The Morning Rant: Let’s Advance Conservative Goals With “Student Loan Forgiveness”

Student loan repayment is not going to come back as it was before Covid. That offends my principles, but it’s a fact. Now the challenge for us conservatives is to stop the Higher Education Industrial Complex from creating additional debt that will be foisted onto taxpayers. This is also a great opportunity to inflict some pain on the university cartel that is so hostile to normal Americans.

Some quick background - it was in March of 2020 that President Trump waved his magic wand and announced a 60-day suspension of payments and interest-accrual on federal student loans, due to Covid. It’s now more than two years later and that “payment pause” has effectively become permanent. Payment deferrals were most recently scheduled to expire on May 1, but in early April President Biden extended the pause for another four months, until 8/31/2022.

With Biden (or his handlers) believing that debt forgiveness will mitigate the election wipeout facing Democrats in November 2022, they are itching to make a move.

Biden administration signals a decision on student loan forgiveness could come soon [CNBC – 4/27/2022]

“Not a single person in this country has paid a dime on federal student loans since the president took office,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at Monday’s press briefing, referring to the suspension of interest on the debt. She went on to say that President Joe Biden “would make a decision about any cancellation of student debt before the conclusion of that pause on student loans.”

So what can be done? Above all else, make the colleges and universities pay for it. They pushed the bad debt on those young college students, and most of the money flowed to the universities.

The colleges HAVE a lot of money.

Let’s embrace the idea that colleges and universities exploited naïve teenagers, and propose partial debt forgiveness funded by the universities’ mountains of cash.

There is going to be forgiveness of some sort, so let’s lead the charge so that we achieve some of our goals, including:

• Re-start debt repayment! Biden is never going to stop extending the payment pauses as things stand now. (Which makes me ponder a question for another day, is the part-time employee shortage at restaurants and retail establishments partially related to young Americans not having to repay their student loan debts?)

• Make the universities pay, not the taxpayers.

• Going forward, put 100% of the risk of any new student loan debt on the universities those students attend.

• Ensure that the ruling-class demographic still repays most of their debt.

• $0 forgiveness for graduate programs.

Over 50% of student debt is held by those who took out the debt for post-graduate degrees. Those borrowers can re-pay their own debt. They not only have the means, but they were not naïve teenagers when they took on all that debt to keep going to school. And if they took on all that debt to get a graduate degree that doesn’t result in a job that can re-pay their debts, they can always get a 2nd job.

If we play this student loan forgiveness situation smartly, perhaps capping forgiveness at $10,000 and only for undergraduate debt, the credentialed professionals will still have to repay most of their debt, the universities will take a financial hit, and the gusher of student-loan cash going to colleges gets permanently cut off. That is a much more desirable option than all debt being forgiven and being paid by taxpayers, with no structural changes, while we conservatives stand on the sidelines talking about our principles.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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