Poof! Gone Like A Popcorn Fart In A Tornado!
With the midterms just a couple of months away, the puppet-masters pulling Pedo Joe Biden's strings decided to implement the first of what are sure to be many offerings to appease the woke mobs in the form of "forgiving" up to $10,000 in student loan debt for people making less than $125,000. Like waving a magic wand, it just disappears!
John Wilder has a solid post covering this topic today, Student Loans, Death, And Taxes, you should check it out.
It goes mostly without saying that this is a huge eff you to working people and an obvious bribe to the people Democrats need to show up in November, this year and in 2024. Most reports that bother to look, like this story from Fox, peg the costs of this scheme at around $300 billion. It will be "paid" for by more "debt" but that isn't really the point. What this scheme represents is a politically targeted bribe. Lots of people have lots of debt, trillions of dollars in mortgages, car loans, credit cards, etc. Only one kind of debt, student loans, is being "forgiven". Why is that?
For one reason only, the people carrying around that debt tend to be Democrat voters, specifically people who attended college. White millennials and various younger ethnic minorities who went to college, got useless, overpriced degrees (or often didn't even graduate) who have no way to earn enough to pay back their loans because they sure as shit won't work a demanding job to pay them off. These are the voters the Dems rely on to show up to vote (as many time as they can get away with). People who are working class that didn't go to college? They don't vote for Democrats, not anymore, at least not Whites. In 2020 exit polling Whites who didn't graduate from college voted for Trump 2-1. White men without a college degree voted 70-30 for Trump.
The people who voted for Trump get left out of this deal for the most part. That is not a coincidence.
This won't be the end of it. While many people will have their entire (current) student loan balance wiped out, lots more won't. According to the Fox News piece linked above...
The nation's federal student debt now tops $1.6 trillion after ballooning for years. More than 43 million Americans have federal student debt, with almost a third owing less than $10,000 and more than half owing less than $20,000, according to the latest federal data.
I am not great at math but that makes it sound like 2/3 of people will still have loan balances after this and that almost half of borrowers owe more than $20,000. Like pretty much everything in America, this is not equal across racial groups as Nina Turner, dumb even by the already low standards of famous black women, points out:
Let that marinate a moment. How exactly is it that black women have on average student loan balances over over $52,000?! Whites have less than a quarter of that balance, although I notice she didn't break it out by sex for White borrowers. I suspect she cooked these numbers somehow because it doesn't jive with other stats I am seeing but in every report blacks, and especially black women, were carrying larger balances than Whites and Asians. This is blamed on a lack of "household wealth" in black families, something that is the result of poor decision making on the part of generations of blacks starting with the out of wedlock birth rate, but it also ignores the many race based scholarship opportunities for blacks not available to Whites and Asians. Maybe blacks are just less responsible with debt, something that underwriters have known about since....well since blacks started getting loans.
Also not mentioned, blacks just tend to not graduate from college once they start. I posted about this here, Participation Ribbon Egalitarianism Has No Place In Education, including this chart:
....and wrote:
For white students, only 3 out of 5 have completed their degree six years after starting, which of course means that almost 40% of students start school and likely never complete a degree, and many of them have nothing to show for it other than student loan debt. No one lists on their resume "Completed 4 semesters of college". For black students it is even worse with 3 out of 5 students failing to complete their degree in six years, and if you haven't completed a degree in six years the odds are you never will. Schools like the University of Michigan have a staff of almost 100 and spend $11 million a year in their "diversity office" but in the case of blacks the majority of them attending college don't graduate.
It is hard enough to pay off student loans with most degrees but if you get deep in student loan debt and don't graduate? You will never pay those loans off.
A dirty secret of college is that most degree programs do nothing to make you more prepared for a decent career. Engineering, accounting, nursing, those sorts of degrees of course do but virtually nothing in the liberal arts or even business degrees are actually useful to a career. The problem is that getting a four year degree in electrical engineering costs the same as a four year degree in Medieval Sodomy Studies. When our daughter gets out of medical school with a large debt load, she will earn enough to pay it back in short order. People with liberal arts degrees? They won't be in the same position.
What we should do is pass loan "forgiveness" costs back on the universities, at least most of the cost, but also eliminate Federally guaranteed student loans. If you want to borrow money for college, you should have to prove how you will pay it back like you have to do with most loans. If you are going to be a nurse or an accountant, that should be easy, but if your degree is in something stupid you shouldn't be able to get a loan to pay for it. We already have far too many people in college, that number should be slashed by 50% or more.
Of course that won't happen. Instead we will get regular waves of loan "forgiveness" and never address the actual reasons why college is so damn expensive in the first place. This is just the latest iteration of the ruling class looting the productivity of the White working and middle class to bribe their voters.