Summer is winding down, and that means another round of midterm elections is almost upon us. The regime’s policy of fueling bloodbaths abroad and economic chaos at home has met a public reception on par with a post-Starship Troopers Verhoeven movie. The High Party was facing its own electoral massacre, so their paymasters directed Puppet Pal Joe to do something the people want for a change.
Regular readers will know that I predicted the inevitability of student debt relief years ago. I also predicted how the DC court jesters known as Republicans would respond.
Upon further consideration, that’s a slight against court jesters. In more civilized times, they were allowed to mock the rulers while dispensing unpleasant truths with impunity. Today’s GOP is no less buffoonish, but they are only allowed to lie.
Biden’s plan offers $10,000 in debt relief to victims of the usurious higher education scam. Unlike loan forgiveness through income-based repayment plans, the forgiven amount is not considered taxable income. So it’s real relief.
That said, this plan’s main effect will be to raise debt-strapped Millennials’ net worth from -$30,000 to -$20,000. The feds own 92% of student debt and could wipe their share out with the stroke of a pen if they wanted, so forgiving 10 grand per borrower isn’t such a big deal.
But you’d never know that to look at Republicans, who couldn’t wait to go online and don the devil horns in the Dems’ mystery play.
Here’s Senator Tom Cotton fumbling to paint fraud victims as fat cats shaking down truckers. Never mind that Biden’s handlers’ plan has an income eligibility cap of $125,000.
Now if your response to the above figure is to grumble that in 1972 your first real job only paid 18 grand, and you don’t realize that’s the same amount adjusted for inflation, you should log off the internet, turn off Fox News, and waddle outside for some air.
Cotton’s capering for strangers’ applause is embarrassing, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Groyper War casualty Steven Crowder’s unforced own-goal.
Shot:
Chaser:
Before you ask, yes, I checked.
And yes, it’s real.
How someone can be using Twitter and simultaneously forget that the internet exists boggles the mind. Though this Tweeter prefers a woman’s wig to devil horns.
Next up: Here’s Dan “Jesus is a hero archetype” Crenshaw presuming to lecture the rest of us on morality.
Captain Squint pulled that one from the GOP’s “They’re doing the right thing the wrong way!” file.
How do people keep falling for shopworn old shticks like that?
OK, I know the Democrat Party is just a full-on Satanic death cult at this point. But how does any well-meaning person with a shred of dignity still vote for Republicans?
People have tried throwing “Don’t give money to people who hate you” back in my face by claiming student debt relief gives money to pink-haired Wokeists. Then those same critics will pull the lever for cynical grifters who constantly backstab them and laugh about it.
All that line of argument shows is that the one making it has a shallow understanding of that maxim. Paying evildoers is material cooperation with evil. Opposing the repayment of evildoers’ victims is formal cooperation with evil. The operative moral in both cases is “Don’t cooperate with evil.” It’s not rocket science.
And have you ever noticed how student debtors are nose-pierced Studies majors whenever Conservatives pander to Boomers, but in front of a blue collar audience the only usury victims are big shot lawyers? They’re just bad-faith arguments.
The lesson: Always look at actions. The same Conservatives who decry $400 billion in student debt relief are silent on – or personally benefit from – twice that amount in PPP loans.
What’s the difference? PPP loan forgiveness helped corporations and investors. Student loan forgiveness is seen as helping the poor and the young – though quite a few Boomers have significant student debt.
Serious people are warning that the commanding lead Republicans enjoyed all year has now evaporated. Congress was the GOP’s to lose, and now they run the real risk of losing it to the child sacrifice and cricket flour party.
And if they do lose in November, it will be due to a well-deserved judgment for oppressing the poor – one of four sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance.
That might be the best outcome at this point.
I’m just trying to decide which side has more contempt for me at this point:
The Institutional Right, for being a wanna-be academic with a mountain of debt and a degree in a ‘useless’ field,
or the Death Cult, for being a cishet white male dedicated to their ultimate enemy, Christ and His Church.
Ah, well. While my sympathies remain with the Order of Preachers, I think the Order of Carthusians has the more apropos motto for the present moment: Crux stat dum orbis volvitur.
Somewhere along the line a lot of the world got convinced that having student loans be kept on the books is the greatest priority. I’ve seen people admit that the interest rates are too high, that the inability to discharge debt through bankruptcy is usurious, that the average student will pay so much over the principal that the loans do not make sense even if they do have the income to repay them, and that none of this was made clear to students as they took out the loans (but indeed all their teachers, relatives, etc. said that loans were reasonable.) And then the most they will allow is “well, maybe we should change how we give out loans in the future, but we absolutely need to make sure that everyone with a loan pays back every dime so that they learn their lesson about bad financial decisions.”
