win and Romney’s plans for the military would do very interesting things for the economy,” he said.
Both Romney and Obama have very different views on how to improve all of these things.
‘Obamacare’, the name coined for President Obama’s massive health care legislation, has sweeping implications for younger voters including increased time a student can spend on their parent’s plan, lifts on lifetime limits one person can have for insurance, and a mandate in 2014 requiring all Americans to have some form of insurance.
Should Mitt Romney win, he plans to repeal all of that, but has not said what he will replace it with.
But just as healthcare matters to younger students, so does student loan debt and how it will impact in their future.
The rate at which students default on their loans is starting to climb and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for students to go to school and earn a college degree without going into serious debt of some kind.
In the past year, the total of United States’ student loan debt surpassed the total credit card debt, reaching more than a trillion dollars.
Jason Trikburke, a student at MCC, says regardless of the candidate elected, they will not make the impact on student loan debt they say they will.
“These candidates never deliever on real issues like this one and I feel as if they won’t make any difference this time around,” he said.
President Obama has touted an executive order that eases the process for applying for a loan program that lets students make lower payments tied to their income and promises to continue the process if he is re-elected.
While Romney agrees that student loan rates need to be lower, he fundamentally believes the cost of education needs to be cut by using more online instruction and encouraging schools to become more efficient in order to help students more.
The economy also plays an important role for younger Americans trying to take the next step in their careers, especially with how difficult it is to find work in the field related to what students get their degree in.
Should Romney be elected there is a lot of uncertainty whether things will get better.
If he is elected many economic regulations will likely be stripped and many businesses will likely receive tax cuts but there is no way of telling whether or not things will get better at a faster rate.
