I'm always left with the same feeling. Folks opposed to things like student loan debt relief are sailing on the good ship "I Got Mine.". They are already all set, so why be concerned about others? I find it a commentary on the selfishness of current society.
Great article Thom. After looting the treasury since the JFK assassination with right wing failed policies the last 60 years, like the trickle down, free trade, unfunded wars, capitalist healthcare, union busting immigrant labor, bank bailouts, interest on the national debt, bloated military budgets and much more. After stealing about 100 trillion dollars, now they want the poor to suffer while they take all of their social spending money and it looks like exterminate them. While they are doing that, they want to bring more babies into the world under the charade of "pro life", so they can replace all the ones that they grind up. That is the capitalist billionaires utopia! They will lie constantly until they get control of the treasury just to get elected. Once in power, the fascist will just get rid of anyone who opposes being abused which is about 90% of Americans who make under $150,000 a year.
Every good and honorable offer to assist people in endeavors to get a good education, help the ecosystem , or just working people in general are shut down . Medicaid expansion in the poorest Republican states, refused, child care assistance in same Red states , refused.
Assistance of any kind to needy Americans , refused.
Assistance to the defense of our Allies , refused.
This authoritarian thing everyone’s worried about is here now.
It’s the Republicans brand.
It’s their loyalty to Putin via Trump. And it’s not going to end well .
You cannot shame these Magats into doing what’s right. They have no conscience . It’s been screened out over the decades since Reagan boldly told the once ‘ middle class’ to “ tighten their belts “ , while giving massive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
It’s gone on ever since . More and more boldly , more destructively.
We’ve seen the middle class evicted by their policies, education is inferior , fewer people and many fewer minorities are being educated .
This is not an accident . This is by design .
Medical care is inferior . It’s largely corporate now .
Insurance companies are getting wealthier every year and the patients owe much more to their providers. Scams are legal.
Congress is largely non functional . They are pretty terrible at investigating , because they investigate people that have done no wrong . But when it comes time to assist our allies, which we are obligated as a country to do . They take their direction from the rapacious invader, Putin , via Trump the unstable.
Mike Johnson, who had visions prior to assisting in the attempted overthrow of free and fair election , January 6 , is apparently experiencing some twists in interpreting his job , which is to bring the Ukraine funding to a vote .
I just skimmed this post, so I may have missed you making this point. Republicans, back when they were actual conservatives, not radicals, were appalled by the student protests of the 1960's and 1970's. How dare they challenge their betters! And they smelled bad, too!
Never ones to sit back, they decided to defang students the way they defanged the Socialist Party, labor unions, etc. They made student loads immune from bankruptcy. They passed this law with bullshit arguments (which had no basis in fact, yes, they were doing it before Trump) and they got help from Joe Biden, then in the Senate. They also made federal student loans much easier to get so that massive debts could be run up and then, bam, the door slammed shut. Needing to pay off these inflated student loans, students had to buckle down and not rock the boat as they needed their jobs desperately.
This is the real reason the GOP doesn't want student debt relief . . .they like it just the way things are. For the same reasons they like high unemployment . . . it makes workers pliable to their demands.
If one owes many thousands in student loan debt, which cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, then it keeps one toiling away at rotten jobs at paltry wages. What a cruel scam!!!
I have three daughters, who are college educated who are in debt, and my wife, and I also spent an enormous amount of money participating in their educations. The cost of education has saddled my daughters with enough debt that they are in their 30s and have said to me they will not most likely never purchase a house. They do not want to have children because of the cost either. The amount of money my wife and I had to put out also towards their education has inhibited our retirement plans as well. I’m not complaining I’m just explaining that the cost of education is a huge price for the American family. Education the population is something that helps the whole country. It’s good economics. Saddling the population with that price tag is bad economics.
I was flabbergasted after reading this. Seems like I learn something new every year of the evils of Ronald Reagan's administration. First it was his ghastly Trickle-UP economics now this!! At least now I have some ammunition to use when people start griping about Biden trying to buy Votes. It truly is good economic policy. Thank you Thom for your wonderful work!! Love it!! ❤️🇺🇸💙
P.S. I'm buying your Book too. Can't wait to read it.
