WaPo reports, based on what "four people familiar with the matter said."
Biden has drawn the ire of activists and some student loan borrowers who were growing tired of promises of a decision that stretched over more than a year. Biden had previously expressed reluctance to grant forgiveness to people who attended elite universities, while moderate Democrats and Republicans derided the policy as fiscally irresponsible....
“It’s great to see the president take action to forgive the crushing debt burdens of borrowers from the most disadvantaged backgrounds,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think-tank....
“Canceling student debt is expensive, inflationary, and unfair to those who paid their student loans and most likely illegal,” said Brian Riedl, a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think-tank. “It does nothing to prevent universities from raising costs and students from borrowing more money in anticipation of future loan forgiveness."
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217 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 217 of 217Althouse: “$10,000 isn’t much. Hard to get excited about.”
I guess that’s pretty fucking easy to say when you’re living on a taxpayer-funded pension.
Some of us actually have to work for that money.
Where the Hell is Shouting Thomas when we need him?
$10,000 isn’t much. Hard to get excited about.
What's it called when a blog host trolls her own blog?
Effective, no?
Althouse said:
"$10,000 isn’t much. Hard to get excited about."
I would laugh at the grifting con artist who thinks she gave good value for what the taxpayer is now on the hook for, but the fact is that she's so delusional that she doesn't see the hook in the whole thing.
You've just witnessed the Government connecting what you provided ("education") with the interests of the taxpayer. The taxpayer is going to have some thoughts to impart, about the value of that which you provided at such dear cost. Those thoughts are likely to include a bunch of considerations that you no doubt think unconnected, like what you provided having actual real social benefit. The taxpayers may have different feelings about your having "educated" the class of lawyers now besetting them with petty harassments, and you will find that those taxpayers have entirely different viewpoints about the social "benefits" accruing from same. They're not likely to be thanking you for creating more lawyers, or indoctrinating those lawyers with the conventional wisdom of you time and milieu. Indeed, they may well hold you personally responsible for the pain they've felt at the hands of those lawyers, and choose to return the favor by raping your financial security the same way your works have raped theirs.
When the time comes, I expect a lot of people to suddenly discover that they're actually accountable for things they had no idea they were signing up for. Our host at this site will likely be one of them, and she'll be shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that accountability is coming for her, personally.
Which it will. Crap like this blatant theft from the working taxpayer will not go unanswered, and the least of the things that should be expected is the imminent disenfranchisement of the academic class, along with all of the lawyers. They're going to be lucky if that doesn't include actual slaughter at the hands of those they're sloughing off the bills upon.
I can't imagine a more effective means of suicide for the Democratic Party and their hanger-ons. The only question is how many of them are going to wind up dangling from lamp posts, when the revolution comes calling for them.
"What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our government must be strong;
It's always right and never wrong!
Our leaders are the finest men
And we elect them again and again,
And that's what I learned in school today,
That's what I learned in school"
Lyrics by Tom Paxton
I've been opposed to this idea from the beginning. A terrible decision. The Dept of Ed needs to start going after colleges to contain costs. I was talking to a guy who went to Queens College in Kingston Ontario. Tuition: 6500 bucks CAD a year. Why is college here so expensive?
Why is college here so expensive?
Government backed student loans.
Althouse: “$10,000 isn’t much. Hard to get excited about.”
I guess that’s pretty fucking easy to say when you’re living on a taxpayer-funded pension.
A pension that pays her more each year than I make working full time.
"Cook, the war dept is an enumerated power of the federal government. Where do YOU find the govt power to spend a penny on education?"
Where does it say the government cannot provide funding for education? Are you suggesting public schools are and have always been unconstitutional?
That aside, you are avoiding my point, which is not what the government may or may not (or should or should not) pay for, but the purpose of reporting to the public how much a given government expenditure is costing the tax payers, but not all other government expenditures? If reporting the cost to taxpayers of the loan forgiveness program is considered pertinent and important for the public to know, why not report such costs to the public of all government expenditures? If the public were informed of the costs to them of every proposed or approved government expenditure each year, perhaps the public might start to protest. The grotesquely bloated War Department budgets--bigger and bigger each year--are reported with zero comment by the mainstream press. If we were aware how much more money we are each spending on the wasteful war budget every year, we might soon have public pushback, and growing demand that the war budget be reduced and reduced and reduced.
"Cook, as usual, is 70 years out of date. "The War Department" pre WWII."
