Tag Archives: student loan debt

Using Your Tax Dollars To Influence An Election

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This is an election year. When you consider everything that has gone on for the past four years, you realize that things were bound to get a little crazy. However, the craziness and dishonestly has reached levels very few of us ever realized they would reach.

On Thursday, Legal Insurrection posted the following headline:

Biden Admin to Use Tax Dollars to Pay College Students to Register Voters Ahead of 2024 Election

Does anyone want to guess the political leanings of college students?

The article reports:

The Biden administration is already facing accusations of trying to buy the votes of college student aged voters by ‘cancelling’ billions in student loan debt. Now they have announced that they will pay college students to register voters, and they’re doing this with tax dollars.

The corruption is right out in the open, for all to see.

The article quotes The Daily Caller:

Vice President Kamala Harris announced Tuesday that college students would be able to collect federally-funded work study for registering voters.

Harris’s announcement of the new policy was posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. The federal work-study program is intended to allow students to earn money for day-to-day expenses while at college, according to the Department of Education.

“We have been doing work to promote voter participation for students,” Harris said. “For example, we have under the Federal Work-Study program now allow students to get paid through Federal Work-Study to register people and to be non-partisan poll workers. As we know, this is important for a number of reasons. One, to engage our young leaders in this process and activate them in terms of their ability to strengthen our communities.”

Do you really think that college students are interested in registering conservative voters? Conservatives and patriots are going to have to come out to vote in very large numbers to overcome the cheating that the Democrats are already planning.

Is The U.S. Constitution Relevant In America?

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On February 27th, Issues and Insights posted an article about a recent statement by President Biden.

The article reports:

The Supreme Court told President Joe Biden that he didn’t have the authority to forgive student loan debt. But he did anyway, bragging that the Court “didn’t stop me.” So why do we even have a legislative branch and a high court if the president is going to make law as if he were a king?

Does Congress have the intestinal fortitude to insist that the President abide by the Constitution? Frankly, I doubt it.

The article continues:

It’s Biden’s party, and its activist media, that has been carping for years about losing “our democracy.” Yet when a Democratic president bypasses the checks and balances that are the backbone of our republic, the three co-equal branches framework of government that is intended to guard against descending into a dictatorship, they celebrate rather than condemn.

Maybe it’s because they care about the integrity of our system of government only when it’s making policies they want.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, struck down the Biden administration’s plan to cancel up to $400 billion in student loans, which it had announced in August 2022. In her concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that “when it comes to” national policy, “the Constitution gives Congress the reins — a point of context that no reasonable interpreter could ignore.”

But high court rulings apparently don’t apply when a Democratic president decides they don’t. Last week, the White House played the role of unreasonable interpreter and announced “$1.2 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 153,000 borrowers.”

“The Biden-Harris administration has now approved nearly $138 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 3.9 million borrowers through more than two dozen executive actions,” according to a White House fact sheet.

Biden acknowledged last week that “my MAGA Republican friends in the Congress, elected officials, and special interests stepped in and sued us,” and that “the Supreme Court blocked it.”

The government does not have the power to step between a lender and a borrower. That is a private contract and should not be interfered with by the government. How would you feel if the government stepped in and forgave your neighbor’s mortgage while requiring you to pay off your mortgage? That is what the Biden administration is trying to do.

Where The Money Is Actually Going

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On Friday, Zero Hedge reported the following:

President Joe Biden is heaping another $5 billion onto a $136 billion pile of taxpayer-funded student loan debt forgiveness, as one of his signature 2024 (vote buying) schemes heading into the 2024 election.

Not only has moral hazard been reduced to an academic concept, shouldn’t taxpayer funds be used to bail out poverty-stricken Americans before people with college degrees who signed their names to a contract for non-dischargeable debt? We digress.

Around 74,000 student loan borrowers will now see debt canceled as a result of administrative changes enacted by the US Department of Education in the latest round of relief – including borrowers enrolled in the government’s income-driven repayment and public service loan forgiveness programs, Bloomberg reports.

Each program requires at least a decade of payment or service to be eligible for relief. Mismanaged federal student-loan plans have left some borrowers without promised relief after making payments for as long as 25 years. -Bloomberg

“My administration is able to deliver relief to these borrowers – and millions more – because of fixes we made to broken student loan programs that were preventing borrowers from getting relief they were entitled to under the law,” Biden said in a Friday statement written by other people.

