References: Warren, Pressley push Biden to cancel student loan debt – The Boston Globe; Yes, By All Means Let’s Throw Away Money On This Phony Elitist Student Debt “Crisis” (posted here on November 15, 2020)
Dumber than a bag of hammers is an old saying, and we don’t really mean to insult bags of hammers here. Congress is infested with bags of hammers. But at least a bag of hammers has a use. Preferably for beating dummies over the head until they acknowledge their dumminess. (Oops, did we just incite violence against dummies?! Oh my!)
Progressive darlings Warren and Pressley (and undoubtedly others) continue to beat their drum of “let’s just cancel all the student loan debt of people with $50,000 or less of such debt.” However, this whole student loan “crisis” is completely ginned up by these people purely for (1) PR splash, and (2) because every debt cancelled is likely a Democratic vote for life.
Of course the reasons given are to save the economy and to more fairly distribute deficit-spending goodies among all the right identity groups, so-called “social justice”. And if we’re being truthful about it, for “reparations,” though no one actually comes out and says so. As the Globe notes, “Doing so would deliver financial help to tens of millions of struggling Americans amid an economic crisis, particularly Black and brown borrowers who have been disproportionately affected by the nation’s more than $1.6 trillion student debt crisis, proponents argue.” Sounds like reparations to us, albeit thinly cloaked.
Warren claims that “It would open up more opportunities for more Americans than any single act the president could take . . . . It would close the racial wealth gap among those with student loan debt by 25 points. It would boost a faltering economy. And it is fundamentally the right thing to do.” To all of that we say, Baloney. This is nothing more than a money give-away for the benefit of the Democrats in the 2022 elections.
As the Globe also notes, “Critics, including some liberal economists, say the proposal being pushed by Warren, Pressley and others wouldn’t actually goose economic growth that much, despite a price tag of $640 billion or more. Across-the-board cancellation also would mean plenty of well-off borrowers, who have not issues repaying their loans, would benefit, raising fairness concerns. An analysis published by the Brookings Institution last fall found that almost 60 percent of outstanding student loan debt is held by households in the top 40 percent of income, those making more than $74,000 a year. The authors argue that those low-income workers hit hardest by pandemic-driven job losses — such as restaurant and retail workers — live in households that are less likely to have student loans. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget argues that student debt cancellation would deliver far less ‘bang for the buck’ for the economic recovery than the other federal spending.”
And what do you say to those of us who already have paid off our student loans without crying about it? Or who don’t need help and are doing just fine. Do we all want to pay off student loans for people when for tons of them it just means agony over whether or not to buy another beemer for the McMansion three-car garage, and what color it should be?
Yes, there are people who didn’t plan, or didn’t ask the right questions, or who got hoodwinked by one of these for-profit fly-by-night “certificate” factories. The people who got screwed by some unscrupulous con-man, those people perhaps merit some help – OK, that’s fine. As for the rest, well, we have little sympathy with people who took out $100,000 in student loans so they could get an undergraduate degree in English Literature or Creative Writing, or sociology. Any moron is fully aware that the income potential of such degrees generally don’t merit the expense. And the people who have actually lost jobs during this pandemic, yes, let’s help them out, the retail and restaurant employees. But not people who are still working and haven’t lost a nickel of income, which frankly is the vast majority of us.