No, US Taxpayers Don’t Owe You Student Loan Debt Forgiveness
This week “President” Joe Biden forgave $10,000 worth of student loan debt for those making less than $150,000 a year. More specifically, among other actions, the “Department of Education will provide up to $20,000 in debt cancellation to Pell Grant recipients with loans held by the Department of Education, and up to $10,000 in debt cancellation to non-Pell Grant recipients.” Magic does exist! Because government has so much free money lying around, right?
Even a guest on leftist CNN noted that this move will make inflation worse. But I want to look at an even more fundamental problem here—a problem shared by many college graduates as well as Democrat politicians. On the one hand, college is way too expensive, and there are far too many jobs that unnecessarily require college degrees (journalism, for instance); many such jobs were provably performed better before most of their practitioners went to college. That is true, but the American taxpayer still does not owe you student loan debt forgiveness.
According to the US Census Bureau, in 2021 about 38% of the US population had bachelor’s degrees, with about 14% of those having an advanced degree as well. That means that a significant percentage of Americans, about 62%, do not have four-year college degrees (about 10% had an associate degree). So those who want student loan forgiveness are demanding that the majority of Americans, who do not have access to many jobs (a lot of them higher paying) because they do not have college degrees, should pay for the degrees of a privileged minority of Americans whose degrees allowed them special access and more money that others do not have. This is flat out a tyranny of the privileged minority over the majority.
The elites are calling themselves victims in order to scam ordinary, hard-working Americans out of money. And usually for degrees that are pretty worthless—let’s face it, most college graduates nowadays are stupider and less skilled coming out of college than going into it. In fact, as of 2021, Washington, D.C. had the highest percentage of college degree holders in America. I think that statistic speaks for itself.
Again, I don’t want to characterize every American who likes the idea of student loan forgiveness as a villain. There are those who may have gotten a degree because they could not get the job they wanted without one, and perhaps were forced to take on debt, maybe debt that was not really worth the education they got. I agree that college is overpriced, but the solution is for government to get out of college, because that is what made it so expensive to begin with. After all, college is already heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, and it’s clearly not bringing down prices (evidence indicates it even did the opposite). The solution is not to pretend that loan debt has just evaporated at the wave of a magic wand. Debts have to be paid. The money has to come from somewhere.
I don’t want to be overly hyperbolic, but the basic definition of slavery is that someone is forced to provide labor for another without choice. Forcing Americans to pay out of their salaries for other people’s college seems to be bordering dangerously on slavery. And this at a time when Americans’ Real Wages have been falling for 16 months straight. Why should the waiter making minimum wage or the struggling restaurant owner be made to pay for John Doe (he/them) to get his degree in gender studies?
That’s injustice. There’s no other word for it.