Biden's student loan forgiveness critics are hypocrites.
That doesn't mean his college loan forgiveness plan is good policy or good politics.
Much of the defense of Biden's college loan forgiveness plan centers on "whatabout." I used whatabout myself in yesterday's blog post. Critics of Biden's plans are hypocritical. Everyone is hypocritical. Government burdens and benefits are uneven and everybody gets a little of each. No one has clean hands.
My post yesterday likened college loan forgiveness to the home mortgage interest deduction. The comparison is imperfect. The mortgage deduction is long-established and people know to take it into consideration when doing home financing. The college loan plan was sudden. The mortgage interest deduction went through Congress. Biden is proposing to do this on his own executive authority. But I made a whatabout comparison because the biggest beneficiaries of the mortgage interest deduction are prosperous people buying big houses. They are among those condemning the unfairness of Biden's proposal. I was pointing out hypocrisy.
We hear whatabout because the critics of student loan forgiveness included members of Congress who themselves personally received PPP loans of hundreds of thousands of dollars. They didn't need to repay those loans. Hypocrites.
Business critics of Biden's plan include people who survived the Great Financial Crisis because of multi-billion dollar bailouts of too-big-to-fail banks. Hypocrites.
And what about bankruptcy laws Trump used to stiff vendors and bondholders? Hypocrites.
Who can cast the first stone? I cannot. I got a significant bonus from my too-big-to-fail bank, a bonus made possible by the bank's government bailout.
Still, I observe problems with the Biden proposal. Bad politics is bad policy.
Biden's proposal offers loan forgiveness to borrowers with incomes up to $125,000 for an individual and $250,000 for a couple. Possibly in Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and Silicon Valley people who earn those incomes can be viewed as needy, but in most of America those people are considered to be doing very well. The median individual income in the U.S. in 2021 was $51,480. Of course people in the lower half of the median are going to resent thinking they are paying the college bills for people richer than themselves. A proposal with headline income limits of $125,000/$250,000 isn't a helping hand to the needy--a fellow victim in the struggle to get by. It signals a helping hand from non-college Americans to college-educated Americans. It is applied after the fact, so there wasn't equal opportunity to take advantage. It will look like a screwing. The ads are already out there making that point.
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| https://youtu.be/GEA72wFG6o4 |
Isn't the idea that the proposal helps "rich kids," as the ad says, a "Republican talking point?" Yes. It is a talking point for a reason. Biden's proposal is tailor-made for Republicans hoping to accelerate Democrats’ loss of non-college working class. What do Democrats think people like the woman in this ad would feel about the proposal? What is in it for her?
There is a second, worse problem. Democrats are positioning themselves as supporters of constitutional process in contrast to Trump-friendly MAGA Republicans who overturn elections and justify Trump's flouting of laws. Democrats disagree with Liz Cheney on most things, but she is making principled arguments about the rule of law as the central issue in American politics. Democrats can win the votes of some Trump-wary voters if they are understood to be the rule-of-law party, the party that respects norms and Constitutional limits on presidential power. Yet, Biden now says we are in an "emergency" that allows him to cancel loans on his own authority, without Congressional approval. Yikes! Both Biden and Nancy Pelosi have recently said that this was the purview of Congress--but now it isn't. Biden isn't coming across as strong and decisive. He is coming across bullied by his left flank into doing something he doesn't want to do and that he knows is illegal. The midterm election was supposed to be a showdown between Biden "normalcy" and Trump extremism. Biden is muddling that.
Democrats who are celebrating Biden's plan will have plenty of opportunity to regret it. The waitress in this ad may not be thinking about abortion this November. She may be thinking that the cafe owner's son just got a windfall and she is paying for it.
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12 comments:
Hilarious, really lame ad. The actors in that commercial are not very convincing, they probably took the gig to pay off a student loan. Republicans pander to financially uneducated voters and promote victimization, a nice little closed disinformation loop. Democrats should counter with some fact based ads.
The casting is weird also. The waitress probably pays little or no federal tax, the mechanic and landscaper have all kinds of deductions and credits they can take advantage of, and in fact are probably right in the 125K bracket, and will need to take out loans to pay for their kid's college.
The $125K limit is political and designed to include, I would guess, the relatively few borrowers with professional degrees who got good jobs, and yes, maybe a few "rich kids"...whatever. The fact is the wealthy don't borrow to pay for college; they don't have to.
C'mon, this is no more than political tit for tat. However, unlike the Republican tax cuts to the 1% this will actually generate economic activity that benefits the middle class. Someone making $125K has more in common with a $50K earner than Elon Musk. Maybe this initiative will help some of those 50K folks to move up a notch and take advantage of their degree.