In the rural area where I live, deep red, my read is that in every group gathered in every place the conversation is a whine fest. Whining is the go to. If student loan forgiveness comes up every whiner agrees. "They didn't do that for me!"
The whining points have been in the Kool-aid since Thom and I were told to love it or leave it.
Selfishness and lack of foresight is why Republicans oppose student loan forgiveness and almost every other investment we might make together.
It is clear that the Repubs leadership want the middle class to be poorer and as few as possible. They just do not want wealth for all. The billionaire class requires the many poor in order to maximize the number of billionaires. A large middle class wealthy enough makes being a billionaire nearly impossible.
The Republicans know that Americans have a short term memory and have been using that knowledge for as long as I can remember to pound Democrats at the ballot box. It was Republicans who killed the interest rate deduction in the 1980's (does anyone but me remember when you could deduct credit card interest, car loan interest, etc from your taxes?) Once we the people became addicted to credit cards and buying things on credit, versus lay a way and revolving credit, the Republicans under Reagan killed the interest rate deduction. Under Trump they killed the Mortgage interest deduction, which didn't affect most Republican voters anyway, because they filed the short form 1040, and those who were landlords, even if only one tenant, filed the long form and still took the mortgage interest deduction as a business expense.
They do this time and again, because it is mostly Democrats who take the hit. I don't know the stats, but my guess is that it is mostly Democrats who send their kids to college, and mostly middle class, and people of color, who have to rely on student loans.
So nixing student loan forgiveness is shoving it to the Democrats and people of color, and currying favor with white blue collar voters who look down on" coastal elites"
Rural America holds intellectuals (educated) Americans in disdain, and Republicans know that if a person is educated they are less likely to vote Republican.
Reagan's contempt for educating America launched a landslide that today continues to negatively evolve. His audience was, is, peopled strongly by evangelical zealots who decry vibrant intellectual life force. They shake their Bible against all scientific and intellectual certainty, claiming the Bible can claim dominion over all their hate-based rejections, their resentments born of their insecurities, their adamantly defended ignorance. The hubris staggers all sane rationality. The snowball thrown downhill by Reagan has today resulted in the assault within our schools, removal of books in school libraries (bonfire book burnings). Are concerned educators and school board personnel fighting back? Mostly they are walking away, quitting. I'm one county in Florida, dictionaries were removed because they contained objectional words! Truth is, Reagan's snowball has grown exponentially. They are unquestionably winning.
Republicans hate when Biden gets any wins. They were happy when he couldn't relieve college debt, and it looked like young people would be upset that he wasn't doing what he promised. They need to spew out as much propaganda as possible.
The best recent arguments other than a few of the "buying votes", were cutting government revenue (adding to the deficit) and increasing demand (people have money to spend) which could cause more inflation. People often argue that taxpayers are footing the bill and not getting their own debt relief. And yes, there are the people that paid theirs off and are not happy to help others (and call into your radio program). (Not my takes but what I hear)
You do a fantastic job of breaking this down in a way that I never can find with all of the arguments together. I had been piecing together the pros and cons for 8 years and had been a little conflicted at times. I went to state colleges in the 90s and early 2000s and received quite a bit of grant money. I ended up with $30K in loans (that I refinanced from 10 to 20 years with a good interest rate), and I assumed that I was going to make good money to pay it off. I assumed that was just the way that it was. Eventually, I thought that I qualified for debt forgiveness after working over 10 years for a state government on a plan put in by Bush. I found out my old loans didn't qualify as they weren't the right type. A few years later they changed some rules because very few were meeting the criteria. I went from potentially having $13K forgiven to actually getting $6K relieved a few years ago. I didn't tell anyone including my wife, because it seemed so controversial.
Hit it outta the park. 2 points Id like to expand upon. Yes all those educated on GI Bill (including my Dad) helped build the middle class. As important as their near free college/advanced degrees was the huge expansion of public sector employment. That’s where the jobs are for the most educated among us … especially in the 50s & 60s. School systems … need college educated workers. So too all the highway building & planning departments. For women with college & post secondary degrees public sector employs 3 of 5. So shrinking government disproportionately unemploys or underemploys college grads, women & PoC.
