US Student Loan Forgiveness Is Left-Wing Class Warfare. By Charles Stallworth.
The Education Department wiped out $4 billion in student debt this week for over 200,000 borrowers. It was the second time the Biden administration eliminated student loans; they also forgave $6 billion in June, and extended a pandemic-era moratorium on student loan payments that began in March 2020.
To the progressive camp, this is nowhere near enough. They have been pushing for full cancelation — of all student loans. …
How unfair — to those who didn’t go to college, and to those who paid back their loans:
I’m a blue-collar worker, and when I talk to other blue collar workers about student loan forgiveness, it’s one of those subjects where no one disagrees. It gets a resounding, 100 percent “Hell no!” every time it comes up.
This isn’t because we’re anti-college. Most of the folks I work with and talk to have kids in college or have kids that graduated college. But if you ask if college students’ loans should be paid off by taxpayers, the answer is always the same: No way.
Unlike progressives, we don’t see student debt cancelation as an avenue out of poverty. We see it as a tax on those of us who chose not to go to college, who now have to pay for those who already got a big advantage in the labor market by way of their degree.
Maybe the college degree didn’t give them the job they wanted. But when it all comes down to it, before taking out a big loan, it’s on you to know what you’re getting into. It’s on you to do your due diligence. Big decisions like taking on thousands of dollars in debt have consequences. Why should that burden fall to taxpayers? …
A debt is always paid, either by the borrower or the lender:
Calling it “canceling student loans” is just as dishonest as calling government funded health care or education “free.” None of this is free; it’s taxpayer funded. It’s not cancelation; it’s taking money from the taxpayer and putting it toward paying off student debt held by borrowers.
It’s deeply disrespectful to the people they are trying to convince to help pay for their loans to misrepresent it. …
Elitists rule:
How much of an elitist do you have to be not to give a damn about the cruelty of demanding that blue collar workers who didn’t go to college chip in and pay off student loans that they didn’t take out? …
If they are so committed to canceling debt, why not push for car loan forgiveness, or medical debt forgiveness, which would help more classes of people and would in many ways be cheaper? And therein lies the ugly truth: Progressives are not rallying for those causes because they don’t focus on who progressives really care about: highly educated elites.
That’s who has the most student debt: The top 40 percent of households hold 60 percent of the student loans.
College enrollment is dropping fast. Given that the left regards universities as a key bastion of power and influence, you can consider this move as merely one step in an ongoing bailout for a key leftist institution. Needless to say, all institutions will move to capture subsidies (like car companies raising prices for electric vehicles after the IRA passed last week), and the high cost of higher education has been driven in part by past government subsidies, such as student loans, etc. Colleges will now feel less pressure to restrain future tuition hikes.
Nate Silver tweeted the quiet part out loud:
