When did we get to be so damn mean?
And so selfish?
According to statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, as of this month there is a total of $1.75 trillion in student loan debt.
President Biden is forgiving a small percentage of that debt — $10,000 each for students below a certain income level and an additional $10,000 for the poorer student who received Pell grants.
And boy are Republicans angry.
It may be a cheap shot, but let’s face it. The GOP does not want to see things that make average folks’ lives easier, and they always resort to playing off one group against another. In this case, they’re trying to stir up folks who already paid off their loans and saying this is unfair to them.
Of course what they’re saying is that if you had to suffer to pay off your student loans, the present generation should too.
Unless they’re Republican members of Congress. Thirteen of them, including several of the sleaziest, had debts ranging from $38,000 to $4.3 million forgiven under the Paycheck Protection Program.
You may recognize Klan Mom, upper left, and Matt Gaetz, lower right. Greene benefitted to the tune of $183,000 and Gaetz got $476,000 in loan forgiveness.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said Biden’s move was “astonishingly unfair.”
“President Biden’s student loan socialism is a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt,” he said.
Ah, the Socialism Card.
You know what true socialism is? It’s an understanding that we’re all in this together, that what affects other people affects us as well. I’ve said this before, but the greatest gift my wife and I were able to give our two children was finishing four years of college and graduating without a dollar of debt.
My son has told me numerous times of his friends who are still paying off college loans more than a decade after graduation. These debts have forced them and millions of other young people to take lesser jobs just to keep up their loan payments. They can’t gamble on starting their own businesses or move to different locations to take a chance of improving their lives.
So we end up with English majors managing fast-food restaurants and other equally bizarre situations.
I don’t know one good person who suffered to pay off college loans who would complain about young people now getting some loan forgiveness. It would be almost like me complaining that my first year of college in 1967-68 cost my parents $2,200 and my son’s first year in 2003-04 cost us $15,000.
Do I resent students getting up to $20,000 of taxpayer money in loan forgiveness. Put it this way. I resent it a helluva lot less than I resent Klan Mom getting $183,000 or Matt Gaetz getting $476,000.
Ever since Ronald Reagan came along, we have been cutting taxes on the extremely wealthy. It’s why we had two billionaires in the U.S. when I graduated from high school 55 years ago and now we have 714.
That’s no reason to go out and start chanting U-S-A, U-S-A.
This used to be a much better country than it is now.
Maybe helping a generation of kids reduce their college debt can get us going in the right direction again.