Biden’s “student loan forgiveness” is a moral hazard and election year vote-buying. It’s extremely unfair to people who planned as-if they’d have to pay it all back and did something responsible.

Biden’s “student loan forgiveness” is a moral hazard and election year vote-buying. It’s extremely unfair to people who planned as-if they’d have to pay it all back and did something responsible.

I never got to go to college. I was told that if I did, I’d get no help from my parents. In fact, my parents actively stood in the way of me taking a FAFSA grant for years, because they look at your parents’ tax filings until you’re in your 20s, even if you can’t get your parents to help you because they’re a couple of dickheads who ran off after breaking your home and did what they wanted to do and disowned you.

After coming out as gay, my parents did the legal bare minimum and threw me out at 18. Neither one of them wanted anything more to do with me, and even if they did, they had both remarried to people who didn’t want me there. Including my mom’s second husband, who violently beat me numerous times, closed-fist.

I didn’t really stand much of a chance against the guy. I was just a kid and he was a former Army soldier who was a drill instructor. The best I ever managed to do was save my own life from him while he had given me a concussion (I was bleeding all over the place.) and had caught up with me at the front porch of his house, and pinned me down into a choke-hold. I had maybe a few seconds left before I lost consciousness, and with the last ounce of my strength I managed to grab a landscaping rock and smash it against his hand, breaking his hand in two places. I escaped and a passing driver called 911.

My mother took his side and told me I would be homeless if I didn’t go down to the prosecutor’s office and say I had exaggerated and did not want to press charges, so to avoid homelessness, I lied to the state prosecutor, and they reduced his charge to a misdemeanor and made him take anger management classes. They didn’t even convict him and in a few weeks, I was living in my (clunker) car anyway.

Shortly in, I found a slum apartment to live in for the next year, complete with wildlife invasion, old knob and tube electrical wiring wrapped in cloth that blew a circuit breaker if you ran the TV while you were cooking something, and child sex predators living next door (actually next room, it was all one big house with sleeping rooms) because the landlord didn’t care who lived there. Oh, and there was also no heat.

Did I mention that I didn’t have any heat? It’s worth mentioning. It gets very cold in northern Indiana and in winter, my apartment was basically the ambient outdoor temperature. I could run a small heater fan and point it at my face that winter while I slept, and that was about all I could do.

My parents and the government betrayed me and set me back in ways that I still haven’t recovered from, and likely never will.

I’ve had a history of police harassment, and I’ll just leave it at that because I’m trying to delete some of it.

The last series drove me into bankruptcy and made me homeless for two years again and living in a motel by the side of a freeway that wasn’t a lot better than that apartment I started out in 20 years ago.

(Oh yeah, and I’m white. So apparently, “privileged”.)

The people who went into debt to take on student loans are very different people than I am. They typically fall into two categories.

Category 1 are the Jerry Smiths (Rick and Morty). People who are borderline employable and mostly just take up space and figure out how to make the rest of society pay for their incompetence.

They are people like a guy I dated who racked up $20,000 in student loan debt to study Political Science and works a gig job DoorDash while moonlighting as a hotel desk clerk. At least, that’s last I knew. He can’t even hold onto these jobs, but he’s one of those people with a lot of student loan money who is totally unemployable for much more than whatever the minimum wage is.

They keep getting rid of him at that, and he goes to find something else to do, but the $20,000 Political Science crap never helped him make a single dollar. In fact, he owed so many people so much delinquent debt, that he had to do business in cash without a bank account so nobody could garnish him, he had no furniture in his apartment by the time I managed to look inside it, and there was a safe on top of the kitchen counter.

Since he took on a FAFSA to go to University of Wisconsin-Parkside, you’ve already paid to enable him if you’re an American taxpayer, but now Biden will wipe out the rest of the $20,000 and make you pay for that too. And there’s a lot more where he came from.

Even in the 1990s, we had a neighbor whose son was named Lynn. Lynn had a degree in Philosophy, and we used to see Lynn putting his degree to good use, when we went to the movie theater, where he worked for $4.25 an hour as an usher sweeping popcorn off the floor and checking tickets.

Category 2 is people who did well in school, chose a degree where they’ll actually get a career that doesn’t involve flipping burgers and delivering pizzas (there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t need a college degree), and are probably making six figure salaries.

In other words, they simply just do not need our help. Case Closed.

If Biden gave a damn about Public Policy, he wouldn’t be taking money from people who go to work and pay their taxes and handing it to losers and people who don’t even need the help and are in highly paid careers where they can afford to pay back their loans.

What’s worse is that there’s no law passed by Congress that allows any of this. He never even pretended there was one.

He did his debt forgiveness to people who went to colleges that cheated them and are being prosecuted by the Department of Justice first and separately, because that’s the only debt forgiveness that is authorized by statute.

