Elsewhere in WaPo, the columnist Alexandra Petri is mocking the Americans who complain about other people getting the money. From "Stop improving things right now! Everyone must suffer as I did!":
DISGUSTING! AWFUL! I have just received word that life is getting marginally better for some people, and I am white-hot with fury! This is the worst thing that could possibly happen! I did not suffer and strive and work my fingers to the bone so that anybody else could have a life that does not involve suffering and striving and the working of fingers to the bone. I demand to see only bones and no fingers! Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thrashing because I have had the nightmare again, the nightmare in which someone else is being spared a small hint of the suffering I endured. The world should not get better! The world should get worse along with me and perish along with me....
I'm sure that's getting plenty of clicks, but I don't think it's well-written humor. It's so exaggerated, and she's punching down really hard. She wouldn't do that unless she herself came from a working class background. Would she? Oh, no:
Petri grew up in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., the only child of Wisconsin congressman Tom Petri and nonprofit executive Anne D. Neal, and attended the National Cathedral School.... She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University
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59 comments:
Envy is not the right argument against it. It fucks up the economy is the right argument.
It's not that someone's life is getting "marginally better", it's that our self-appointed "betters" are giving money taken away from us to their children and the children of their friends, people who have never faced any adversity and have collected participation trophys their whole life, to bail them out for getting worthless "studies" degrees while partying for four years.
"... to subsidize the education debt of people with valuable degrees."
Some would say (or write) that the optics are not good. The president needs at least one advisor experienced in marketing and communications. And sometimes he just needs someone to tell him to shut up.
Cancel $10K in student loans for people who went to trade schools and community colleges. Welders. Truck drivers. Farmers. Help the people who got things done, but not for the people who spent the lockdowns reading Critical Race Theory and posting to Twitter.
Then those "other people" would get ahead in life. Ignore the self-indulgent trust fund babies who went to any Ivy League school or place with annual tuition higher than a community college.
When you've lost WaPo.
She looks funny. Funny, ha, ha.
Why go for the complicated argument of “it fucks up the economy?” Haven’t you noticed they’ll just roll out Krugman, call him a Nobel prize winning economist, and let him tell other you are wrong? Look, these clowns just took your tax dollars and gave it to the students that people like Krugman fleeced for “a college education”. People, by their own definition, can’t use a their degree to earn more than $125,000 a year. Why limit your arguments to something more noble than envy? Screw that nonsense. I’m going to tell people with automobile loans that they screwed up. They should have taken out a student loan, refuse to pay it off because it is low interest anyway, and then buy the car with cash.
rhhardin said...
Envy is not the right argument against it. It fucks up the economy is the right argument.
Attempting to argue the economics of this farce is pointless as you can come up with as many arguments for doing it as against, and you wind up battling through the weeds of assumptions about future economic conditions, income and spending.
Hit the Democrats square in their hypocrisy. This is blatant wealth transfer from a group of people they no longer consider a part of their coalition (the non-college working class) to one of their main interest groups (largely white aspirants to the upper middle class), and a giant insult to anyone who considers it fundamental that, outside of truly exceptional circumstances, people are responsible to service debt they incur voluntarily.
rhhardin is right about "it f***s up the economy" being the correct argument. But there are others too: the moral hazard argument, the regressive argument, the "you're barking up the wrong tree, work on college costs" argument, the hypocrisy argument ("for a party that's so into 'justice,' you sure don't do it well")... Most of those are arguments from Biden's own side, it seems to me.
I went to just about the cheapest school there was and lived at home for a lot of the time, worked two to three jobs, and still had to take on debt - credit card debt because it was a second bachelor's by then and I couldn't get a student loan for it, and was darned if I was going to ask my parents for help - but paid it off within 2 years, almost 30 years ago. I look back on that time as formative, not miserable. I worked hard, but I would have been an entitled little so-and-so if I hadn't. So I guess - while agreeing wholeheartedly with the economic argument - I'm beating the moral hazard drum too.
"Widely canceling student loan debt is regressive. It takes money from the broader tax base, mostly made up of workers who did not go to college..."
Is that true? About half of Americans pay no federal income tax.
"the threshold does not reflect need or earnings potential, meaning white-collar professionals with high future salaries stand to benefit. Student loans, moreover, are a poor proxy for household income"
But isn't the justification that the Covid "emergency" authorizes the "executive action"? If so, why should there be a cap at all? Is there any attempt to judge the actual "emergency" suffered by borrowers who now stand to benefit?
