Page 4 Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2012
La Vida
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Page 5 Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2012
Democrats’ class warfare strategy dangerous for America Tech alumni produce film, raise National debt hits Andrew Gleinser million of those funds. The unemployment rate has not improved either. Making this worse is the fact more and more people have given up searching for jobs. In truth, Obama and the Democrats have failed miserably when it comes to the economy, which is exactly why they would rather talk about something else. The second purpose their strategy serves is to assign blame for the aforementioned economy to those who are successful. Their goal is to attempt to take that weight off their shoulders and give it to a group of people
Pell Grant error should not be paid for by students By DAILY FORTY-NINER EDITORIAL BOARD
DAILY FORTY-NINER (CALIFORNIA STATE U. - LONG BEACH)
Here today, gone tomorrow. These are the words Florida State College in Jacksonville, students are using when referring to their financial aid. In what would be any poor college student’s nightmare, more than 1,300 students of FSCJ will have to payback their Pell Grants to the government. The Pell Grants were awarded to them between the 2010-11 and the 2011-12 school years. A p p a r e n t l y, t h e s c h o o l goofed and gave Pell Grants to students submitting appeals without proper documentation, rather than following the initial application process. A federal review found the school gave away these grants wrongfully, resulting in a $2.8 million loss from 780 students during the 2010-11 school year. Since then, another 500 illegitimate grants have surfaced for the following academic year. Thus, these students are being forced to make up the difference in cash that they have already spent on tuition, books, rent or whatever else a college student needs. Pell Grants are not the same as student loans, so when they are awarded, students don’t expect to pay the money back. There is no reason to hold onto this money, which is why most of it is used up quickly on college expenditures. While this money was unjustly given away, it is unfair to expect these students to pay back this money. It was not the students’ fault the school gave them the grants incorrectly. The staff awarding the grants was not properly trained and gave away these grants erroneously.
The school has set aside $3 million to cover the costs, but as more illegitimate Pell Grant gaffs surface, it will likely not be enough. So now it falls upon the shoulders of these students to either come up with a good reason why they deserved the money or bite the bullet and sign up for a payment plan. Some will say that even though the students were not responsible for receiving the money, they were still rewarded money that was not theirs to have. Financial aid has never been an entitlement, it is a privilege. Financial aid isn’t a right, but once it is awarded, it is a student’s money to spend, however he or she sees fit. Students should be able to spend their grants without the worry that it will need to be paid back. That is what loans are for. There are strict regulations as to who receives grants from the government. They are reserved for low-income undergraduates. Students receive Pell Grants based on financial need, the status of student and the overall price of tuition. If both the staff at FSCJ and students had a better understanding as to what qualifies a student for financial aid, this problem would not exist. The staff would not have given away unwarranted grants, and the students would not have applied for the grants in the first place. Yet, at the end of the day it is hard to place the blame on the students. It was the school’s financial aid office that made the blunder, so FSCJ should pick up the tab. This probably isn’t the first time something like this will happen and errors in bureaucracy will continue to screw students out of their money.
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earners. They will also accept the notion that the government is their friend and is looking out for their interests. The Democratic Party, as we all know, is a staunch proponent of big government. If people trust the government to look out for their interests, then they will be more willing to give the government more control over their lives, thus increasing the Democrats’ power. The flip side of this argument is to assert that the Republican Party is the party of the wealthy and they only care about the top earners. This is categorically false. The true base of the GOP is not the evil fat cats, but in fact is the blue-collar middle class workers who want to keep the money they earn and for the government to stay out of their lives. This fact does not gel with the current strategy of the Democratic Party, so it conveniently gets pushed aside in favor of a
notion they are more comfortable with. In reality, raising taxes on the wealthy isn’t going to solve anything. It’s certainly not going to pay down the deficit, and in truth it will only harm the economy. If the wealthy have less money, that means they will invest less money, which results in less money going into the economy. True, that money will be paid in taxes, but can we really trust the government to use that money effectively? After the stimulus package, I would say it’s a resounding and definite no. Redistribution of wealth is a notion that has no place in the United States. In spite of the president’s beliefs, America is a land where, through hard work and innovation, anyone can achieve anything. The late Steve Jobs was a member of the evil one percent and he was a perfect example of
the promise of America. I don’t hear any of the Democrats arguing that Jobs didn’t deserve or earn everything he had. Instead of pitting people against each other, the Democrats should instead encourage people to be innovative and make it easier for entrepreneurs to establish themselves. Instead of trying to bring everybody down, they should help people have the opportunity to build themselves up. In America, we don’t need to hate the successful, but instead should strive to be successful ourselves. The Democrats’ message is not conducive to such ideas, which is why it should be ignored now and especially this November. Gleinser is The DT’s opinions editor and a senior political science and history major from Kingwood. ➤➤ agleinser@dailytoreador.com
Use of ‘study drugs’ gives unfair advantage By IOWA STATE DAILY EDITORIAL BOARD IOWA STATE DAILY (IOWA STATE U.)
