As Conservatism continues its steep decline, its remaining adherents present symptoms of memory failure similar to those of the protagonist in the movie Memento. Like him, these otherwise intelligent and decent people suffer astonishing short-term memory lapses. Unlike in the film, Conservative amnesia is limited to politics.
For example, you can point out that student loans are by nature usurious and therefore impose no moral obligation of repayment. Conservatives will nod and agree that a just society would take steps to make victims of fraud whole. But as soon as democrats renew their empty posturing about student debt forgiveness, those same Conservatives will rush on stage to don their devil horns.
Since dissidents are in a moral war against people who hate us, and our nominal allies suffer memory dysfunction that is easily exploitable by the enemy, periodic reminders of what having moral principles really means are necessary. In the spirit of fraternal instruction, I re-blog the following post.
It’s no secret that members of the younger generations, especially Gen Y and the Millennials, lag far behind their parents’ financial attainment at the same age. This brewing economic crisis threatens Baby Boomers housing, pensions, and entitlements. Aging Boomers are having trouble finding buyers for their large, single-family homes because younger folks aren’t earning enough to have families, much less buy houses.
That’s just in the short to mid-term. In the long run, the economic drain of having multiple generations whose standards of living fall far below their parents’ invites a disaster to make the 2008 crash look like a picnic.
Understanding the problem gives you the solution. Why are Millennials, Ys, and even Xers economically underperforming?
Is everybody younger than the Boomers possessed of weak character and a shiftless work ethic?
That’s not what the data show. Ys and Millennials forfeit more vacation days and work more overtime than Boomers. Most of the differences in generational work habits arise from members of those generations being at different stages in their lives with correspondingly different goals.
Is the earnings discrepancy caused by Millennials choosing majors like interpretive dance and underwater basket weaving instead of tried and true STEM fields?
Again, no. Only 26% of STEM graduates actually work in their field of study, STEM jobs only account for 6% of the US work force to begin with, and the influx of H1 visa workers further increase competition and depress wages. Telling Millennials to get STEM degrees is like telling everyone on the Titanic to cram into a single leaky lifeboat.
A major cause of younger generations’ impoverishment, besides the aforementioned insane immigration policies, is the student loan racket.
US student loan debt currently stands at $1.5 trillion. Much of that debt is unrepayable. We’re not just talking Starbucks baristas with studies degrees. There are doctors and lawyers pulling down six figure salaries barred from buying homes because their minimum monthly payments exceed mortgage payments for even modest houses. These kids would have to become millionaires to pay down the principal.
Massive fiscals disasters like the student loan crisis don’t happen for no reason. Those who chalk the entirety of the problem up to Millennial students being too lazy and stupid to research lucrative majors or the perils of usury are blithely ignoring another problem. The people they glibly assume are too dumb to stave off personal financial ruin will soon be in charge of the nation’s finances.
The truth that certain quarters don’t want to admit is that these kids were conned. A functioning society relies upon the young trusting their parents, educators, authorities, and elders in general. When absolutely all of those authorities give their charges wrong information and urge them to take actions that later prove ruinous, the correct conclusion is that the students were defrauded.
Based on many of my interactions with self-professed Christian Conservatives, a shocking number of them just don’t get this. When you confront them with the reality that these aren’t lazy punks deferring their job searches to play Fortnite, but young professionals busting their humps just to tread water, it just doesn’t penetrate. The usual excuses they give for ignoring their fellow Americans’ suffering are bromides about harming the free market, paeans to individual responsibility, and even snide, “I got mine!” vitriol.
It’s that thinly veiled contempt for the young and the poor that outs this cult as thralls of Mammon. Christ exhorted his followers to sell half their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. He endorsed fraudsters repaying those they defrauded fourfold. Christians are to exercise a fundamental preference for the poor–especially the poor among their own countrymen.
You cannot sneer at someone who is impoverished–even by his own bad choices–and at the same time say that Jesus is Lord with any shred of integrity.
Indeed, defrauding workers is one of three sins, along with murder and mistreating widows and orphans, that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.
That’s right, Libertarians and BowtieCons, we have a new Witch Test parameter here.
What sets the Mammon Mob apart from political ideology and into the cult category is its adherents’ elevation of practical political matters to articles of faith. Student debt relief is a practical economic measure necessary to stave off catastrophe. It’s also so popular with the electorate as to be inevitable. You’d think Republicans would embrace student loan forgiveness out of sheer self-interest.
Millennials are suffering the most under the student debt burden, and they’re about to become the largest voting bloc in the country. Whichever party convincingly offers to break their debt shackles is guaranteed to dominate at the polls. Yet when I’ve pointed out that the GOP is foolish for ignoring this issue, Conservatives have recoiled like vampires splashed with holy water because they say student debt forgiveness violates their beliefs.
It’s the exact same aversion to winning and wielding political power you see from Republicans on the immigration issue. And once again, they invent a false principle out of inaction instead of acting on the genuine moral principles of justice, prudence, and compassion.
Politics is the art of the possible. It is about winning elections and then using that political power to help your friends and crush your enemies. The Death Cult gets this. The Mammon Mob unwittingly helps them by refusing to use their last scraps of power even to help themselves.