"and students from high-income families borrowed the largest amounts...."
Right. But they are likely to vote Dem, Dems might lose in November, hence "emergency" action is needed.
"she's punching down really hard"
Right. Give her credit for being an honest prog, in her crude condescension. Shows progs like not just the debt cancellation as such but also the FU symbolism of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJo3wwRCdhU
All those educated people are economic illiterates. The finance village idiots.
If you see it as ‘not that much money’ you’re in the club.
rhhardin said...Envy is not the right argument against it. It fucks up the economy is the right argument.
Envy is not a good way to describe arguments based on fairness. Especially considering that fairness relates to moral hazard. And, IMO, the moral hazard is a bigger problems than the damage to the economy. Just as immigration amnesties encourage illegal immigration, leading to further amnesties, debt cancellation will encourage more student debt, leading to more stunted lives and more debt cancellations.
It's not an event, it's a cycle.
These are the same morons who proclaim ‘GE doesn’t pay taxes’ or proclaim a tax increase from three to four percent is ‘only a one percent increase’…and these people are in charge.
…btw if you’re still puzzling on these- you’re part of the club.
Fucking up the economy is the goal, or maybe it's the means. Either way, it's a feature, not a bug.
"Life is getting marginally better for some people" who went to college and became good with using words or rubbed shoulders with those who are and therefore control the public discourse on student loans. Forgotten are the men and women who didn't go to college, didn't learn to chatter on, but rather work everyday to provide for their families. Those who didn't get the now "free ride" for the "college experience" but rather worked everyday to build a life on the poor foundation of the American K12 education.
DISGUSTING! AWFUL! I have just received word that life is getting marginally better for some people, and I am white-hot with fury!
Marginally better for some, materially worst for most, is what our government does best.
"Stop improving things right now! Everyone must suffer as I did!"
If improving things means I paid the first time by satisfying my loan obligations at great cost to me, and then have to pay a second time to satisfy my taxpaying obligations for those who didn't satisfy their loan obligations, I'm likely to say, "Everyone must suffer as I did."
"Tax the rich" is so last year...
Not only a former Congresscrittr father but a former nonprofit org president mother. The Swamp genes are strong in this fool.
Riffing on the class politics tag, the great deception Big Government types rely on to pass “public assistance” type laws is the deceit of intentions. They pretend we are helping widows orphans and impoverished families but the “relief” is actually grift for some favored few: NGOs that get all the money and hire people to reach out to the aforementioned widows orphans and impoverished families. Maybe the funding trickles down but almost nothing gets to the people we were told desperately needed our help. The more manic the money dispensing, think PPP or “stimulus,” the more that gets stolen and misused. Democrats have perfected never letting a crisis go to waste. Instead they enrich their allies and rake in their cut as donations from the very same NGOs and connected fat cats.
Gotta give credit where due: Democrats are going big before they get sent packing.
The disastrous economic effect is the issue, but at a time when we go on and on about equality and equity, it's distasteful to ridicule the desire for fairness as envy or whining when one isn't one of the disadvantaged oneself. People ought to be able to recognize and condemn injustices even when they aren't the victims of them.
As a RC JAG Officer, I did hundreds of assembly line wills, POAs, Etc. for soldiers about to deploy to Iraq. One comment I heard repeatedly: „Well, I enlisted for the college benefits, but I guess i signed up for this, too.“ (words to that effect.)
Some of these soldiers did not return alive from that cr*phole.
Others suffered serious, permanent injuries. According to Ms Petri, these soldiers are chumps for not instead taking out loans for college and later demanding cancellation, and they deserve mocking for complaining about lack of fairness.
Another reason to despise our elites.
Of her writing, Petri has said, "My goal is to be weirder than everybody else and hope that no one stops me. So far no one has." Wikipedia
Her congressman father was an 18-termer. From Wisconsin. And a Republican.
And her husband is on the Post editorial board. He might even have written the editorial.
A privileged daughter of a former congressman writing in a national newspaper to castigate people with reasonable objections to this new additional debt that will have to paid in taxes is the definition of breathtaking arrogance. She is a yet another useless mouth, who would be a nobody if not for her parents.
Perhaps, the time for Irish democracy has arrived in America
Lets see how long it takes for the moron DC class of republican consultants to grab this sure-fire-winner of an issue for the Nov elections.
My prediction: they won't.
My hope: they will.