Peter is right. Hypocrites portray this as an effort to make “working stiffs” pay for the education of “woke elites.” These are meaningless pigeonholes – I’m a working stiff elite who has always cared about social justice – but it’s good enough for those who get their disinformation from Fox Noise. On the other hand, nothing Biden could do would endear him to them, short of admitting he stole the election and reinstating their cult leader.
This country needs affordable education for all, including trade schools, community colleges and universities. Loan forgiveness falls far short, but something is better than nothing.
It’s quite possible that the Supreme Court will stop Biden’s plan dead in its tracks. That may have been the plan all along: generate increased midterm turnout of young college graduates without having to pay the financial cost of student debt relief.
We have only seen the beginning of the Republican ads. There’s a rogues gallery of absolutely crazy woke faculty, administrators, and students waiting in the wings to star as examples of what working stiffs are being taxed to pay for.
Good times… 😱🤔😀
I am saying what I said yesterday. The big bailout for the “too big to fail” rich students is a smoke screen. I look at the debt forgiveness as a poke in the eye of the “pay day “ loaning banks. And boy do they squeal. No tax for education! They get a lottery !
A hand out from the gambling poor. If the Democrats controlled by the Visa card mentality can’t get across the collapse of public education and show the shark tank full of the University of Phoenix online barracuda type colleges, then the Demos deserve to lose.
Many young people avoid the community college route to gain a skill because completing an AA degree will land them in a $15,000 plus hole. When I went to a Jr college (so called in 1957} tuition thanks to Gov. Pat Brown was $20 something for books. I had zero debt and worked a part time job. Even UCLA was virtually free. The states have opted out of education, leaving the banks to rape the young, The rich hang on to their wealth and turn the student population into indentured servants. This has nothing to do with woke,
This is usury very similar to pay loans. I could never afford to send my step son to Berkeley in the 80’s and on to his further education as a doctor. His is still eating the debt. “I am so proud of those who worked their way through college!” Nowadays you can work your way through and then even with your expensive degree you get to work at more part time jobs to pay back your wonderful education. Go be a plumber, apprentices pay plenty for that privilege also since unions have fallen on hard times.
All public education is in a state of collapse because it is under funded. Go ask the teacher who buys his own supplies for his wonderful students.
I don't agree with Rick's assessment that the ad is ineffective. It must be countered. And with Whatabouts! There are a lot of them, and I have the memes stored to use when I can. I think that there are millions of people helped by Biden's assistance to student loans. I am lucky that at age 79, I finally got a permanently disabled classification, and just got my old loan from the 1980's dismissed. The interest would have been three times the amount. (I previously paid off three other student loans, by the way).
Maybe the earnings limit is a bit too high, but in much of the country it is not that much.
I think interest in this will fade by November, but abortion issues will not.
We might all be able to agree that college is too expensive. We might all be able to agree that the administrative bloat in higher ed needs to be cut drastically. We might all be able to agree that the adjunctification of college faculties is an abusive labor practice. We might all be able to agree that colleges should not be allowed to encourage students into more debt than can be justified by the economic value of the degrees being offered.
$200,000 of student debt for a woke studies degree that qualifies you to be the same barista you could have been straight out of high school is not justified. Signing up 18 year olds with no judgment for a deal like that should be a crime. The colleges that take advantage of those 18 year olds should be forced to pay those loans off, not the overeducated baristas they produce.
Once again we are treated to being slurred by the use of the word "woke" as a scurrilous pejorative. Curious, I looked up some Dictionary definitions, and since I decline being labeled "elite", decided not to use the Oxford or Cambridge Dictionarys but since all I looked at used basically the same definitions, I decided to post this link, while proudly claiming myself to be "Woke"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oxford-dictionary-woke_n_5952b1f7e4b02734df2e0e39
Republicans are using this issue as a weapon of mass distraction in their culture war because, after years of having a madman as their Supreme Leader, fomenting fear, anger and hatred is all they’ve got. So they pit the elites vs. the working stiffs, as if we don’t all benefit from people getting educated and becoming doctors, engineers, teachers, etc.
Next they’ll be whining about the billions of dollars squandered on our National Parks so those woke elites can commune with nature, when working stiffs just want to unwind by drinking beer and roaring around on their ATVs. Stereotypes may be stupid, but they obviously work.
No one is slurred by the word “woke” unless they identify as such. I made no accusation directed at anyone around here.
Here is a more accurate definition of “woke” as it is used in current American culture.
To be more accurate, it isn't "current American culture" that slings "woke" around like an insult, but Trumplican culture. Let's face it: culture warriors like DeSantis are far more obsessed with it than social warriors.
It wasn’t DeSantis who caused California to propose a statewide woke math curriculum.
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