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Student Loan Forgiveness is about Buying Votes

Biden is buying votes, and using your tax money to do it. You don’t think the timing of this is an accident, do you?

I know many of you have heard the saying from Thomas Jefferson (and apparently many before him):

“Democracy will cease to exist when people realize they can vote themselves more money”- Thomas Jefferson

Biden announced officially that he would be giving up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers making less than $125,000 annually and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.

43 million federal student loan borrowers will benefit, and 20 million borrowers will have their debt completely canceled.

That is a heck of a lot of voters who will be receiving a cash bonus right before an election.

The money was borrowed legitimately by people wanting to get an education. They bought something of value, took out a loan, and are paying it back. And a great many people who have had student loans have worked their butts off and paid them back.

But now they will just be forgiven. Free money. Obligation forgiven. Thanks, Joe we will vote for you now.

There are a lot of arguments against this. It is unfair to people who have already paid for their own education, especially those who worked their butts off to go through college debt free.  One can say that perhaps the students were too young to know what they were doing. Too stupid maybe, but we recognize 18 years old as adult, they are free to take on responsibility. One can also argue that it is not fair to place the debt burden on blue collar workers who never had the benefit of college to pay for the college education of others.

It doesn’t matter. This is not about fairness, it is about winning an election.

This is the fault of liberals over past generations who, for some reason, have never understood the economics of subsidies. They believed that by subsidizing educational loans you would get more educated people. 

But this has backfired.

Perhaps a few more people were educated, especially in the beginning. But the liberals never realized exactly what they were subsidizing.

As Ronald Reagan said, whatever you subsidize you get more of. But the unintended consequence is that they were actually subsidizing higher tuition rates in Universities. The Universities were pleased to continue raising their tuition because they knew the students could get loans to cover it, whatever the cost, guaranteed by Uncle Sam.

Those of us who attended a university “back in the day” could actually pay for the tuition by working, and perhaps with some assistance from our parents to get things done faster.  Now a university education is unaffordable without loans. This is what happens when the U.S. government gets into the subsidy business instead of letting the markets work.

And now it will get worse.  Biden has just justified all of the grotesque logic that brought us to this point, the massive loans, the university gouging on tuition, all of it. We are teaching our young people that is it OK to take irresponsible loans and not pay them back, we are damaging our economy with new inflation stimuli, we are creating new debt for everyone to relieve the debt of a few. From every perspective except the political one, this is wrong.

But again, this is not about fairness or intelligent decisions. This is about winning an election.

And with Biden the people have voted themselves more free money.

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