Of those receiving taxpayer-funded assistance, roughly 60% are taxpayer-funded “public servants” – so the snake continues to eat its tail. So, buying votes with voters’ money.

Since when is the federal government able to change the details of a contract mid-stream? Since this is essentially an expenditure, why is it coming from the Executive Branch? The House of Representatives is supposed to be in charge of spending. This should quickly be found unconstitutional by the courts, but I seriously doubt anyone will bring the case.

The Coming Whirlwind

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The Epoch Times posted an article today detailing President-elect Joe Biden’s plans for his first ten days in office.

The article reports:

A preview of the executive actions President-elect Joe Biden will take shortly after assuming the presidency shows that “the racial equity crisis” and the “climate crisis” are among his top four priorities for the first 10 days in office.

“We face four overlapping and compounding crises: the COVID-19 crisis, the resulting economic crisis, the climate crisis, and a racial equity crisis,” a Jan. 16 memo by incoming White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain states. “All of these crises demand urgent action.”

Klain noted that the executive actions will be “bold” but noted that “the legal theory behind them is well-founded.”

The article notes:

Last week, Biden introduced his legislative priorities for tackling the pandemic of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus. The proposed legislation includes an apparently unrelated mandate for a $15 federal minimum wage, which Congress has estimated will wipe out 1.3 million jobs. The president-elect plans to introduce his legislative priorities for a CCP virus recovery bill in the coming weeks.

On Inauguration Day, Biden will take roughly a dozen executive actions, including an order for extending a pause of federal student loan payments, rejoining the Paris climate accord, and canceling President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from nations posing a terror threat to the United States.

On the same day, the president-elect will impose a mask mandate on federal property and interstate travel. The mandate is part of Biden’s “100 Day Masking Challenge,” according to the memo. The list of actions on the first day also includes an extension on nationwide restrictions on evictions and foreclosures.

On Jan. 21, Biden’s second day in office, the president-elect “will sign a number of executive actions to move aggressively to change the course of the COVID-19 crisis and safely re-open schools and businesses, including by taking action to mitigate spread through expanding testing, protecting workers, and establishing clear public health standards,” the memo states.

So lets see. A $15 minimum wage will put many of the businesses not already closed by the coronavirus permanently out of business. It will also severely decrease the number of jobs available to people initially entering the workforce. It will hurt the economy. Rejoining the Paris climate accord will further cripple the American economy while allowing the Chinese economy to flourish. It will abolish a lot of manufacturing and carbon-related jobs in America. I should mention here that America has been reducing its carbon footprint in recent years due to an increased reliance on natural gas obtained through fracking. Fracking will be severely limited, and it is quite possible that under the Paris accord, America’s carbon footprint will grow–not shrink. Our energy independence is also at stake–posing a security threat as much as an economic threat.

Pausing student loans is an interesting concept. If those loans are forgiven, the taxpayers will be the ones actually paying them off. At that point you are asking a lot of people who didn’t go to college to pay the expenses of those who did. That is not only unfair–it is illogical.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. We are in for a bumpy ride.

 

Our Ancestors Understood Human Nature A Lot Better Than We Do

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From Vox June 23:

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s proposal to make college free in the United States just got bigger: He wants to erase all student debt too. All $1.6 trillion of it.

The Vermont senator will unveil the most ambitious higher education plan in the Democratic 2020 presidential primary so far on Monday. The proposal would make two- and four-year public and tribal colleges and universities tuition-free and debt-free, and erase the roughly $1.6 trillion in student loan debt currently owed in the US, paid for by a tax on Wall Street.

Currently, about 45 million Americans have student loans. This would cancel debt for all of them — regardless of their income or assets. That’s a notable difference from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s free college proposal, which also provides broad debt relief but caps it for households with incomes over $250,000.

Sanders is proposing funding streams to states, tribes, and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to allow them to eliminate undergraduate tuition and fees. The bill would also increase spending on work-study programs and build up federal grant programs for low-income students for additional costs related to getting an education, from housing and transportation to buying books.

