Before we discuss the latest ridiculous idea emanating from the progressive movement, let’s keep in mind something that these radicals do everything to make you forget. The money they propose to spend on their latest one-step scheme du jour is, as always, your money, your tax dollars, your fuel which keeps the Swamp engine primed and pumping. That said, here is how a desperate Democratic Party and an even more desperate president of the United States want to use a big chunk of your hard-earned dollars: to literally buy off young voters.
Yes, the president who has failed so badly at every turn that most every observer expects a political tsunami in November’s congressional elections, is seriously considering a typically reckless course of action. But given how Joe Biden and his party have squandered the full but tenuous power granted them in 2020, it is perhaps the only strategy remaining in their playbook: throw money at the problem. Or more precisely, your money.
Democrats understand that they will need a massive turnout among young voters to counter-balance the collapsing approval of middle-aged and older Americans and avoid an Armageddon-level wipeout in November. And so, this president, urged on by his progressive cohorts on Capitol Hill, is seriously considering a move to forgive, i.e., wipe out, billions in student loan debt owed to the federal government, which made itself the sole purveyor of student loans during the Obama era. This would involve canceling obligations undertaken with the full knowledge and consent of students who will now be told, never mind, we’ve got your back. Democrats will undoubtedly promise to fill the hole in the budget left by this treasury-draining solution with another one-stepper: simply raising taxes even higher on greedy rich people like Elon Musk, that dangerous advocate for free speech who must be condemned and shunned.
To place this move in context, some 40 million people owe the government around $1.6 trillion for student loans – that is 90% of all student debt, according to The Wall Street Journal. Biden has been under constant pressure from the left to extend the pause on student loan payments put in effect in March of 2020 upon the outbreak of COVID-19. As of now, that pause is set to expire on August 31, at which point Biden could make a dramatic announcement of debt retirement just as voters are starting to pay close attention to the upcoming elections.
Elizabeth Warren (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
As a candidate, Biden called for canceling up to $10,000 per borrower for certain types of student debt, but Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have pushed for forgiveness of up to $50,000. And while Biden proposed doing it through legislation, desperate times call for desperate measures, so it now appears this president is planning to do just what he has done since taking office: cave in to his progressive base with unilateral executive action.
Indeed, it would be bad enough for the Democrats running Congress to pass a bill forgiving billions in student debt, but they don’t even have the gumption – or votes, of course – to change the law to accomplish their objectives. Instead, the move being contemplated would involve a full end run around congressional authority and oversight by commanding debt forgiveness by executive order, or decree. Joe Biden won’t even need a phone, just a pen, to sign his name and exchange billions in debt for, he hopes, millions of votes his party would not otherwise have earned. The message from Democrats to young voters is as obvious as the day is long: don’t forget who lightened your load come November.
This move would suggest Democrats may well have first hatched the idea of giving the federal government full control of student debt for just such a time as this, when they can employ their leverage in a desperate attempt to dig up voters in every dark corner. Nice work if you can get it, and with free-spending Democrats in charge, as the song goes, you can get it if you try. But this latest one-step solution is fraught with problems. It is strikingly transparent; no one can witness such a move by a feeble president right before national elections and fail to see right through it, or even recoil in anger (unless you’re paying for your child’s loan, one supposes). One wonders how those who signed on student loans and actually paid them off, fulfilled their obligations often with great difficulty, will respond to the debtors who followed them being bailed out by their permissive progressive parent. And how about the rest of us who will have to pay for Biden’s nakedly political maneuver?
As always, big government types treat this OPM (other people’s money) like Monopoly money – in both the sense that it isn’t real to them, and that they use it the way one does in the board game, strictly to gain and exert power. Accountability to the taxpayers matters not one whit to the likes of AOC and her Squad, or the Democratic establishment acting in obeisance to the progressive mob destroying their brand. That the forgiven debt in this scheme, like so many of their other harebrained, delusional contrivances, places an added burden on you simply makes you suckers with no recourse. They believe spending your tax dollars in a way insulting even to drunken sailors is their birthright, and a highly virtuous one at that, worth signaling for all to see. They believe you should be happy just to keep a small portion of your undoubtedly ill-gotten wages – and the state will go ahead and confiscate the rest, since they clearly understand better than you how to run your life, don’t you know.
Beyond that, what message does this send to rising generations? That you can go ahead and sign a legally binding agreement with terms and conditions clearly spelled out, but have it voided later if the political climate is right? It is not an exaggeration to say that the entirety of contract law which is the very basis of our constitutional system would suffer a psychic if not actual body blow from this latest craven scheme.
What, in the end, is the difference between a politician paying off the debts of targeted voters in exchange for votes, and, say, a businessman paying off the mortgage of a politician in return for favorable treatment? Both represent undeniable corruption. But the worst part of all is that we should no longer be the least bit surprised by anything this president or his party is willing to do, even using our money to all but directly purchase votes.