Student debt forgiveness is going to happen. The only choices afforded Conservatives is whether to jump in front of the parade to implement debt forgiveness on their terms, or to keep doing nothing, hand this winning issue to the Death Cult, and let them continue leading Millennials into socialism. And as go the Millennials, so goes America.
Republicans have to wake up and propose their own serious student loan forgiveness plan. It’s a rare case in which the politically savvy move is also the moral course. We’ll see what happens, but based on the BoomerCons’ screeching, I’m not holding my breath.
Those who want solutions, see this post.
“Goes beyond analysis into action”
The Boomer while his kids are graduating high school:
“You need to go to college. It doesn’t matter if you have to sign a bunch of loans. I took on debt all the time and I ended up fine. Besides, you’ll get so much more money after graduating that you’ll pay it off in no time. It doesn’t matter which major you choose, studies show that college graduates generally make a lot more than high school graduates.”
The Boomer while his kids are struggling to pay their bills in their 30s:
“Stop complaining about your debt. It was your choice to take it and now you’re obligated to pay it back. If you don’t have enough money to do it it’s probably because you didn’t choose a good major. Or you don’t have enough hustle. In my day people could make more than enough to cover loans even without a college degree.”
Oh, I forgot the most important part of the Boomer to his kids in their 30’s:
“Why haven’t you purchased a house yet? It doesn’t matter if you need to take out a big mortgage, you can pay it off if you just have enough work ethic. Besides, you’ll have 30 years to pay it off so you don’t need to worry about the debt now.”
The Boomers have coined their own Cretan paradox.
“Aging Boomers are having trouble finding buyers for their large, single-family homes because younger folks aren’t earning enough to have families, much less buy houses.”
What are you talking about? BlackRock and the rental companies are snatching up all of the single-family homes that they can find.
In my experience it’s both.
I have a lot of Gen Y friends who either can’t afford a house, or put themselves into crippling debt to get a house (and it’s always a much worse house than their parents had at their age.)
I have enough money for a house, but things are only staying on the market here for two or three days at most. I can’t confirm 100% that they are all being bought up by rental companies, but certainly many were. I have been advised that if I want a house I will need to make an offer above the asking price on a house that I have not been inside. Since my employment situation is technically stable but shows tons of signs of being something I will probably leave in five or less years, I don’t really want to get something that may be unsellable just to get a house, so in an apartment I remain for now.
I recommend sucking up to your landlord or landlady. Bring him lunch, bring him shiny Christmas gifts, and offer to fix your own appliance or plumbing issues if you have the knowledge. He might cut you slack on your next rental agreement.
I’m already on good terms with him. Combination of paying rent on time (even when MN put a rent moratorium in place) and fixing issues I could myself and informing him promptly of ones I couldn’t (like the water heater getting a huge leak.)
If there were any doubts there were dismissed when I accidentally sent the wrong rent amount one month and rather than getting threatening calls or threats of eviction I just got an e-mail saying “Hey, I think you wrote down the wrong number here. I’m sure it was an honest mistake. Get me the remainder whenever you have time and that will be that.” I know he does NOT treat all tenants like that.
Why are you leaving out the fourth sin that cries out to Heaven? Is it not a serious omission to suggest that there are only three?
As I said above, this is a re-post. I’d always heard there were 3, because BoomerCath teachers. Someone else already corrected me in the comments on the OP.
And yes, sodomy is the fourth.
Thank you. I guess I’m not seeing the re-post notice, with apologies. But you addressed my fear, that we’re skirting around controversial issues here- which doesn’t seem your style; which is why I come here. Thanks for not being a BoomerCath indeed, and keep it up. I actually looked up whether there are different (legitimate, authentic, not innovative) traditions within the Church of the proper list, and it seems so- four versus seven- but, well, to quote Monty Python, three is “right out”.
The number one thing people struggling with student debt say they’d do if their debt was cleared is go back to school and accumulate even more debt, worsening the issue. Any sort of student loan forgiveness that isn’t part of a 100% debt jubilee should be conditional. At the very least, those taking it should permanently lose the ability to vote at every level. Simply relieving student loan debt would mean giving trillions to people who hate us.
No, it would be restoring money they were defrauded of. Supporting usury on that basis is like supporting infanticide because blacks abort at higher rates.
Attaching some conditions is fine. Voting just gives the fraudulent system a stamp of legitimacy, so I’m fine with 35-49 year-olds, who make up a majority of student debtors, no longer voting.
It isn’t “supporting usury,” its the acknowledgement that debt relief sans wholesale financial reform (like [fedpost redacted] bankers) is giving a fistful of Columbia’s finest to a crack fiend.
Not to worry. After we restore their stolen money, we will confiscate it with all their assets once the Inquisition finds them guilty of witchery.
Based.
Ok, finally found my question in there, but I think it still applies: this is giving money to people who hate us. What do you think they’re going to do with their windfall?
The answer is they will put more people who hate us in power, and they will be laughing at us as they take away our livelihoods and indoctrinate our children because we were stupid enough to help them do it.
