I say that politics is all about fighting the enemy. And rewarding your footsoldiers with loot and plunder.
So it makes perfect sense that President Biden, facing a nasty midterm election, is lobbing loot and plunder at lefty college students and lefty university professors.
That is what canceling student debt is all about. It is about giving free stuff to the most enthusiastic non-black Democratic voters on the planet: college graduates with useless CRT and gender studies degrees — not forgetting white liberal women with sociology degrees — and the people that work and teach at universities. I don’t know if you have noticed the “studies show,” but it seems that almost all college professors are Democrats: who knew? And as for the DEI administators…
The Hail Mary pass nature of this is whether the Biden administration gets more Democrats to vote by canceling their student debt or whether the non-graduates are totally pissed off and vote Republican. We don’t know.
And whatabout Hispanic roofers?
My only input is that our Mexican-born former mailman sent his elder daughter to college and she racked up some student debt, but he realized, with his second daughter, that he could play the DEI game and get her through college for free. Still, he is all focused on paying off the debt. So you tell me: which way will he vote?
At the crude political level, people will vote their interest. If they are getting the free stuff they will vote Democrat and if they are getting shafted they will vote Republican. Presumably the Biden administration has opinion polls that tell them that canceling student debt is a winner.
Never mind the bigger picture that subsidizing college has just made it more expensive and encouraged non-motivated students to major in subjects that don’t benefit them because they don’t qualify them for higher-paid jobs.
But my question is: when does it end?
It’s funny isn’t it. Our glorious noble educated ruling class, that is above all tawdriness like the Irish and Italian political machines of yesteryear, has created a politics of pure loot and plunder. Today’s politics is all about buying votes with gubmint money and gubmint rules, from Social Security to racial quotas to student debt to EV subsidies for Tesla buyers.
And, whereas, in yesteryear, those urban machines were buying votes with nickels and dimes, our present lordly rulers are using the entire economy to buy votes, and totally messing things up as they do it. That’s 35-40 percent of GDP in spending and who knows what in terms of regulations and subsidies.
But hey. It has all been done at a very lofty level, by highly-educated people with our best interests at heart.
Starting with Social Security. Wouldn’t it have been cool if Social Security were really a worker savings program instead of a income transfer program from young workers with nothing in the bank to old retirees with a nice little nest-egg?
Thirty-year fixed rate mortgages. This was created in the 1930s with Fannie Mae as a consolidator of mortgages issuing debt guaranteed by the US government. When the crash came in 2008 the federal-guaranteed mortgage debt was about 50 percent of GDP. And, of course, house prices had increased well ahead of inflation. This program benefits existing homeowners and screws young first-time homebuyers. Oh yeah, there’s an analysis at usgovernmentspending.com to tell you all about it.
Student debt. This is a program that screws students and benefits professors and administrators. And, I suppose, contractors building fancy gyms and dorms. You know, since Obama federalized student debt, I wonder where the numbers are. I’d better check.
The point is that almost every government program, by short-circuiting the market and handing out free stuff, Makes Thing Worse.
As Art Laffer says: when you increase taxes on the businessman he creates fewer jobs. When you hand out free stuff, the recipients work less. Do you see what that means? It means that government handouts shrink the economy.
But wait! Everybody knows that FDR and the New Deal saved America in the Great Depression. Anything else is disinformation.
Note to you young’uns. If you can imagine and sell us humans on a politics where we humans get beyond loot and plunder and buying votes with lovely free stuff, you will go down in history as a genius greater than the Platos and Aristotles and Macchiavellis.