August 28, 2022

Several years ago, I was staying at a hotel and could not fall asleep. I went down to the bar for a quick nightcap and overheard two gentlemen a few years younger than myself lamenting about the cost of sending their daughters to college.

I jokingly entered the conversation and suggested that they just have their daughters borrow the money and not pay it back. Both gave me flabbergasted looks. I explained that my wife and I had played by the rules and paid full tuition for our daughters’ educations and that we felt like saps.

One guy said, “How will my daughter ever be able to buy a house if she defaults?”

I replied “The bank who finances your daughter’s house couldn’t care less if she defaulted as long as you use the money you saved by not paying for her college as a 20% down payment. Furthermore, our political class patronizes deadbeats. Those who don’t want to pay their loans back will start whining and their loans will be either forgiven or reduced. People like us who live below our means to educate our children are basically saps. Being an entitled freeloader is the way to go.”

We all had a good laugh but President Biden has now substantiated my cynicism by canceling $10,000 worth of debt for individuals making less than $125,000 and families making less than $250,000.

 

 

I am not making this up. Why should a family making $245,000 or an individual making $120,000 a year receive a $10,000 windfall? Perhaps the Biden administration hopes to increase Merlot and Tesla sales.

And it gets worse. Those who received Pell Grants, basically free money for education, will get up to $20,000 of their additional loans forgiven. And Biden has extended the loan repayment moratorium started by President Trump during the COVID epidemic for another four months. Undoubtably, it will be continued again in four months. The Wall Street Journal estimates that Biden’s actions will increase the deficit by $500 billion dollars.

Liberals argue that Biden’s plan disproportionately helps minorities and redresses historic racial inequalities. And they have a point. Black women have a high debt burden averaging $41,000.

But who are the rest of these people. They are upper middle class white liberals with either worthless degrees or who are too lazy to work. I waited on tables and bartended when I was in medical school to help meet expenses. Why can’t these people do the same? There are hordes of jobs available.

Why should the non-college educated get the bill for these freeloaders? Why not tax Harvard’s $54 billion dollar endowment or Yale’s $39 billion? Why not require the schools who ripped off these students with overpriced tuition in order to give six-figure salaries to do-nothing administrators and tenured professors ante up? Why not change the student loan system so that this mess doesn’t reoccur? Because of easy access to these loans, college costs have risen 169% since 1980.

The answer is that our liberal elite considers the uneducated to be a “basket of deplorables” who deserve to be shafted. This was best summarized by Hillary Clinton’s statement at a Manhattan fundraiser in which she stated half of Trump’s voters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he [Trump] has lifted them up.”

But it was not so much what Hillary Clinton said, but how she said it – with oozing elitist condescension. And one must hear the Manhattan audience chortling at her comments, exuding the superiority of people who sit at the top of the financial food chain while the deplorables harvest their food, clean their toilets, build their cars, get killed in their senseless wars and bail them out when their financial speculations go south.

Many of these liberals are actually upset with President Biden. They want all their debt cancelled!

There is a possibility that legal challenges will stop President Biden’s abuse of power. Congress should vote to cancel student debt. It should not be enacted via executive fiat. But this will take years to litigate and, in the meantime, the freeloaders will be sitting in a café sipping on pumpkin lattes and texting on their iPhones while some deplorable serves them.