You’re making a false moral equivalence. There is neither a moral obligation nor a justification for paying megacorps that hate you to be propagandized. Doing so is cooperation with evil.
There is a moral obligation to oppose usury and make its victims whole, regardless of those victims’ politics.
Just don’t morally obligate yourself into a gulag.
Permit the loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, end federal student loan guarantees, and tax the living daylights out of university endowment funds to pay for the foregone revenue, and I think most of the crisis goes away.
And if you’d taken the time to read the Finding Solutions post linked above, you’d have known that’s what I support.
When did “Oh well, too bad. Get fucked.” become a Christian principle?
It tends to happen when people put religion in service to politics instead of the other way around.
Justice, however *is* a Christian principle. Which is why I give wholehearted support to imprisoning unrepentant death cultists and confiscating their assets _after_ they’re duly returned.
The obvious solution here is to couple debt forgiveness with a destruction of the student loan industry.
*nods*
If there is student loan forgiveness, the people freed of debt will not rush right back out to rack up more student loan debt.
Because student loans won’t exist any longer. Start cancelling debt and lenders get scarce.
Student loan forgiveness won’t just gain a huge voting block for the GOP if they did it, it would also fundamentally wreck the prog stronghold of higher education.
Dcal
You read my mind. All partbofvthe plan to make us Ciscterian monks without the community or salvation
xavier
I have to laugh when some people on twitter say you moved so far to the right that you are now a lefty. And all over this issue.
Binary thinking is the real pandemic.
The irony in that is that (and please correct if I’m wrong, Brian), he hasn’t actually moved at all. He is a Catholic theologian, being Catholic and applying that theology to politics. If our political identity is ever more important to us than our identity in Christ, we have a problem, and an idol. This is a beam I’ve pulled out of my own eye, by God’s grace.
The student debt jubilee isn’t Bernie-bro-ism. It never was. The only reason anyone mistakes this actual charity for socialism is that the socialists are so very good at pretending that theft is a charitable act. But their moral posturing doesn’t make all Charity theft, or relieve us of the responsibility for actually considering potential acts of charity on their merits. This is a practical application of Christian charity, based on principles that go all the way back to the Law of Moses. Anyone who’s actually reading – as opposed to skimming until offended – should understand that, or at the very least be able to ask relevant questions if something isn’t clear.
If the price of that student debt jubilee is the the destruction of the Ivy League and other death cult seminaries, so that the scales will balance, so be it. That might well be a win-win. If it means swathes of Gen X, Gen Y, and Millenial student debtors losing the franchise, so be it.
As TheGodcast remarked, debt relief alone sets up the relieved to return to university and to return to living as debtors. We need radical shifts within society as a whole that disincentivize people from attending in the first place, such as:
1. Laws against requirements for degrees for any careers that don’t need them. Many people have happily and productively worked at companies for decades until they were suddenly dismissed for not having a bachelor’s degree.
2. Making all public universities free for the students—while also axing affirmative action and grade curves and requiring all courses to be made extraordinarily difficult.
And again, attaching some strings to debt relief is fine. But we need to be vigilant against the besetting right wing vice of dickering over the water bill before putting out the house fire.
Keep in mind that you still might have to suck it up and have to pay for it yourself at the end of the day. Life is sometimes a bitch, but we weren’t promised an easy ride.
If this possibility causing gnashing of teeth then perhaps building a better system in the future should be of greater concern than cackling at deliberately misguided children.
Building a better system is my point, JD. Everyone is talking about debt jubilee without also discussing how to shepherd the misguided or to keep the universities from conning future generations. Imagine campaigning for the human right to healthcare without incentivizing people to move their bodies or to stop eating themselves to death. Or imagine receiving the Sacrament of Reconciliation without also receiving a penance that leads you back to Godly habits.
My point is that debt jubilee is only half of the equation. We need it, but we need more.
Andrew
Exactly. I’m deeply affronted by some commentators who vociferously denounce the universities as frauds…yet demand the very students to suck it up and pay off their debts as they did.
Well no. I’m not improvishing myself to fund the death cult seminaries.
Not only do I want the debts wiped clean but students to be given any leftover cash to start a family/business. Compensation for lost opportunities
xavier
If nothing else, consider what the debt jubilee would do to college as an institution.
(It’s because of this, not the debt forgiveness, that the left’s take fails. Free, “universal” college… as though twelve years of schooling isn’t already four too many to universalize and hasn’t done enough damage to growing men and women.)
Some other ones:
-Wasn’t Trump supposed to brilliant for putting out the vaccine? (He was not; I just hope you remember thinking so.)
-Whatever happened to hydroxychloroquine?
-Are polls to be trusted, and can we vest hopes in the 2024 election?
-Does Dobbs v. Jackson matter, even though the mass media does not wish to discuss it?
This is going to come across as snarky, but I really am open to persuasion here.
Forgiving the loans of a demographic dominated by progressive Millennials and Zoomers looks a lot like giving money to people who hate me.
What am I missing?
It used to be that blog readers would check the previous comments before asking a question that had already been answered. That point of netiquette is going by the wayside, sadly.
I did read through other comments, but I did not see this question asked. My bad if I missed it.