But my prediction stands.
In other news, universities specializing in expensive degrees for low income earners make plans to raise tuition $10K.
Alexandra Petri is well named: her message is a little sample of a toxic culture. I’m glad to read it, because it illustrates perfectly the spiteful selfish cheap excuse for mean-girls wit that dominates in her bubble world. Harvard must be right proud of this one.
We should remember her words and, more importantly, the attitude behind them. Even in the midst of stealing from the taxpaying public, she pauses to mock those who object to this immoral and illegal windfall.
Remember in November.
Ms. Petri's biography reads like an extra from House of Cards: she's the baby Claire aborted. The live, lesbian daughter on Veep is far funnier.
She an shove her vitae where the sun don't shine.
cassandra lite said...
The problem is that the burden has been shifted to people who did not sign onto this financial obligation and it has been lifted from those who had. What I find galling is that the people who incurred this debt are young enough to work to pay it off whereas the rest of us who must now pay off that debt have already allocated our funds to do us the most good.
It is akin to me saying to you," I don't have the things that you do so I'm going save money and have you, my neighbors, pay my mortgage from now on."
Like many things the left advocates it is immoral.
It's nice of her to demonstrate that she never was actually educated by any of the "schools" she attended.
Because apparently she's so stupid / ignorant that she's unaware that her "life is getting marginally better for some people" is coming at a serious cost to the rest of us.
And yes, economic ignoramuses, increasing the moral hazard by letting people get student "loans" that they dont' have to pay back IS a huge cost to the rest of us.
Then there's the money that all the rest of us have to pay, to pay for that "life getting marginally better" for the elect few.
American "journalism" is so horrendous. David Burge (aka IowaHawk, a humorist and old car fan on Twitter) has a long thread with some details about student loan defaults that shed an interesting light on this story and I haven't seen this covered anywhere else. The rest of the press is too busy screaming their prepared talking points to actually cover the story. You can go read his work and decide for yourself, but, ponder the question: what schools have, by far, the highest student loan default rates, and why? Why the defaults and why do those schools even exist? Oh, and why is a twitter goofball the only one covering this?
I can't get a handle on how canceling student loans for college grads "improves things" for anyone but an already privileged class.
But that's just me. I just don't see thing as clearly as LeftBank, WaPo columnists and the chumps who still vote for Democrats. /s
"Alexandra catapulted from National Cathedral School to Harvard, where she ticked off withering lines in the Crimson about her hyper-achieving peers. After she graduated, Fred Hiatt, the Post’s longtime editorial-page editor, gave Petri her own blog with a groaner of a name, ComPost. Her task is to write funny."
She did all this w/o pilfering a truckdriver's salary. All she had was spunk and a congressman father.
This has reached a point at which we can no longer attribute this kind of behavior to stupidity. Coupled with their corrupting everything and their immorality, it is clear that the aim of Democrats is to destroy the goodness and greatness of our nation.
Nobody is this stupid!
I think if you asked Petri and others who make this argument, outside of the student loan context, if they favor government/society puting a high value on fairness and treating people in similar positions equally, to the extent reasonably possible, they would say yes. And if you asked them whether a person who has been treated unfairly, and in a way that is not equivalent to how others are treated, may have a legitimate grievance, they would say yes.
People who went to college and paid their loans are being treated differently than people who went to college and did not pay their loans. That unequal treatment, under general principles, is a legitimate source of frustration, and sneering at it suggests a lack of principle.
I will give Petri a pass however, since a year or so ago she wrote a column with various references to Greek myths, and when she wover an Amazon into her story, she included the obligatory Post parenthetical (Jeff Bezos owns Amazon and owns the Washington Post). That still gives me a smile.
I saw Ron Baron today on CNBC. If you don't know him, he's a younger and Jewish Warren Buffett.
Ron's point is that this inflation is all intentional. The idea is to devalue the dollar so that the Treasury debt gets paid back in dollars that are devalued.
Ron is right. Inflation helps debtors. But hurts savers and people who need to spend a large majority of their income on necessities.
Ron's other point is buy stock in companies that are fast growing. He's made billions on Tesla. Tesla makes $15k on each car. That's why the Big Three want to switch. I bought TSLA this AM.
Cui bono? Follow the money.
You are all welcome.
You can go all the way back to Aristophanes' Clouds and see that finding clever ways to absolve people of their debts is a trademark of the sophists.
