How about less fast food and more toilet paper?

The Manawatu Standard continues with its advocacy for NZUSA with unchallenged students starving stories. The latest:

Using fast food wrappers as toilet paper and cutting fresh food from their diets are some of the desperate measures Manawatu students facing “financial distress” have resorted to.

A meal from McDonalds costs around $10. For that you can get 24 rolls of toilet paper. Seems an obvious solution. Less fast food, and then you can afford toilet paper.

New Zealand spends one of the highest proportions of tertiary funding on student support in the OECD. Our student support scheme is arguably one of the most generous in the world, due to interest free student loans. We spend 47% of our tertiary education budget on student support, compared to an OECD average of 22% or so. This is the second highest in the OECD.

If students need a higher level of income while poor and studying – I’m for that – so long as when they are earning good incomes they pay back the cost of the student loans, which includes the interest. So if we stick interest back on student loans (which won’t cost students anything while they are studying), then we can afford to give them more support while studying.

But what NZUSA wants is truck drivers to pay more in taxes, so doctors and lawyers get more income overall from taxpayers.