Tim Worstall of Forbes makes an excellent point about the high price of college loans.

Memo To Hillary And Bernie: Student Loans Are Expensive Because Student Loans Are Risky

That politicians who are running for office are going to find things about the current state of the world that they will then fix as and when elected is something we expect to happen. But it would be nice if those problems which are uncovered were actually problems rather than just the way the universe spins on its axis. So it is with this complaint from both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton that student loans are just too expensive, darn it! My own opinion here is that it is Bernie who really doesn’t understand this and Hillary has seen that the idea plays so she’s pandering to it. Which rather, in a nutshell, explains what I find so unappealing about both candidates. But then what an Englishman thinks about American political candidates isn’t all that important even if showing up the faulty economics they’re using is.

As the WSJ points out:

The Democratic presidential contenders agree on at least one thing about student loans: Interest rates are too damn high.

Hillary Clinton told the New York Daily News this month college students are often paying “above market level” interest rates on federal loans.

“It is outrageous that young people are being asked to pay interest rates that are so much higher than interest rates to buy a house, a car, or just about anything else,” she wrote in the Huffington Post last month.

Her rival Sen. Bernie Sanders accuses Washington of “profiteering on the backs of college students.”

“It makes no sense that you can get an auto loan today with an interest rate of 2.5%, but millions of college graduates are forced to pay interest rates of 5-7% or more for decades,” his campaign website says.