The Democrats are making noises about student debt relief in the run up to the elections. That assault on fiscal and personal responsibility has roused principled Conservatives from their Barcaloungers to crusade against forgiveness.
Joking aside, this blog has covered how making interest-bearing loans not backed by collateral to teenagers is the sin of usury. And based on the vast sums involved, it’s a mortal sin at that. A promise to participate in sin, whether it’s being the getaway driver for a bank heist or paying back a usurious loan, nullifies itself immediately.
But the counter argument arises: Why should taxpayers, many of whom paid off their debts by themselves, foot the bill so people who borrowed foolishly can have their debts forgiven?
Author, educator, and student of economics David V. Stewart explains.
“Student debt forgiveness,” as the name should imply, involves the forgiveness of debt. And yet, church-going Americans who have a firm grasp of the forgiveness offered by God through Christ, suddenly forget its meaning entirely any time you mention student loans. They immediately spout the platitude that the “taxpayers foot the bill.” I have to believe this is because of the repetition technique of propaganda: if you repeat something enough times, people will think it is true.
But, the truth is in the definition. “Forgiveness” is just that. If Peter owes Paul 100 dollars, and Paul forgives the debt, then Peter no longer owes Paul 100 dollars. Paul does not have to go rob Mary to get the 100 dollars he is owed. Paul didn’t have the 100 dollars prior to the forgiveness, and he didn’t have it afterward. Peter is no longer obligated to give it to him in the future.
Somehow when the debt holder becomes the fluid mass known as “government,” words lose all meaning
If the government is holding a debt, and it forgives it, that is the end of the debt. It doesn’t have to raise taxes to cover the debt because it’s not paying anyone any money. It didn’t have the money it was owed before and after the forgiveness. All it loses out on is the interest owed on the debt, which hasn’t been paid yet and would have gone away anyway had the debt been paid down.
A good indicator that the uproar over forgiving student debts is astroturfed propaganda is that the Pentagon creates and destroys hundreds of billions of dollars on a routine basis. The DoD’s F-35 program is projected to cost $1.5 trillion. That’s the current total amount of all American student debt. And it bought taxpayers a plane that’s extraordinarily mediocre for a sticker price of $150 million a pop. Contrast that with earlier models that perform just as well if not better for one-tenth the cost.
It’s worth noting that the war hawk and anti-debt forgiveness camps have a high degree of overlap.
And it also bears pointing out that most of the money in play is fake to begin with.
And this is all quite to the side of the way the government manages its debt in the real world, which is through the creation of money. When the government issues a treasury bond and the Federal Reserve buys it, it does so with money it has conjured out of nothing. It doesn’t even bother to print new money. On paper, there is a debt, but the Fed got the money from nobody since it can create money at will. If the Fed were to “forgive” the government’s debt to it (which makes no sense since the bank is part of the government), it isn’t as if it has to call in debts to cover the books. It did everything through imaginary money in the first place.
Those of you who know monetary theory will know that 9/10 of all the money that exists is in the form of deposits. It’s imaginary, created by the transactions between banks and the fractional reserve banking system, which treats debts as assets on its books. The short explanation is this: if you deposit 100 dollars into a bank, it loans out 90 dollars, which is then deposited into another bank (or even itself), which then loans out 81 dollars, etc., and everyone treats their deposit (like the original 100 dollars) as money. Eventually, you get to 1000 dollars, all of which was created out of thin air.
Leaving a needless financial burden on young adults so our corrupt rulers can keep committing usury with fake money is just obscene.
The government creates and destroys as much money as the balance of all student debt every few years. But no one raises a fuss if it’s for bombing people overseas.
Again, there is no moral obligation to participate in usury. Forcing people to pay back usurious loans is a serious injustice.
Just wipe the debts off the books. It doesn’t have to cost taxpayers a dime. Or at least make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy like other debts.
This shouldn’t be a tough call for Christian Conservatives. The fact that there’s any debate on this issue shows that many on the Right worship at the altars of Mammon and Mars.
But enough dreary economics. Let’s talk thrilling fiction.
For exciting war stories of the God Emperor of Mars, back Combat Frame Ƶ XSeed on Indiegogo.
All backers get the new book early, plus the first two XSeed S books right away. Claim your perk today and receive some fun reading material for that long plane or car ride this holiday weekend.
And unlike Underwater Basket Weaving students, you know you’ll get your money’s worth.
What can I say but: I HATE ZERO-SUM MENTALITY!
That seems to be the source of all the assuming that life or society is nothing but shuffling numbers around or whatever.
This might have to do with how the West view’s Christ’s crucifixion. Christ says the equivalent of, “Paid in full,” before he dies on the Cross, which leads Protestants to believe that God only forgives us after He takes out His wrath His the Son.
Meanwhile in the East, the Orthodox believe that the fall of creation led to an ontological infirmity of the soul. The crucifixion for them is less about the Father pouring His wrath out on Christ than it is about Christ being slain by His own people, only to ironically defeat death itself. The stereotype thus becomes that Westerners champion justice while Easterners champion mercy.
I am also not a professional editor. Can you tell?
You did fine.
The “asset” of educational loans are future earnings. If they are unrecoverable then the asset is worthless. Lmao this will devalue certification and “higher education” to even lower than the dog sh$t value of pubic schools. This is why I support total student loan forgiveness.
Remember that many universities forced students to leave their dorms during the COVID lockdowns, and then tried to deny them refunds. Even the ones that did give refunds often found sleazy ways to keep a little extra (such as prorating the refund from a date weeks after their policies forbid any students to remain in their rooms.) Some only gave credit for future dorm fees or meal plans.
I was privy to some internal discussions on this matter and many involved did not care about the students at all. Their line was “if we give a full refund it could cause a financial issue for the university at a time when WE are struggling.”
So don’t weep at the prospect of their endowments getting raided to cover the refund to the student loan scam they took part in.
While I wouldn’t be adverse to stripping the ivy league of their endowments to cover the loans their students took for useless degrees, I think the more important point to make is that the money in question doesn’t exist, and never did. It only starts to exist when debtors apply their real earnings to service imaginary debt.
The way to really solve this problem is to drive the point home that we’re debating the morality, or rather the bogus “moral hazard”, of paying for worthless degrees bought with fake debt with real people’s money, which is really a proxy for their time. It’s obscene to treat people’s real time as a fair exchange for imaginary money and imaginary education. It really is tantamount to slavery. Of course, I’m not in the least accusing you of thinking that way.
I’m not at all sure that would be enough to wake us from our moral coma. As a nation, we’ve turned a blind eye to the murder of the unborn for decades. How is locking the survivors of the Holocaust of Roe up in an invisible, inescapable debtors’ prison any different? American society found a different way to treat the living as disposable commodities. They still end up poisoned, dismembered, and discarded, while they’re up and walking around.
It’s like this when I’m surprised the sky isn’t already raining fire. Surely we have earned what God to Sodom and Gomorrah a million times over.
Reading this gave me a dystopian thought because it seems we have something like de facto forgiveness in that, as far as I know, student debts involving the government can be endlessly deferred. But imagine a government run by people who decide to selectively call in loans of their political enemies or pressure dissenters into playing ball. You take the Devil’s money, you gotta dance to his tune. That alone should be enough an incentive for conservatives to agitate for wiping the books (and turning off the loan faucet).