It’s not the banks who make the most offa student loans. It’s the loan sharks … Sallie Mae & the others who are wholly unregulated, able to capitalize all those late fees, re-registration fees, and rewrite the terms of loans on a whim … they just .. without your signature or prior consent … generate a new loan document at a new (higher) interest rate & with a new principal amount.
That’s why of the trillion dollars of student loan debt, less than half that was actually borrowed.
If public education is not free and available to all Americans equally, it is demoralizing and damaging to the society. My U of Illinois Journalism education in the 60's had tuition of $270 annually. We worked outside jobs to pay for books, food and housing. I earned an Emmy for innovation in the TV industry. How else would that tech evolution have occurred if higher education was overpriced and thus unavailable to me?
Thom: Thanks for this educational history lesson on the politics of our country. The greatest impression it made on me was the recognition that today’s political debacle could perhaps have been avoided had the wisdom in this essay been understood & used to fight all the erroneous Republican steps that have fomented today’s political problems. I know your focus was on student debt & why forgiveness of it is not a bad thing, but the fact is it’s not the only area where unwillingness to see potential long-range bad effects was practiced & took us to tough, untenable circumstances. For example, we ignored Newt Gingrich’s promise to lead us to a one-party (fascist) nation & we now live in an era where one party effectively blocks every decent effort to advance our nation’s well-being (like student debt forgiveness). Or the GOP efforts to make Nixon a king with total power; we paid more attention to the fact that Nixon was a crook than to the monarch-making reasons he was being groomed for dictatorship, a clear precursor to the fascist movement we see today. Of course, it really doesn’t matter now since there’s apparently little we are going to do about it beyond hoping for a positive outcome in the 2024 election. Hindsight is, indeed, 20-20, insightful but useless in changing the course of history. A fascist GOP has been developing for decades & we are now paying the price for ignoring it. Student debt forgiveness is only one place where Republicans are causing & will continue to cause trouble.
I'm always left with the same feeling. Folks opposed to things like student loan debt relief are sailing on the good ship "I Got Mine.". They are already all set, so why be concerned about others? I find it a commentary on the selfishness of current society.
Great article Thom. After looting the treasury since the JFK assassination with right wing failed policies the last 60 years, like the trickle down, free trade, unfunded wars, capitalist healthcare, union busting immigrant labor, bank bailouts, interest on the national debt, bloated military budgets and much more. After stealing about 100 trillion dollars, now they want the poor to suffer while they take all of their social spending money and it looks like exterminate them. While they are doing that, they want to bring more babies into the world under the charade of "pro life", so they can replace all the ones that they grind up. That is the capitalist billionaires utopia! They will lie constantly until they get control of the treasury just to get elected. Once in power, the fascist will just get rid of anyone who opposes being abused which is about 90% of Americans who make under $150,000 a year.
Republicans are appallingly destructive.
Every good and honorable offer to assist people in endeavors to get a good education, help the ecosystem , or just working people in general are shut down . Medicaid expansion in the poorest Republican states, refused, child care assistance in same Red states , refused.
Assistance of any kind to needy Americans , refused.
Assistance to the defense of our Allies , refused.
This authoritarian thing everyone’s worried about is here now.
It’s the Republicans brand.
It’s their loyalty to Putin via Trump. And it’s not going to end well .
You cannot shame these Magats into doing what’s right. They have no conscience . It’s been screened out over the decades since Reagan boldly told the once ‘ middle class’ to “ tighten their belts “ , while giving massive tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
It’s gone on ever since . More and more boldly , more destructively.
We’ve seen the middle class evicted by their policies, education is inferior , fewer people and many fewer minorities are being educated .
This is not an accident . This is by design .
Medical care is inferior . It’s largely corporate now .
Insurance companies are getting wealthier every year and the patients owe much more to their providers. Scams are legal.
Congress is largely non functional . They are pretty terrible at investigating , because they investigate people that have done no wrong . But when it comes time to assist our allies, which we are obligated as a country to do . They take their direction from the rapacious invader, Putin , via Trump the unstable.