This next phase creates an unauthorized entitlement for which no enabling law or appropriated money exists. It will cost us $362 billion, which is more than $2,000 debt added to the plate of every American who actually pays taxes. Someone is also likely to sue over this to stop it, and let us all hope that they succeed!

When I voted for Biden, it was a choice between two bad options. Trump has changed the Overton Window to the point where people will accept the very worst candidates the Democratic Party has to offer. He may have even lost if Hillary Clinton came back.

That was the lasting damage of Trump. Americans now have only two choices. Being screwed over by the radical policies of the Democrats or the Republicans, both of which are pursuing policies that would have been unthinkable years ago.

Biden’s “student loan forgiveness” is illegal, unconstitutional, bad policy, a moral hazard, inflationary, and will add to the long national nightmare of people who pay their bills, pay their taxes, and have to find some way to live because they don’t actually qualify for any welfare programs. Worse, it’s vote buying.

90% of the bailout money will go to people who were too stupid to pursue a legitimate college degree and got bilked by money grubbing universities into pursuing something that they could get, but that wouldn’t help them.

The State of Illinois is making this system yet worse by getting rid of the ACT/SAT, which was designed to help potential students by directing them to remedial education if they would get into a program that they won’t do well in.

It’s finally gotten to the point where people have been so dumbed down that George Carlin’s “Have you got a pencil? Get in there! It’s physics!” joke is frighteningly close to reality.

It’s too late for me. By the time I figured out that I was going to have to spend so much time looking for enough money to eek by that I could never do anything else but fight to stay where I was at, it was too late.

Part of the problem is that college gets more expensive every year, and everyone knows that. And part of the reason it gets more expensive is because they’ll give these loans to just about anyone.

And the reason they would give these loans to just about anyone is because you can’t file bankruptcy on them if it doesn’t work out.

So they scared the hell out of me. I knew that win or lose, if I got in there and didn’t do well, I’d have to pay back a lot of money, with interest, even if they continued into my old age and started sucking it out of my Social Security checks and I didn’t have enough to live on.

The loans, therefore, had an extra appeal to the kind of people who don’t plan on what they’re going to do a week or a month from now, much less years later. And they scared people like me. People who know we’ll always be pinched, and, if they come for our Social Security near the end….what will we do?

Because I know that I don’t do well in structured environments and I was concerned about loading up on debt. So I made decisions accordingly, and decided to just accept my lot in life.

If I knew then what I know now, that some day we’d have “Biden” “forgiving” all the loans for all of these people who are such fuck-ups that even I’m going “God damn!”, I would have gone to school. Where would the risk have been?

But Biden won’t be the president forever, and there’s no guarantee that this will ever happen again.

So it’s a one time Jubilee, and if I take on debt now, I’m still stuck with the same calculation, except I’m nearly 40 years old and I’ll definitely be paying it back forever.

Economists figure that in 4 years, the student debt crisis will be just as bad as it is now, because the people who got the loan forgiveness will have learned nothing except that they got away with it once. Why not try again?

It will also say to the people who have no loans that the government will eventually have to “forgive” it again (not a guarantee!) and they’ll behave recklessly too based on what just happened.

What America needs is not Joe Biden’s debt “forgiveness”.

It needs to stop giving out loans to people who plan to major in English and spend credit hours reading Jane Austin, which they can do at the public library for approximately $0.00.

I’m absolutely in favor of making trade, vocational, and some community college courses “free”, and while we’re at it we should stop assuming that everyone’s parents will help them just because they declared a lot of money on their taxes last year, unless we’re going to make another law that says the parents are on the hook to spend down some of that money on their children’s college funds.

There must never be another “debt forgiveness” and there must also never be another story like mine.

But our country is very dysfunctional. Absolutely nothing has been fixed. The promise that this country used to have has been gone for years.

Instead of giving people a hand up, Cancel Culture makes people develop strange and radical political ideas and foments the hatred it claims to want to stop by making people get angrier and angrier about being mocked, and then tries to shove them off the Internet so that they can’t talk about those. I have another post coming up soon, maybe the next post, about this problem.

People who see the system failing them over and over get mad.

And then they want to tear it down. They don’t care what replaces it anymore.

All of the shit I had to crawl through in the past 20 years and now this.

Biden hands these people who completely screwed themselves with student loan scams a free pass.

The entire “deficit reduction” part of the “Inflation Reduction Act” was about the size of the federal loss that was just taken on so that he could give movie floor sweepers with Poli Sci degrees a bailout.

And in return, the IRS will comb through your PayPal wallet to see if your mom handed you some money for getting her car fixed and spotting her for her Medicare premiums that year.

Of course, it’s obvious that this will cause more consternation in political circles. Almost nobody who didn’t rack up student debt or has paid theirs off with their own money is happy about this. In the end it will cause more harm to the Biden Administration than it was worth.