American higher education is, overwhelmingly, a source of favorable propaganda and a source of financial support for the political left in general and the Democratic Party in particular. But the supply/demand picture for American higher education has been deteriorating. Government intervention to reduce the real cost of American higher education will serve to prop up demand. That is the point of this exercise; the regressive redistribution of money to previously propagandized voters is a delightful secondary effect.
Well cancelling student loans is a good thing right? There's already been a "halt" in collecting payments due--because of Covid. And now good Old Joe is wiping out $10 to 20 K on the balance. And of course there's been an eviction moratorium for renters--justified by the fact that the various governments locked down the economy and some people couldn't work.
Now let's help Joe Six Pack. Joe is drivng a 12 year old clunker that he bought down at Crazy Larry's Used Car Lot--No Money Down. And he's paying 22% interest on the $5,000 loan he took out to buy the jalopy. Come on Man! Joe--reach down and cancel the balance due on that car loan. After all, isn't it the right thing to do? Of course the bank that issued the loan might object, but so what?
You can go read his work and decide for yourself, but, ponder the question: what schools have, by far, the highest student loan default rates, and why? Why the defaults and why do those schools even exist? Oh, and why is a twitter goofball the only one covering this?
This has long been known. The answer is that a lot of the schools/majors with high default rates are also associated with protected classes. HBCUs, for example.
"Sebastian said . . . s that true? About half of Americans pay no federal income tax."
Government raises money three ways: i) tax its citizens; ii) borrow money from lenders; or iii) (most insidiously) print money. Even if only half the citizenry pay federal income taxes, they all have to buy gasoline and groceries with U.S. money which the federal government will debase even further to pay for this hot mess.
"Widely canceling student loan debt is regressive. It takes money from the broader tax base, mostly made up of workers who did not go to college..."
It actually doesn’t take money from the tax base, because there is no money left to take. The government has to borrow, from someone, for the money. As long as we could borrow from the ChiComs, and the rest of the world, that wasn’t that inflationary. But the FJB Administration and the Dems screwed that by overspending, and driving us into a recession. And, by driving much of the world away from our sovereign debt by destroying its value as the world’s reserve currency by forcing countries around the world to use other currencies to buy products, in particular, from Russia. So who funds the deficit when no one wants all of the debt that we are incurring? The Federal Reserve! And that, ultimately results in the creation of money (to buy the debt), and with the Pelosi/Schumer Congress, that means a lot of money. Despite the Dems’ fantasies to the contrary, that is the root cause of inflation- too much money chasing too few goods.
Envy is not a good way to describe arguments based on fairness.
But this Alexandra Petri person isn't presenting her own argument as being based on fairness. She's presenting it as envy - a caricature of envy, in fact. So I think rhhardin's characterization is fine.
This is wrong. This is wrong even though it will help my son, whose college efforts and his routine life came crashing down when his fiancé died from a brain aneurism in their apartment. It's taken a while for him to get back fully on track. He's decided to pursue a non-college career (although he talks about online courses) and that's going well.
Mayyyybe I could agree that the poorest among college graduates need some relief.
Mayyybe I could agree that the *interest* on these loans should be deferred, or reduced for graduates who are really, truly struggling.
Mayyybe I could agree that colleges (who are the ultimate recipients of this largesse) should refund some of the money to the government (us) for the lack of jobs among their graduates.
Mayyybe I could agree that colleges that actually, actively, purposefully defrauded innocent students should be charged for the cost of the loans and to refund the money directly to their students.
But this solution? There's really nothing I can agree with here.
People (smart people?) borrowed money that they agreed to pay back in return for an education and a degree. People did this fifteen years ago, and they didn't get their loans cancelled. People will do this fifteen years from now--and what expectation will they have? Is this just a one-time deal for the lucky Covid-era-grads (whose age cohort is among the least directly-affected of all)?
I don't see how this can be a one-time thing. Maybe that's the biggest problem.
Thanks for that link, Ficta. I am so old that I remember when UCLA was free tuition. The federalized loan program was a subsidy for colleges and they ate it up.
My daughter and son-in-law stand to have most of their outstanding student debt paid off. Their AGI is less than the $250K cutoff but not by much. They own a very nice home and new vehicles and have been responsibly paying down their student debt even through the Covid nightmare. They also have paid a lot of income tax over the years as I have also. I paid my daughter's tuition for the first 4 years of college so she wouldn't have so much debt.