Mike Johnson, who had visions prior to assisting in the attempted overthrow of free and fair election , January 6 , is apparently experiencing some twists in interpreting his job , which is to bring the Ukraine funding to a vote .
I just skimmed this post, so I may have missed you making this point. Republicans, back when they were actual conservatives, not radicals, were appalled by the student protests of the 1960's and 1970's. How dare they challenge their betters! And they smelled bad, too!
Never ones to sit back, they decided to defang students the way they defanged the Socialist Party, labor unions, etc. They made student loads immune from bankruptcy. They passed this law with bullshit arguments (which had no basis in fact, yes, they were doing it before Trump) and they got help from Joe Biden, then in the Senate. They also made federal student loans much easier to get so that massive debts could be run up and then, bam, the door slammed shut. Needing to pay off these inflated student loans, students had to buckle down and not rock the boat as they needed their jobs desperately.
This is the real reason the GOP doesn't want student debt relief . . .they like it just the way things are. For the same reasons they like high unemployment . . . it makes workers pliable to their demands.
If one owes many thousands in student loan debt, which cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, then it keeps one toiling away at rotten jobs at paltry wages. What a cruel scam!!!
I have three daughters, who are college educated who are in debt, and my wife, and I also spent an enormous amount of money participating in their educations. The cost of education has saddled my daughters with enough debt that they are in their 30s and have said to me they will not most likely never purchase a house. They do not want to have children because of the cost either. The amount of money my wife and I had to put out also towards their education has inhibited our retirement plans as well. I’m not complaining I’m just explaining that the cost of education is a huge price for the American family. Education the population is something that helps the whole country. It’s good economics. Saddling the population with that price tag is bad economics.
I was flabbergasted after reading this. Seems like I learn something new every year of the evils of Ronald Reagan's administration. First it was his ghastly Trickle-UP economics now this!! At least now I have some ammunition to use when people start griping about Biden trying to buy Votes. It truly is good economic policy. Thank you Thom for your wonderful work!! Love it!! ❤️🇺🇸💙
P.S. I'm buying your Book too. Can't wait to read it.
In the rural area where I live, deep red, my read is that in every group gathered in every place the conversation is a whine fest. Whining is the go to. If student loan forgiveness comes up every whiner agrees. "They didn't do that for me!"
The whining points have been in the Kool-aid since Thom and I were told to love it or leave it.
Selfishness and lack of foresight is why Republicans oppose student loan forgiveness and almost every other investment we might make together.
It is clear that the Repubs leadership want the middle class to be poorer and as few as possible. They just do not want wealth for all. The billionaire class requires the many poor in order to maximize the number of billionaires. A large middle class wealthy enough makes being a billionaire nearly impossible.
The Republicans know that Americans have a short term memory and have been using that knowledge for as long as I can remember to pound Democrats at the ballot box. It was Republicans who killed the interest rate deduction in the 1980's (does anyone but me remember when you could deduct credit card interest, car loan interest, etc from your taxes?) Once we the people became addicted to credit cards and buying things on credit, versus lay a way and revolving credit, the Republicans under Reagan killed the interest rate deduction. Under Trump they killed the Mortgage interest deduction, which didn't affect most Republican voters anyway, because they filed the short form 1040, and those who were landlords, even if only one tenant, filed the long form and still took the mortgage interest deduction as a business expense.
They do this time and again, because it is mostly Democrats who take the hit. I don't know the stats, but my guess is that it is mostly Democrats who send their kids to college, and mostly middle class, and people of color, who have to rely on student loans.
So nixing student loan forgiveness is shoving it to the Democrats and people of color, and currying favor with white blue collar voters who look down on" coastal elites"
Rural America holds intellectuals (educated) Americans in disdain, and Republicans know that if a person is educated they are less likely to vote Republican.