Pressure. “Pressure” is one word that singlehandedly unites college students from all walks of university life. All students have felt it, whether from their parents and peers or within their major. There is pressure to keep up, to slow down, to stay focused, to stay current and, most of all, to succeed. This push for excellence has brought many to their breaking point. Everything students once achieved in high school all of a sudden just isn’t good enough anymore, and the pressure to do something about it can be overwhelming. Finding themselves in this situation, many students believe they’ve found a way to push their excellence to its limit using one, or sometimes two, pea-sized pills that send their mind into a utopia of concentration. Out of all this pressure a new “study drug” is born, and its name is Adderall. Adderall is a combination of two drugs, dextroamphetamine and amphetamine, and is used to treat attention deficit hyperactive disorder, more commonly known as ADHD.
Those who struggle with ADHD have trouble focusing and holding attention on a day-to-day basis. Adderall helps to focus those who are prescribed to take it by releasing different chemicals into the brain. Simply put, it’s a whole lot of focus all bundled up in one small, convenient pill. This focus, however, is meant for those who are rightfully diagnosed with ADHD. Studies suggest students with ADHD are at an increased risk for academic problems, lower GPA and compromised academic coping skills. College students with ADHD tend to report more academic problems than students without the disorder. Adderall allows those students who are given a disadvantage by this disease to keep up and be on the same level academically as those who do not have ADHD. Therefore, those students who do not in fact have ADHD, but still take Adderall to get that extra push of focus to help them academically, should be considered cheating when they pop that pill. Like steroids are illegal for athletes to help increase their performance levels, Adderall should be considered a method of cheating when it comes to performance in the classroom, especially at the col-
lege level. Many ISU students have this nasty cheating habit. Some use it daily and some only when large tests or finals week arrive, but most have the same reasons for wrongly boosting their brain power. One student said: “It motivates me to study longer and be more focused, and [it] makes other activities feel uninteresting, like Facebook and Twitter. I feel like it makes me zone in on whatever I’m doing.” Another argued that it allows them to retain the information they study better: “I’m able to read through an entire textbook in one sitting and remember every word I read.” Although taking Adderall as a study drug has its benefits when it comes to test time, it administers some scary, health endangering side effects while being used. Studies show that symptoms of Adderall include a suppressed appetite, dehydration, sleeplessness and rapid mood swings. Students who have taken the drug can attest to these defects while on the pill. “I have spent a 14-hour day in the library before with nothing but a water bottle and a sleeve of saltine crackers. Some people forget to eat because they are so focused.” Even
too much focus can make one lose focus. Another using student explains, “One morning I was waiting for the Adderall to kick in, and I realized I had been brushing my teeth for 10 minutes. It’s powerful stuff.” If it’s not the unnatural side effects that make students more cautious about using Adderall, it should be their conscience. Taking this pill to academically advance your performance is the same as copying someone else’s work during a test to get ahead. Under university guidelines, any kind of academic misconduct is punishable by receiving a failing grade in a class, performing community service, and even being expelled from the university. If classes are proving themselves challenging, take more time to study using your nondrug-induced brain. If you’re feeling like there’s not enough time in your day to get everything done, then close out of Facebook and learn better time-management skills. It’s not worth ingesting chemicals through your body just to turn into a mood-swinging, cheating zombie. Get up, get motivated and study with what you have, because cheating is never the right way to excel academically, especially when you have to abuse drugs to do it.
money to prepare for festivals By HALLIE DAVIS STAFF WRITER
When a dead body turned up on former Texas Tech student Zachery Quinones’s filming location at Hell’s Gates outside of Lubbock, production was delayed for a few days. Another location flooded, and filming was set back even further. Between delays like those, working full-time jobs, sicknesses and going to class, Quinones’s film has taken four years to complete. “(We were) doing everything ourselves, with our own money and with a lot of people’s effort,” he said. Though Tech has no official film program, he said there are plenty of students interested in the field and many of them came together on this project. “It was sort of our film school’s master thesis,” he said. “It was our way of doing something big.” The movie started out as an idea Quinones and Armando Suarez had in high school in McAllen. Years later, the two reconnected online, Suarez said and when Quinones returned to McAllen for the summer, the two wrote for weeks in a friend’s attic. “A lot of things in the film are experiences from my life,” Suarez said. “I remember telling him the stories and they started popping up in the first draft.” From there, Quinones returned to Lubbock where he said he was taking English courses and working diligently on preparations for the film. The budget was less than $5,000 including everything from equipment to wardrobe, he said, as well as trying to pay the actors something for their weeks of work. “If you look at all the famous filmmakers, they all started out like this,” Quinones said. The film, called “Spontaneous Human Combustion,” centers on four characters whose lives are on a down-
PHOTO COURTESY OF ZACHERY QUINONES
SOME OF THE starts of “Spontaneous Human Combustion” perform their lines for the movie.