It’s like if a loan shark was arrested and people said “we need to make sure to break the kneecaps of those who didn’t pay him on time, so they will know better in the future.”
The crowning irony is that the “Muh financial responsibility!” crowd is no less deluded than “College is a human right!” wokeists. Ensuring that all student debtors pay back every dime would take intrusive, brutal police state measures of the kind BoomerCons fedpost against.
They’re indulging in pure fantasy. In reality, what will happen absent at least a 50% debt jubilee is hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans will be defaulted on. And then our current recession will turn into a depression.
There is also the bizarre spectacle of many Christians acting like debt forgiveness is somehow un-Christian for being against “holding up your word.”
Even “Sola Scriptura” Christians have no excuse for this, when considering the Lord’s Prayer, the parable of the dishonest manager, the parable of the unforgiving slave, the practice of the jubilee year, the repeated prohibitions against taking interest on loans (especially to the poor), etc.
Catholics have even less excuse for such a viewpoint.
Some related issues are that:
a. A lot of people don’t understand how much of this debt is held by the government, so they assume that the government has to rob Peter to pay Paul;
b. Everyone’s convinced that government money is their money and shouldn’t be used for the ‘undeserving.’
Yeah, I have seen a lot of people on twitter and the like say things along the lines of “the Bible endorses debt forgiveness, but only when the lender takes on the whole loss. Since the lending agencies are federal, forgiving the debt means we all take on the loss.”
But I can’t understand this reasoning at all. If we are serious about it, it means that when the loans were given out in the first place they were given out with our money, and hence we were the lenders in the first place. The only objection I can see to that is “but we don’t gain the profits from the interest” which would only mean that we were robbed by the lender in order to pay the loan.
Anyone serious in this line of thinking would be advocating for the destruction of all federal loan agencies (which would be a great thing), but it’s always just an excuse to keep these loans on the books.
Another helpful reminder that most people – even Christians – are NPCs.
I just spotted an article on The Federalist (https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/26/no-joe-biden-canceling-student-debt-isnt-like-jesus-forgiving-sins/) that has me wondering: is the hostility to debt forgiveness wrapped up in the dominance of the penal substitutionary atonement model that dominates American Evangelicalism?
(And no, Anselm’s satisfaction model is not penal substitutionary atonement.)
Good heavens, just when you think Con Inc. shills can’t get more venal and unctuous, they somehow find a new low.
The Parish Council Susan who cobbled together that copypasta of Blaze TV sound bytes presumes to claim that forgiving debts isn’t debt forgiveness, based on her biblical exegesis. Yet she conveniently ignores 1 Timothy 2:12. Goodness.
Almost as cynical and manipulative is her fearmongering about loan forgiveness costing taxpayers money. Her only basis for that whopper is another piece in the same NormieCon rag. That hack job is based on a budget analysis from the University of Pennsylvania overseen by Kent Smetters, a former World Bank consultant. That’s the racket which was just caught artificially inflating China’s business score.
What’s really got these bankers’ panties in a bunch is that student loan relief takes debt out of the current income-based repayment system. In that scheme, debtors’ outstanding balances are forgiven if they make consistent payments for 20 years. The catch is that the amount forgiven is considered taxable income by the IRS. Failure to pay tax on this illusory income can land you in prison.
Whenever you see grifterCons bitching about student loan relief, remember that they’re angry their kids won’t go to debtors’ prison.
Who’s willing to bet that if this DOES lead to defeat or underperformance in the midterms, the GOPe takes this as a sign that it’s all Trump’s fault and that what we really need is to go back to RINO politics?
They’ll have a point, but not the one they’ll think they’re making.
Trump should have dissolved Congress and spared us this dog and pony show.
I’d say we’ll have an even split between “Too much Trumpism” and “This is what we get for letting those religious nuts overturn Roe v. Wade!”
Meanwhile, the progressive side of American politics–at least the educated, upper-class, urban part that is driving the train–is honestly convinced that the entire GOP is just one incident away from full-on Enabling Act-Fuhrer-and-concentration-camps fascism…
I heard an interview with Donald Trump Jr. today where he said that anyone who owes money on student loans is too lazy to pay them off, are greedy for expecting any help, and that the dems are appealing to the worst elements in American society by going ahead on loan forgiveness.
He even used the dead horse phrase “no one held a gun to their head and forced them to get useless degrees in gender studies and underwater basket weaving.” That’s pretty close to verbatim; I’m not 100% sure about the first half but he definitely did say the degrees were in “gender studies and underwater basket weaving.”
This is about the worst way to react to the issue, even just on a political level. At least attack the universities running the cons.
I don’t know if his father has the same views, but if he does then he deserves to lose another election.