Reagan's contempt for educating America launched a landslide that today continues to negatively evolve. His audience was, is, peopled strongly by evangelical zealots who decry vibrant intellectual life force. They shake their Bible against all scientific and intellectual certainty, claiming the Bible can claim dominion over all their hate-based rejections, their resentments born of their insecurities, their adamantly defended ignorance. The hubris staggers all sane rationality. The snowball thrown downhill by Reagan has today resulted in the assault within our schools, removal of books in school libraries (bonfire book burnings). Are concerned educators and school board personnel fighting back? Mostly they are walking away, quitting. I'm one county in Florida, dictionaries were removed because they contained objectional words! Truth is, Reagan's snowball has grown exponentially. They are unquestionably winning.
Republicans hate when Biden gets any wins. They were happy when he couldn't relieve college debt, and it looked like young people would be upset that he wasn't doing what he promised. They need to spew out as much propaganda as possible.
The best recent arguments other than a few of the "buying votes", were cutting government revenue (adding to the deficit) and increasing demand (people have money to spend) which could cause more inflation. People often argue that taxpayers are footing the bill and not getting their own debt relief. And yes, there are the people that paid theirs off and are not happy to help others (and call into your radio program). (Not my takes but what I hear)
You do a fantastic job of breaking this down in a way that I never can find with all of the arguments together. I had been piecing together the pros and cons for 8 years and had been a little conflicted at times. I went to state colleges in the 90s and early 2000s and received quite a bit of grant money. I ended up with $30K in loans (that I refinanced from 10 to 20 years with a good interest rate), and I assumed that I was going to make good money to pay it off. I assumed that was just the way that it was. Eventually, I thought that I qualified for debt forgiveness after working over 10 years for a state government on a plan put in by Bush. I found out my old loans didn't qualify as they weren't the right type. A few years later they changed some rules because very few were meeting the criteria. I went from potentially having $13K forgiven to actually getting $6K relieved a few years ago. I didn't tell anyone including my wife, because it seemed so controversial.
Hit it outta the park. 2 points Id like to expand upon. Yes all those educated on GI Bill (including my Dad) helped build the middle class. As important as their near free college/advanced degrees was the huge expansion of public sector employment. That’s where the jobs are for the most educated among us … especially in the 50s & 60s. School systems … need college educated workers. So too all the highway building & planning departments. For women with college & post secondary degrees public sector employs 3 of 5. So shrinking government disproportionately unemploys or underemploys college grads, women & PoC.
It’s not the banks who make the most offa student loans. It’s the loan sharks … Sallie Mae & the others who are wholly unregulated, able to capitalize all those late fees, re-registration fees, and rewrite the terms of loans on a whim … they just .. without your signature or prior consent … generate a new loan document at a new (higher) interest rate & with a new principal amount.
That’s why of the trillion dollars of student loan debt, less than half that was actually borrowed.
If public education is not free and available to all Americans equally, it is demoralizing and damaging to the society. My U of Illinois Journalism education in the 60's had tuition of $270 annually. We worked outside jobs to pay for books, food and housing. I earned an Emmy for innovation in the TV industry. How else would that tech evolution have occurred if higher education was overpriced and thus unavailable to me?
Thom how do you respond to people who say “but loan forgiveness adds to our deficit?”
Thom: Thanks for this educational history lesson on the politics of our country. The greatest impression it made on me was the recognition that today’s political debacle could perhaps have been avoided had the wisdom in this essay been understood & used to fight all the erroneous Republican steps that have fomented today’s political problems. I know your focus was on student debt & why forgiveness of it is not a bad thing, but the fact is it’s not the only area where unwillingness to see potential long-range bad effects was practiced & took us to tough, untenable circumstances. For example, we ignored Newt Gingrich’s promise to lead us to a one-party (fascist) nation & we now live in an era where one party effectively blocks every decent effort to advance our nation’s well-being (like student debt forgiveness). Or the GOP efforts to make Nixon a king with total power; we paid more attention to the fact that Nixon was a crook than to the monarch-making reasons he was being groomed for dictatorship, a clear precursor to the fascist movement we see today. Of course, it really doesn’t matter now since there’s apparently little we are going to do about it beyond hoping for a positive outcome in the 2024 election. Hindsight is, indeed, 20-20, insightful but useless in changing the course of history. A fascist GOP has been developing for decades & we are now paying the price for ignoring it. Student debt forgiveness is only one place where Republicans are causing & will continue to cause trouble.