hill slide, he said. Filming was done throughout Lubbock and even features a Tech professor in one of the acting roles. Another former Tech student, Daniel W. Ballard, a 2007 graduate in electronic media and communications, said one of the then-student actors was the best he has ever met. “I just love watching (his monologue scene) because he’s so compelling,” Ballard said. Inspiration came from movies like “Reservoir Dogs” and “The Maltese Falcon.” “The key was to put out a film with honesty,” he said, “not just for the audience but for ourselves.” Ballard’s work was an ongoing process as he edited together all of the raw footage, as he and Quinones created the final film. “It seems really daunting,” Ballard said. “You have to have faith in the product.” Still putting it together was a lot of fun, both said, and despite the time
commitment, Quinones said he is excited to have gone through the process. Now, Quinones lives and works in Los Angeles, writing scripts and working on movie sets. “Everyone (who worked on the film) is doing what they set their minds to,” he said. Many have moved to Los Angeles and are working in the industry, whether on crews or on stage. “It’s OK to be afraid to pursue something you know you’re going to get resistance for,” Quinones said. “Don’t be afraid.” Between the unconventional structure and the interesting themes, Ballard said the movie was unlike any other. “It’s a unique film,” he said, “there’s people out there who want to see this, you have to find your audience.” The team is looking for an audience at film festivals, he said. Quinones said he hoped to enter between 20 and 30, and thought the film could be accepted
PERFORMANCE PIECE
Young voters must not give up on political process By THE ORACLE EDITORIAL BOARD THE ORACLE (U. SOUTH FLORIDA)
As the election season grows nearer and the 2012 presidential election continues to reside at the forefront of the nation’s mind, college students especially must educate themselves and exercise their right to vote, both at the local and national levels. According to a Pew Research Center poll released this summer, Americans under the age of 30 are less engaged in the upcoming election and in politics than they were in 2008. Among voters under the age of 50, only 60 percent said they were giving the election “quite a lot of thought,” a significant decrease from 71 percent in 2008.
EDITORIAL BOARD
M
uch of the recent political dialogue coming out of the Democratic Party has concerned the idea of income equality. It’s seemingly the biggest issue on their campaign platform, centered around their plan to raise taxes on the nation’s wealthiest earners in order to ensure that they pay their fair share. This strategy primarily serves two purposes. The first is that it diverts attention away from the fact that the Obama administration has failed to improve the struggling economy that the president so often reminds us he inherited. Remember the stimulus package the president signed in 2009? That use of more than $800 billion of taxpayer money has been nothing short of a failure, highlighted by the failure of Solyndra after receiving more than $500
who have a strong tendency to vote Republican. President Obama’s recent speech, in which he told business owners that people and entities other than themselves were responsible for the success of their businesses, completely unmasked his intentions. The message was those who are successful do not get to where they are on their own, but instead get there because of other people as well as the government. This fuels the notion that the Democrats are trying to propel, which asserts that those who are successful owe something to the rest of society. This is why their taxes need to be raised. The result of this is to pit the haves against the have-nots. If those who are not wealthy are led to believe that their position in life is the fault of those who are wealthy, then they will be much more receptive to the idea of raising taxes on the top
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Over the past few years, many of President Barack Obama’s supporters became disillusioned with the candidate after seeing little of the promised change. A Harvard Institute of Politics survey from the spring shows that Obama’s 12-point lead against Republican candidate Mitt Romney among 18- to 24-year-olds is half of what it is among 25- to 29-year-olds. Despite the disappointment following the 2008 election, and because most presidential election cycles seem to yield few immediate results, students should not give up on the political process and should focus more on the elections at the state and local level, where they are more likely to experience change. Many have expressed their distaste
for both candidates of the Democratic and the Republican Parties. Nonetheless, not voting in protest is not the answer. Rather, voting for one of those two candidates, or voting for a candidate from neither party, remains a better alternative than foregoing a right for which many people around the world have fought and died for. The U.S. has, since its revolution, had a longer period of disenfranchisement than enfranchisement. The 15th Amendment of 1870 was not smoothly implemented, and it was not until 1965 that the Voting Rights Act was passed to prevent obstacles to black citizen voting. It was not until 1920 that the 19th Amendment secured women’s suffrage. A right that was so difficult to Copyright © 2012 Texas Tech University Student Media/The Daily Toreador. All DT articles, photographs and artwork are the property of The DT and Student Media and may not be reproduced or published without permission. The Daily Toreador is a designated public forum. Student editors have the authority to make all content decisions without censorship or advance approval.
