What a mess. If Karl Marx reappeared from the dead, were asked how best to ruin incentives behind capitalism, disrupt and demoralize America, retrain young Americans to forget the lessons of greatness, how best to seed Communism, he could not do better than Biden. Here is the latest.
The Biden White House is preparing to “forgive student loans,” at a level between $10,000 and $50,000, but only if loans were not to be a doctor’s or lawyer’s, and not if the recipient worked up to $150,000 income. Biden already canceled student debts for those with disabilities, as well as deferred payments during COVID.
As someone who came from nothing and borrowed under federal, state, and private sector bank options to finance an undergraduate and legal education, someone who carried hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for decades until it was all paid off, this pandering – vote buying binge – is a mistake.
Worse than a mistake, it undermines the American Dream – what it means to dream of being a doctor, lawyer, nurse, pilot, educator, scientist, architect, veterinarian, military officer, priest, businesswomen, or political leader, then to dare to invest in yourself, and finally to have the self-respect, personal responsibility, and honor to work hard, finally repaying what you and others trusted you would repay.
Biden throws all that away. The idea of giving away “free” money – incidentally earned by others’ hard work, paid for in taxes, that’s not Biden’s money to give away – undermines the core values, life lessons, historic expectations, and goodness of the American experience itself. Follow me.
By allowing kids to dream, then making real their dreams by offering loans – a means by which they can invest in their own education and future, we do a great service. We empower the dream. By setting the expectation that hard work in college and beyond is required to pay back the loan, we incentivize hard work, self-worth, self-respect, and self-accomplishment.
When the government makes “free” all that money – either ahead of time or by loan forgiveness, the student who would highly value the education as his or her own doing, the product of personal risk-taking, resolve, hard work, and a point of pride, ends up a recipient of educational welfare.
Put differently, rather than feeling satisfaction and accomplishment in dreaming, daring, working, earning, and repaying the debt that made the dream theirs, they become part of a long hand-out line, a conveyer belt of entitlement, part of federal largess that makes everything easier.
Worse is the process of having to borrow, to account for those funds, to measure the expenditure, to squeeze as much learning from every dollar spent, then timely and properly learn fiscal and individual responsibility by paying these monies back – over time – is all lost.
The Federal Government becomes a helicopter parent, sweeping in to relieve the student or worker of responsibility – and in this way failing the student or worker, by doing for them that which they had agreed to do for themselves, and what they had planned to learn from by doing.
Is free money alluring? Yes. But was America built on free money or teaching each generation to dream, believe, take risks, work hard, and follow through?
And if one slips, fails, misses payments, must learn to work out problems, is perhaps forced to make choices, downsize, reorient, or become resilient to achieve that dream, is that bad?
Protections of all sorts already exist: deferred interest, consolidation options, extended repayments, lower interest, public service waivers, and even bankruptcy protection.
Like most Americans of his day, and most today as well, Democratic President Harry Truman was proud to be a risk taker, felt a sense of honor in hard work and made few excuses. Yet the future president also knew failure and resilience and what it meant to be hit hard and recover. He faced bankruptcy and recovered.
Today, the options for managing debt are enormous, and post-COVID even higher than before. The life lessons in ownership, self-confidence, and self-reliance taught by regular debt payment, accountability, follow-through, and a sense of ordered advancement are as real today as they ever were – arguably more important today, as excuses for not being accountable seem to proliferate.
For the Federal Government to imagine that a blanket forgiveness of student debt is somehow a public good that trumps life lessons in borrowing, repayment, and advancing one’s dreams is myopic. Free money sounds good now, but is a politically opportunistic approach to public good, one that elevates dependence on government over learned lessons, the sort that never comes painless.
Notably, the idea that only those in lower paid jobs deserve this forgiveness is also insulting to those who dream big, work hard, and throw themselves at higher mountains and steeper slopes, making them somehow less deserving of this questionable public good.
Moreover, the idea that dreams should be downsized, that the same kind of relief would not be given to those who hope to save lives, deliver justice, strive for more years to learn to enhance themselves and society – by working to become successful doctors and lawyers, is equally insulting and runs down the American Dream as envisioned by those who aim high.
So, while Biden and Congressional Democrats seem to be on a fiscal bender, an endless spending binge creating greater dependence on the Federal Government at every turn, spending money not theirs on social justice whims, angling to buy votes from whoever will accept their Turkish Delight, it is wrong.
Individual responsibility, fiscal management, aligning dreams, daring, and work to complete the circle, producing individual and societal accomplishment generation after generation is not about giving away free money or about buying votes, but about opening the opportunity for all to get a good education – and upon paying back what they willingly invested in themselves, feeling that salutary sense of success.
Biden’s college and legal education was paid for him, and the rest of his wealth came from the American taxpayer. Perhaps that is why he finds this lesson so hard to absorb. For many, it is simply a life lesson.