Commentary
Remember 1773’s Boston Tea Party and “taxation without representation” that led to the American Revolution and our ultimate separation from Britain?
I imagine you do, but perhaps not if you are one of our younger readers and all you were being taught in one of our woke schools that skin color and gender identity were far more important than reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Nevertheless, Joe Biden—quite possibly, even likely, illegally and certainly as the most obvious kind of vote grubbing—has gone one (or multiple times) up on King George in the “taxation without representation” department with his student loan forgiveness, partial though it may be.
Consider this: The gullible poor slob (aka good citizen), whether parent or graduate, who has been paying or has fully paid his/her student loan is being asked to pay for someone else’s, once again through taxes, even though the recipient of this largesse may be less needy than the benighted taxpayer.
He or she is paying twice, rather like the estate tax but worse because it taking the money of yet more people that can ill afford it.
How much will this loan forgiveness cost all of us taxpayers? Estimates vary, of course. The other day Penn Wharton put it at $300 billion after 10 years. That translates to $2,000 per taxpayer, according to the National Review.
But those are not the most recent figures. Fox Business on Aug. 25 is estimating between $440 and $600 billion over the same time frame. Something called the Committee for a Responsible Budget has now put it at $500 billion.
In most of our experiences, these estimates tend to go up, often also in multiples, so no one knows what it will actually cost, but we can be sure it’s a stupendous amount.
Driving home from my early morning stint on the Tennessee Star Report today, I heard Glenn Beck—who immediately follows on the same station to his national audience—mention ever more disturbing numbers, comparing the expenditure to the annual cost of the U. S. Military and to the gross national product of over a hundred countries.
All this at a time when our national debt is rising exponentially, inflation (with the temporary exception of heavily-managed gas prices) is doing the same, and the Fed is working overtime to fight these trends through rapidly increasing interest rates.
And yet the man in the White House is taking us all in the opposite direction for a few votes that might not really be there, especially if the Republicans wake up, as opposed to being woke, and communicate well to the public. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) has made a good start at a Senate hearing.
More, please, and as forcefully as possible—not just at hearings for the C-SPAN crowd, but everywhere for everyone.
Messaging, with exceptions (notably Trump and DeSantis), has been a weakness for Republicans, especially with the quondam-left’s stranglehold on mainstream media.
This relates interestingly to the larger higher education discussion. For the last year or so, I have been conducting a private—admittedly random and without concrete statistical value—survey of liberals and progressives to ask them whether they knew Biden had plagiarized (rather extensively at that) in law school, of all places.
Only one of seven or eight did!
When I informed the others about the plagiarism and its extent (he lifted an entire legal brief and claimed it as his own), repeated several times with Neil Kinnock and others (when he lifted their speeches), I watched as ears seemed to close and eyes grew unfocused. Some even looked away as if overcome by a sudden cognitive disorder, while trying to figure out how to walk away or change the subject. Such is communication in our times.
Which makes me wonder if Biden really respects education, whether he sees it as any more than just a road to getting votes, just as he saw a law degree as something for getting a job or getting into politics, but not as something enshrining, or even recognizing your belief in, the rule of law this country was founded on.
He clearly is acting lawlessly against the separation of powers in our Constitution in many areas—trampling on it really—whether at his own behest or that of others.
Anyway, I hope and actually suspect that this loan forgiveness will backfire.
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