While I think this loan thing is not good, I must admit I'm glad that at least my immediate family will qualify for the freebee. If the government is going to hand the money out, we certainly won't refuse it.
It does fuck up the economy 👉🏽 I wish I could quietly quit.
I'm actually in favor of relief for low income people, many of whom weren't able to graduate or attended trade schools that ripped them off. $125,000 (I think $250,000 for married people) is way to high a mark. The lawyers and doctors aren't going to be too affected by a $10,000 credit. However, I think it ought to come out of the pockets of the colleges that got the money, not the taxpayers.
Buying the votes of those with student loans is cheap at $10k per vote.
For those who remember, it's how the Tea Party began in 2010, with proposals to pay for delinquent mortgages by those who couldn't/wouldn't pay what they owed. That had less of a class-based focus than this one, and more of a flavor of helping out those in need of help. Even still it went over badly for Team O at the time, as the 2010 mid-terms made clear. Now we get to see whether that history repeats itself as farce. Biden is just the guy to make it happen, too.
The concern is not that people with educations are being handed money, although that certainly is a bad policy. The concern is that colleges and universities that ripped people off are getting away with it, and being encouraged to do even more of it.
It's not the role of government to pick and choose groups of people on whom to lavish governmental largesse. There's a place for a safety net for the truly destitute and their dependents, but obviously the safety net should apply to everyone who needs it. The idea that the government can use public funds fill the coffers of certain favored groups based on anecdotal claims that they are "struggling" should really be rejected not just on policy grounds, but as a violation of equal protection.
Alexandra Petri is, by far, the worst political comedian in my experience. I am nonpartisan when it comes to political comedy; I like Molly Ivins as well as P. J. O'Rourke. Petri has, at most, one idea per column, and she'll ride that donkey until it drops dead, or at any rate until she reaches her allotted word count.
Unfortunately, she's got a plum gig (I'm guessing three or four columns a week), and she's wanking on that for all it's worth.
I am not sure exactly where I fit in the student-loan thing. Of the four universities (Cal, MIT, Princeton, Stanford) I got into, I picked the cheapest one; and then I got a fellowship which made even the cheapest one basically free. But my parents had saved up about $20K for me (a lot at the time; this was 1984). Then I got another fellowship (= a year in London, studying violin and viola), and came back to Cal, where I had four years of essentially free study, between fellowships and teaching assignments.
So: I had nine years of higher education at basically zero cost. But! My parents had prepared for my college. Prices were not then what they are now, obviously, but they saved up, and Princeton, Stanford, and MIT weren't out of reach, at least for the first couple of years.
I imagine that my parents would be peeved that other parents in their own position would also get stiffed -- those who had prepared for their childrens' college education for a decade or two -- whereas parents who provided nothing to their kids at all are made whole. My parents weren't wealthy by any means. They saved because they wanted their kids to have higher education.
Redistributive change is a progressive tax scheme that hits the middle and lower classes.
The average student loan debt is about $ 45,000.00. Any gainfully employed jerk can pay this amount off in a year or two. I paid mine off in about six months! So why won't these people limit their nights out on the own? Or stop spending money on gross takeaway "coffees"? How about skip just one vacation? It's all instant gratification and no sacrifice for these people. They suck!
Envy is not the right argument against it. It fucks up the economy is the right argument.
Single/central/monopolistic solutions engender gross and catastrophic misalignments. With a narrow and progressive global buffer, we're overdue for a "reset".
Both of our kids married spouses of the same income bracket. Parents that worked hard, Reared the kids through high school as high achievers (2 valedictorians, 2 top 5 in class) and got degrees with summer jobs and some debt. The four of them had the combined debt paid off around 10 years.
My point is, their families are now doing quite well. They will be the ones paying for others education.
That is what the Dems do. Punish the hard workers, the producers, the intact families raising above average children. Take from them to give to slackers and takers. All to buy votes so they can keep abusing the productive.
Dave Begley said...
I saw Ron Baron today on CNBC. If you don't know him, he's a younger and Jewish Warren Buffett.
Ron's point is that this inflation is all intentional. The idea is to devalue the dollar so that the Treasury debt gets paid back in dollars that are devalued.
Ron is right. Inflation helps debtors.
Inflation only help debtors who are not constantly generating more debt, that has to be taken at a higher interest rate because of the inflation.
IIRC, > 50% of US gov't debt is in instruments that are 5 years or less.
This inflation is going to blow up the deficit, because the debt servicing costs are going to rise faster than anything else
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