Medical Bills, Student Loans, Broken Lives: Reparations for a Rigged Economy?

Forty-four years of plunder, and now Trump wants to garnish your wages to finish the job…

Louise’s Daily Song today is particularly poignant:

Big news from the Trump regime: Next week, 1.8 million student loan borrowers who are currently in default will be under attack by our own government, according to billionaire, former wrestling executive, and now Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and documented by the folks at How We Fight Back.

They note that McMahon bragged about her plans to go after financially distressed Americans in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on April 21:

“On May 5, we will begin the process of moving roughly 1.8 million borrowers into repayment plans and restart collections of loans in default. Borrowers who don’t make payments on time will see their credit scores go down, and in some cases their wages automatically garnished,” McMahon wrote.

Which raises the vital question: Is it time to lay down a claim for reparations for student loan borrowers and health insurance payers?

The bankers and insurance companies should pay for their gutting of our middle class. The American people didn’t want or ask for these three to four trillions in debt: it was dumped on them by Republicans since Reagan.

Earlier this week a completely deranged right-winger called into my radio/TV program and launched into a breathless rant about how, if Biden’s forgiving billions in student loans was to stand (Trump is challenging some of them), then he wanted a check from the government to repay the tuition loan he’d already paid off.

His tirade against Biden’s program to eliminate student debt (which was largely gutted by six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) recycled that tired GOP talking point:

“It’s not fair that I had to pay for my education and these people are going to get theirs for free.”

I called him out for what was clearly right-wing-propaganda-poisoning — I even asked if he was tripping or on drugs — but there’s a deeper truth buried in his misguided outrage, a truth that never crossed his Fox-addled mind.

That truth? Both crippling student debt and trillions in medical debt simply don’t exist in any other advanced democracy on this planet, from Europe to Canada to Costa Rica.

Every other developed nation ensures their citizens have affordable access to medical care and education. In more than half of the world’s democracies, healthcare is virtually free, and students get stipends to attend college.

They do this because it’s the best thing for democracy and their economies.

We learned from our experience with the G.I. Bill that every dollar invested in college education for young people produces a seven-dollar return in additional lifetime tax revenue and strengthens the nation’s intellectual and social infrastructure.

Similarly, when Toyota built a factory in Canada instead of the United States, they did so because it would save them thousands of dollars per car built in healthcare expenses; stupidly expensive health insurance and the resulting healthcare debt makes us uncompetitive and suppresses opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Both healthcare and education used to be cheap here in America before the Reagan Revolution, when Republicans sold their souls to the highest corporate bidders, taking legalized bribes disguised as “campaign contributions” from banks, fossil fuel companies, hospitals, drug companies, and insurance giants in exchange for policies that have bled working Americans dry for two generations now.

When I went to college in the mid-1960s, I paid tuition, rent, and board with part-time weekend jobs at Bob’s Big Boy restaurant and the Esso station across the street on Towbridge Road in East Lansing. I washed dishes and pumped gas, and still had money left for a used car and dining out. Try doing that today!

In the 1970s, when the business my partner Terry O’Connor and I had started hit 18 employees, we gave them all free health insurance. Why? Because we could afford it back then: Michigan — like most states prior to the Reagan Revolution — required both hospitals and health insurance companies to operate as non-profit corporations. Revolutionary concept, right?

Then Reagan cut his corrupt deals with the health insurance and banking industries, guaranteeing American families would be financially crushed by healthcare costs while bankers raked in billions from desperate student borrowers. Billions they could skim a few percent off the top from and recycle — with the blessing of 5 corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — as “campaign donations” and gifts to GOP candidates.

Since then, Republican administrations have doubled down on these schemes. George W. Bush made student loans impossible to discharge through bankruptcy (creating the most profitable product bankers have ever seen) and kicked off Medicare’s privatization with his Medicare Advantage scam.

These assaults on America’s working class are exactly why over $50 trillion has been looted from middle-class families and funneled into the money bins and offshore accounts of the morbidly rich since Reagan’s 1981 inauguration.

It’s time to not only fix this rigged system but make things right with the American people. In other words, it’s time for reparations for the most obvious victims of Reaganism.

Insurance and banking industries have gorged themselves on hundreds of billions — likely trillions — in profits from these twin crimes against America’s working people. These obscene profits don’t exist in any other democracy on Earth and never should have been extracted from us over these 44 years of plunder.

So beyond implementing Medicare For All and free college — programs that would actually save our government money and make America more competitive — we need mechanisms to claw back those ill-gotten gains from these predatory industries.

Like any reparations, implementation is complex:

— Should insurance and banking industries issue stock to Americans drowning in student or medical debt?
— Should their overpaid executives surrender the billions they’ve stolen from us?
— Should we break up these behemoths, sell them off, and use the proceeds to make Americans whole?
— Do we need “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” to facilitate this and get confessions from these industries whose practices have demonstrably led to the deaths of many Americans and destroyed people’s lives?

There must be a way to balance these scales of justice.

Americans are finally waking up to how thoroughly we’ve been screwed by Reagan’s neoliberal policies, and targeted by billionaires and specific industries working hand-in-glove with Republicans for decades.

For example, the fossil fuel industry should, at minimum, be funding FEMA’s efforts to rebuild communities shattered by the climate chaos they’ve caused and denied. Instead, Musk and Trump are trying to gut FEMA, leaving Americans even further screwed.

Remember how homes that in 1960 cost twice an annual salary now cost ten times the median income? That’s because we let Wall Street turn housing into an investment vehicle.

Remember when drugs were affordable before Reagan stopped enforcing the antitrust laws in 1983 and the resulting Big Pharma monopolies started buying politicians?

Remember when credit card interest rates were capped at 10% before banks captured both Nixon and the Supreme Court?

The damage of Reaganism has been widespread and extensive, and student and medical debt — those twin abominations — are the perfect place to start making things right.

Americans have been bled dry for too long; it’s time to rip these parasites off our backs and rejoin the civilized world. And for them to make it right with the rest of us.

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
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