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secure universally should not be taken for granted, even if some feel as though “there is no point” or that “my vote doesn’t count.” Especially, according to Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC, if you’re a voter in several states, including Florida, “Your vote matters. A lot.” Making voting mandatory for those above the age of 18, as Greece has recently done, is not the solution to the seeming indifference of youth in the U.S. Nonetheless, the U.S. at its very foundation is based on the idea of “no taxation without representation,” and voting is that form of representation. Everyone, including college students and young adults alike, should make an effort to vote based on an informed opinion. Toreador, Box 43081 Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas 79409. Letters The Daily Toreador welcomes letters from readers. Letters must be no longer than 300 words and must include the author’s name, signature, phone number, Social Security number and a description of university affiliation. Students should include year in school, major and hometown. We reserve the right to edit letters. Anonymous letters will not be accepted for publication. All letters will be verified before they are published. Letters can be emailed to dailytoreador@ttu.edu or brought to 180 Media and Communication. Letters should be sent in before 3 p.m. to ensure the editors have enough time to verify and edit the submission. Guest Columns The Daily Toreador accepts submissions of unsolicited guest columns. While we cannot acknowledge receipt of all columns, the authors of those selected for publication will be notified. Guest columns should be no longer than 650 words in length and on a topic of relevance to the university community. Guest columns are also edited and follow the same guidelines for letters as far as identification and submittal. Unsigned Editorials appearing on this page represent the opinion of The Daily Toreador. All other columns, letters and artwork represent the opinions of their authors and are not necessarily representative of the editorial board, Texas Tech University, its employees, its student body or the Board of Regents. The Daily Toreador is independent of the College of Mass Communications. Responsibility for the editorial content of the newspaper lies with the student editors.
PHOTO BY DAVID VAUGHN/ The Daily Toreador
ALEX NORRIS, A graduate student violin performance major from Madison, Wis., gets a head start on his end-of-the-year recital piece Tuesday in the basement of the Music building.
at about 1/5 of them. Each festival costs between $50 and $80 to enter, as well as paying for the actual items needed and any publicity. To help with the price of entry, Quinones started an IndieGoGo campaign where anyone interested can help donate to the cause. If anyone wants to support the film, Quinones said even donating as little as $5 would be helpful to get the movie out to the public, and would mean a lot to everyone involved. “They deserve it, if anything,” he said. “We couldn’t have done it without them. They deserve to have that work shown.” Suarez said he could not wait to see if it could get into a festival. “It would be the best thing that could happen to any one of us.” ➤➤hdavis@dailytoreador.com
$16T; GOP critical WASHINGTON (AP) — The Treasury Department said Tuesday that the national debt has topped $16 trillion, the result of chronic government deficits that have poured more than $50,000 worth of red ink onto federal ledgers for every man, woman and child in the United States. The news was greeted with a round of press releases from Barack Obama’s GOP rivals, who used the grim-but-expected news to criticize the president for the government’s fiscal performance over his 3 1/2 years in office. Obama has presided over four straight years of trillion dollar-plus deficits after inheriting a weak economy from his predecessor, George W. Bush. “We can no longer push off the tough decisions until tomorrow,” said No. 2 House Republican Eric Cantor, R-Va. “It’s time to address the serious fiscal challenges we face and stop spending money we don’t have.” Last summer, Cantor dropped out of a set of budget talks hosted by Vice President Joe Biden, citing the insistence of the White House on tax increases to help close deficits that require the government to borrow 33 cents of every dollar it spends. The spiraling debt means that lawmakers and the eventual winner of the White House in November will have to pass a law early next year to raise the government’s borrowing cap from the current ceiling of $16.39 trillion. Passing such legislation last year proved enormously difficult and the nation’s credit rating suffered. First, however, lawmakers will try during a post-election lame duck session to renew Bush-era tax cuts and head off a round of
forced budget austerity as automatic budget cuts are scheduled in January to slam both the Pentagon and domestic programs. Those cuts were required by another failed set of budget talks last fall by a bipartisan “supercommittee.” GOP vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin piled on as well. “Of all the broken promises from President Obama, this is probably the worst one, because this debt is threatening jobs today, it’s threatening prosperity today and it is guaranteeing that our children and grandchildren get a diminished future,” Ryan told supporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Ryan was named to Obama’s debt commission but voted against a proposal by its co-chairs. He declined an invitation by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to try again on the supercommittee. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said: “This debt will not only be a liability for our kids and grandkids, but economists also tell us that it will limit economic growth and kill millions of jobs now and in the future.” Portman was a member of last year’s failed supercommittee, which deadlocked over taxes and cuts to popular benefit programs. The debt topped the $16 trillion mark on Friday. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said the government will likely reach its debt limit at the end of the year. However, Geithner has said he will be able to employ various “extraordinary measures” to keep the government operating until sometime early next year. Geithner would need to use these measures if Congress, as expected, fails to tackle the debt limit by year’s end.