The "Department of Defense" is a euphemism, or, more exactly, a lie. We do not fight wars of defense; we fight wars of offense, wars of plunder, wars of empire, to maintain our position as the controlling empire of the world.
Our so-called "DoD" is still, and always, the War Department.
Gahrie said...
Althouse: “$10,000 isn’t much. Hard to get excited about.”
I guess that’s pretty fucking easy to say when you’re living on a taxpayer-funded pension.
A pension that pays her more each year than I make working full time.
8/25/22, 8:52 AM
The people I know that are okay with this are ALL on taxpayer funded pensions.
Rusty said...
Ann Althouse said...
"$10,000 isn’t much. Hard to get excited about."
That is rather flippant, don't you think?
You are are missing Prof Althouse's point
If you have $100k in loans you can't pay, $10k of "forgiveness" is pretty meaningless to you. "Oh, yeah, now I only have $90k of loans I can't pay!"
So for the people who are whining for "student loan forgiveness", this isn't going to make them happy.
If they weren't going to get out and vote, or get out and volunteer for Dem candidates already, this isn't going to change their minds.
So it's too small to buy a significant number of votes, while still being wrong enough to piss off a lot of voters.
IOW, Althouse is correctly pointing out that the Biden* team managed to find a "sweet spot" where they piss off almost everybody
Where does it say the government cannot provide funding for education? Are you suggesting public schools are and have always been unconstitutional?
Aaaarrrrghhh!
This is the root of so many of our nation's problems. The sheer ignorance! Our Constitution was written to give the government certain powers. These powers were enumerated within the Constitution. If it's not written there, the federal government can't do it. The idea that the government can do anything unless the Constitution says it can't is exactly backwards!
Secondly, education was supposed to be, and until Nixon was, a state and local issue. Public education was doing fine for 200 years until the federal government stepped in and started fucking things up.
"Where does it say the government cannot provide funding for education? Are you suggesting public schools are and have always been unconstitutional?"
Yes. Where does it say it must provide for education specifically?
Credentialism and its providers have rendered themselves meaningless and utterly parasitic.
Ask the average graduate of any course of "higher learning" how much they use what they were taught. Then, ask the average experienced practitioner in that field how well-prepared the average newly-hired graduate of one of those courses of study actually is. The result will leave you questioning just about everything, in regards to the "value of education".
Most higher-education credentials these days are utterly without value, useful only in terms of providing artificial credentials demanded by other equally-useless credentialed dolts who've weaseled their way into the hiring process. In terms of actual education and scholarship, most graduates are no better off than the usual run of high school-graduates of yesteryear. My grandmother's transcript from her high school in Oregon from the 1910s had more breadth and depth to it than today's average university graduate. She had Latin, Greek, two foreign languages, math up to calculus, and a bunch of other subjects we no longer teach due to a general dumbing-down of the curriculum. When was the last time you heard of a high school teaching rhetoric, let alone requiring it?
Modern education is a scam, pure and simple. The intent is to fleece as many as possible, while making it impossible for anyone not taking part in the ripoff from finding work, no matter what their actual expertise or experience might be. I've got a friend who is a self-taught software engineer and programmer; dude writes his own programs, does more work in the guts of his employer's machines than any of the credentialed dolts they keep hiring to "supervise" him, because he obviously lacks the qualifications to be doing the work he's been doing for nearly 20 years now. They keep having to fire the guys and girls they hire to run his IT section, because they're incompetent dolts with pretty paper to put on their walls. Yet... HR keeps trying to fire him, because he's "unqualified" for the work he's been doing for almost two decades, now.
You run into that same thing across every industry, every field. What is the "value of education", again...? I'm not seeing it.
Robert Cook said...
Where does it say the government cannot provide funding for education? Are you suggesting public schools are and have always been unconstitutional?
That's a really stupid line, even for you
1: The Federal Government has enumerated powers. Ever heard of those?
That means if the Constitution does not explicitly give the Feds power over something, they don't have it
2: State Government's have all other powers. State's paying for public schools is perfectly Constitutional
Exactly how have you made it past the 5th grade without knowing that?
Buying votes now has a $10k/voter price tag. Good to know the electorate can be bought off that inexpensively.
mikee said...
Buying votes now has a $10k/voter price tag. Good to know the electorate can be bought off that inexpensively.
That is yet to be seen
That fact that the Biden* Admin thinks they can be bought that cheaply doesn't mean they actually can
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