The proposal would cost $2.2 trillion over 10 years, which Sanders says would be paid for with his Wall Street tax. He proposed a Wall Street speculation tax in 2016, which would raise small levies on buying and selling stocks, bonds, and derivatives; many experts estimate it could raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Sanders’s office cited progressive economist Robert Pollin’s projection that the tax would bring in $2.4 trillion in revenues over 10 years.

From The New York Post February 22nd:

Democratic presidential hopefuls Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren said they both support reparations for African-Americans affected by slavery.

Asked about the matter last week on the 105.1 FM show “Breakfast Club,” Harris agreed with the host that reparations are necessary to address problems of “inequities.”

“America has a history of 200 years of slavery. We had Jim Crow. We had legal segregation in America for a very long time,” she said on the radio show. “We have got to recognize, back to that earlier point, people aren’t starting out on the same base in terms of their ability to succeed and so we have got to recognize that and give people a lift up.”

From Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee (15 October 1747 – 5 January 1813), who obviously understood a lot more than all three of these Democrat candidates for President:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
― Alexander Fraser Tytler
We have a choice of where we will be on that timeline.

When Congress Becomes A Joke

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PJ Media posted an article today about some recent statements by Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

The article reports:

Waters is the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee — the committee that regulates the banks.

During a hearing examining the practices of some of the nation’s biggest banks, Waters complained to a panel of seven bank CEOs that there are more than 44 million Americans that owe … $1.56 trillion in student loan debt.”

She added, “Last year, one million student loan borrowers defaulted, which is on top of the one million borrowers who defaulted the year before.”

She then demanded to know what they intended to do about this massive problem. “What are you guys doing to help us with this student loan debt?” she asked. “Who would like to answer first? Mr. Monahan, big bank.”

I guess she wasn’t paying attention when the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (HCERA) which put the government in charge of all student loans. The band CEO’s she was questioning both stated that they had stopped making student loans long before 2010.

The article also states:

Waters then quickly changed the subject to small businesses.

The Obama administration put the federal government in charge of student lending in 2010, with the intention of saving taxpayer dollars by “cutting out the middleman,” as President Barack Obama put it.

According to the Washington Times, “student loan debt exploded from $154.9 billion in 2009 to $1.1 trillion at the end of 2017”  with current student debt “estimated at more than $1.5 trillion.”

Earlier in the hearing, Waters grilled the bank execs about their interactions with Russia.

This woman serves in Congress. She continues to be re-elected. That is beyond sad.

What Happens When Expectations Are Raised Too High?

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The Daily Caller posted an article today that illustrates the problem with teaching children to expect things they didn’t earn.

The article reports:

Nearly half of all America’s college students have deluded themselves into believing that the federal government will graciously forgive their student loans despite the fact that the federal government forgives only a very low percentage of student loans.

LendEDU, a student loan marketplace website, documented this startling disparity between belief and reality in a nationwide survey of 500 students currently attending America’s colleges and universities, reports the New York Post.

The survey shows that 49.8 percent of the students surveyed think they will be eligible for federal student loan forgiveness.

In reality, only about 10 percent of all college graduates will ever see any portion of their student loans forgiven under current loan forgiveness law.

Under President Obama, the government took over the student loan program in 2010.

Yesterday Fox Business reported:

According to the New York Federal Reserve, U.S. student loan debt has soared to $1.3 trillion becoming the second highest consumer debt category, more than both credit cards and auto loans.

In an exclusive interview with FOX Business’ Liz Claman, Washington College President and former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Chair Sheila Bair said the student loan debt crisis could spark next financial crisis, since it is a “tremendous drag” on the U.S. economy.

During the financial crisis of 2008–09, excessive mortgage debt collapsed consumer spending as more families opted to pay off debt. Bair said the same dynamic could be seen if the student debt bubble bursts.

When the housing bubble burst, there were assets that could be sold (although at a loss). There will be no assets to sell if the student debt bubble bursts–a lot of the people with the debt are living in their parent’s basements.

The Daily Caller reports:

Of the $1.31 trillion in outstanding student debt, some $31 billion, is “seriously delinquent,” meaning the debtors are at least 90 days past their payment dates.

Well known economist Milton Friedman is credited with saying, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” I think it’s time to get the government out of the student loan business and give that business to the banks. Banks are better judges of how to lend money and how to get paid back. I have a strong suspicion that the taxpayers may get stuck holding the bag on this one.