This isn’t debt forgiveness. This is the bar agreeing to cut the alcoholic’s tab by a third, without asking for any behavior changes. The drunk celebrates that he owes less, buys a round for the room, and in six months, everyone’s back in the same place again.
There’s no changes to issuing new loans, no requirements that colleges make any changes that would effect tuition costs.
I’ve said this previously elsewhere when this topic comes up, I’m not inherently opposed to student loan debt forgiveness, but only if it’s tied to institutional changes in the student loan process. This is nothing more than another nakedly cynical attempt to buy votes.
Here in Christendom, we consider it an obligation under justice to make fraud victims whole, regardless of whether the victim is a drunk or a gambler or we just don’t like him. If they do things differently where you’re from, you should consider leaving.
I have no problem with restitution to victims of fraud. But this isn’t it. To use your fraud victim analogy, this is like if Bernie Madoff gave back 1/3 of what he’d taken to each of his victims, while simultaneously being allowed to continue new Ponzie schemes.
Nothing is fixed or solved with this bit of debt forgiveness, it just kicks the problem farther down the road.
If you equate 1/3 fraud restitution with no fraud restitution, you’re letting BoomerCon rhetoric confuse your judgment.
Unless you’re asserting a moral imperative to deny fraud victims any recompense barring a guarantee that no future fraud can ever occur.
Either way, you’re making my point for me.
I’ve got no problem with the individuals taking the money and getting some restitution. What I have a huge problem with is the government double-speak and a total lack of reform or accountability.
It’s the feds speaking out of both sides of their mouth by simultaneously saying “These loans are so bad that we must give relief to those effected (and couching it under a really dubious reading of ’emergency powers’ ” while also continuing to originate new loans under the same precise terms.
Yes, I realize that we’re in clown world so why should the rules of logic apply at all to anything that Big Fed/Big Education/Big Business does, but it’s still frustrating to watch in action, and feel powerless to change anything.
All I can do is try the best that I can to steer my kids away from getting caught in the same trap.
Being inescapably confronted with harsh realities can be stressful. The reality of politics is doing what’s necessary to win political power, then using that power to buy votes. It’s just what successful parties do.
Your feelings of helplessness arise from recognizing that only one party does what it takes to win elections and then rewards its voters. Maybe if the other party’s base didn’t keep voting for them despite getting nothing in return, this dynamic wouldn’t be so one-sided.
Over in my corner of Christendom we don’t make innocent third parties pay for the crimes of others. I happen to agree that much of Academia is a scam and a grift, protected and enabled by government. One only need to look at the change in the cost of college (I refuse to use the term higher education) relative to basically anything else over the last 40 years to see that this is true
I also agree that forgiving anything without fundamental change will simply encourage more bad behavior on the part of the real predator in this story – Academia; you know, the guys that actually benefitted all of the time
It would appear to me that the most straightforward approach is to have the Academic Institutions, rather than the general tax payer (most of whom never went to college, and an awful lot of whom that did paid off any loans) on the hook for some of the cost of these loans
The advantage is – reduction of loans at the expense of the institutions that actually benefitted from them, which could well result in a change in behavior on the part of The Academy
It simply appears to me to be a lot more equitable to put the institutions that benefitted from the loans on the hook than 3rd parties that had nothing to do with them
By the way, before you ask, I believe that Christ died for me, was raised from the dead on the third day, and is The Way (just getting ahead of any possible witch test :-))
You are regurgitating GrifterCon rhetoric. Their scam goes like this:
>Dems hyperventilate about a real or imagined crisis and propose a self-serving fix.
>Con Inc. raises a fuss that diverts attention from any real problem to some tangential economic issue no one cares about.
>Lefty frames the GOP as heartless monsters out to poison kittens and kick puppies.
>It works and the Dems get what they want.
>Republicans cave and start defending the Liberal program they told their voters to oppose.
The whole ruse is engineered to make you look like a heel. And you get nothing for it. Turn off Fox News.
After hearing a lot of people talk about this today, I realized how much this is a generational issue. Not just in the obvious way of younger generations getting shafted with debt more and thus being more inclined to seek debt forgiveness.
Older generations, including most of Gen X, believed wholeheartedly the lie that a college degree by itself would guarantee high income. Gen Y believed this going into college (everyone had that school counselor who said “It doesn’t matter what degree you get, just go to college!”) But we quickly learned that it was false. Millennials and Zoomers never really believed in the value of college in the first place, they just did it because that was what you did and not having a college degree was seen as something that would put you worse off. But they just accepted debt as a necessary part of things.
