If you’re wealthy and hyper-educated, be thankful for Sens. Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren this holiday season; they’re here to make the less-educated classes help pay your bills.
The progressive swamp is begging the incoming president to bypass the legislative body via executive action on so-called debt cancelation.
The multi-trillion dollar cost to Americans? Immaterial, because Democrats need to reward prosperous inner-ring voters who make up the bulk of their insular party.
The Week’s Matthew Walther openly applauds this “bold step,” writing, “The fact that such a proposal would disproportionately benefit high-earning professionals does not make it a bad one.”
After pushing for a return of State and Local Tax deductions to benefit affluent blue state residents (lost in Republicans’ 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act), “canceling” loan debt is now the cause célèbre.
During a recent New York Times-led summit of the richest leftists imaginable, Warren called it “the single biggest stimulus we could add.” Two months ago, she bizarrely claimed it would “start to close the racial wealth gap.”
This bailout, of course, is utterly backwards and regressive. Studies show about three-quarters of student loan debt is held by the highest-income households.
“It’s hard to square debt cancelation with talk of social injustice, income inequality, and ‘looks out for the little guy’ rhetoric,” National Review’s Charles Cooke recently said. “It’s a give-away to the rich and well-connected, and prioritizes one group over another for no good reason.”
Such “forgiveness” also lets profligate colleges off the hook for avaricious tuition inflation — even as they shutter campuses. This can only encourage fees to rise further and enrich overpaid university administrators. And still, we never get to the root causes of this debt debacle. The higher education industrial complex needs accountability, not bailouts.
“It would inculcate the worst lessons in fiscal imprudence and recklessness — all while letting the universities off the hook for their running what amounts to one sustained racket,” Attorney Josh Hammer wrote yesterday at Townhall.
The new Ford F-150 today costs significantly less than one year of college in most places. The often conservative-leaning folks behind the wheel probably made sensible decisions and are now targeted; those are the wrong people, it seems.
It’s overwhelmingly ideological and cultural.
Journalists amplify disingenuous claims because they identify with those carrying enormous loan obligations. I am a journalist, and my PhD wife and I have schooling debt, so I could empathize; but I also don’t live in a theoretical world and have common sense.
Unlike my brethren, I envy an electrician who makes nearly six figures quickly out of school with no liabilities. But the aforementioned elites don’t pursue dangerous occupations, take risks, or work without guaranteed income.
Why should children who decided they could afford years of decadent college experiences get bailed out by taxpayers who instead moved on to adulthood? And what about the 35-year-old who diligently worked to pay off his/her loans?
There are over 40 million Americans with federal student loan debt. This is now the second-largest source of collective American debt, behind only mortgages. If Joe Biden canceled $10,000 per person, the U.S. government would face a bill of $420 billion. And yet with our current deficit at $3 trillion, Warren still seeks $50,000 each, to almost double the massive number.
We have other economic priorities — COVID relief, unemployment and small businesses assistance — that affect far more people. We also have a limited pool of money.
While it’s not the case for all — many grads who volunteer for a few years of public service in urban or rural environs can earn some forgiveness — should your hard-earned money go to cover bad choices made by Brodie, Cadence and Teagan? That’s the inherent question.
And when only one in three Americans goes to college, the answer is easy. Passing the buck to someone else is not about the “greater good”; it’s about political power.
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