Now the idea that a college degree by itself is worth much of anything is so absurd in the modern world that even older generations have been forced to abandon it. But they’ve tried to salvage it as much as possible by pretending as though if certain very obviously worthless degrees were avoided that college is still as valuable as they pretended it was. That is, it’s not the college that went wrong, it’s that students intentionally made bad decisions. It’s not just the inability of Gen X and older to recognize that there are many struggling graduates with STEM degrees; they won’t even criticize things like communication degrees or general “business” degrees. Instead they act like as long as you avoid a “studies” degree, or arts and philosophy (not because they are woke, but for some reason the normiecons really hate art and philosophy) you will still be guaranteed a six figure job out of the gate.
Just wait until universities start revoking the degrees of alumni who transgress the Death Cult pieties. Harvard has already rescinded acceptance of kids who were found to have posted secular blasphemy at 15.
I can’t think of a better way to make the point that “higher ed” is death cult seminary than said institutions stripping normiecons (or even normielibs, at this point) of their credentials.
Agreed with Aaron in virtually every respect. Alas that so much of this rhetoric is a lot of counter-signalling to show how much we hate the boomers, the bankers, and the useless-degree makers at the colleges, except that the universities were all already paid decades ago, and the private banks will definitely be repaid to the extent they were on the hook for any of this. Tomorrow new debt-cattle will be offered the same student loans to enslave themselves for the next generations. There will be no wiping the slate clean, except perhaps in the general default of a state collapse. There will be no restrictions put on tuition raises, no institution of federal student loans that will only pay for certain degrees and certain dollar values like Medicare. They will not even allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. They will say, “Look, we already forgave you ten grand! What more do you want?”
For Mr. Niemeier to peg a potential Republican defeat in the next election on God’s retribution for abuse of the poor is disingenuous. What, no divine judgment for the party of infanticide and sodomy, two of the other four sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance? Not to mention that very few Americans, let alone those who racked up huge amounts of college debt, are materially poor in any objective sense. They are still wealthier than the most avaricious dreams of their ancestors.
Also disingenuous is comparing student loan debt to businesses who were forced to shut down by bogus and unlawful public health mandates. If Boomercon “muh responsibility” takes are bad, so are such fatuous apples/oranges comparisons.
Let state-held debt be wiped out and let those who benefit from it pay the price, or at least be stopped from benefitting from it in the future. Otherwise, this is just bread and circuses and not worth the righteous indignation.
Republicans always forget that it’s their job to exact retribution on Democrats. The flip side of that coin is the GOP’s obligation to reward their constituents. You have no standing to deride Biden for giving his base what they want while your party gives you nothing.
If the Republicans represented your interests against the Democrats, they’d be doing what you suggest. Instead they’re all over the media mocking fraud victims. That is the best way to throw the midterms.
Do you want to keep volunteering for the villain role in the Left’s morality plays, or do you want to win and exercise political power? Because all I see are losers patting themselves on the back for losing by the rules while their political foes sodomize and murder children.
“Also disingenuous is comparing student loan debt to businesses who were forced to shut down by bogus and unlawful public health mandates. If Boomercon ‘muh responsibility’ takes are bad, so are such fatuous apples/oranges comparisons.”
Do you know what’s bogus, Mr. DiBaggio? What’s bogus is when baby boomers con their children and their grandchildren into believing that they need university degrees to succeed in life—and when employers play along by firing well-established employees who lack those degrees. What’s bogus is when absentee parents teach that a generic bachelor’s degree is an acceptable substitute for useful life skills, then laugh at their descendants for feeling lost after they graduate. What’s bogus is when parents pressure their children into taking out the loans in the first place, then sue to get themselves removed as the cosigners. What’s bogus is when Republicans admit that they need student debts to drive military recruitment for America’s empire.
I will concede that there are times at which Brian Niemeier engages in mental gymnastics, and I will also concede the Democrats throw bones to my generation without meaningfully solving the roots of our problems. You’re still missing the point, and you’re still sitting back and sipping piña coladas when you should be fervently praying and fasting for God’s mercy as you wait for the ends of the midterms.
When discussing this issue with Boomers I have noticed that:
-They still view college degrees as practically required for high paying jobs outside of certain trades.
-They think college degrees are well worth taking on a certain amount of debt.
-They think that taking on debt is a normal part of life and it would be strange to try to avoid it (not just for school and mortgage on a house, but also for things like cars, bit ticket appliances, etc.)
It’s not as though they had a conversion moment where they realized that taking on debt for schooling was a bad idea. They just think that you’ll easily be able to pay it off unless you get a “useless” degree or if you are lazy.
I started taking a CS degree at a time when the industry was booming, and four years later when I graduated the bubble had burst and jobs were scarce. While it eventually rebounded, if I had taken on debt to get the degree and didn’t have a backup plan I would have struggled to make minimum payments on loans and thus would have accumulated quite a bit of interest to weigh me down even when I did get a job. But if I had taken on debt I would just be following the advice that boomers at the time gave (and which they still give).