Debt Relief

THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com. Thomas McArdle

Reverse Robin Hood

Biden’s student debt relief is undeniably a vote-buying operation

The democratic party has finally confirmed beyond any further debate that it’s the party of the rich.

Democrats already insulted the intelligence of the American people with an inflationary tax-and-spend monstrosity they had the audacity and mendacity to call the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which the geniuses at National Public Radio say removes “a grand total of $660-ish billion out of the economy over the next 10 years, which is good to fight inflation.”

Imagine how low inflation would be if we shut down the whole economy! Stick around; we might live to see it.

But the all-year-long historically unpopular President Joe Biden, whom we’re told is now “winning,” followed this outrage with the announcement last week that he’s unilaterally–and constitutionally dubiously–taking hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars from hard-working Joe Sixpack deplorables to pay off the student debt of the smart elites who had the sense to go to college, grad school, law school, and medical school and who vote for Democrats, then realize only a sucker would pay his student loan balances off. In so doing, Democrats hope that the working class’s money will motivate the moneyed class to give thanks to the almighty government and vote for the party of the ever-providing teat this November in the mid-terms.

The lies are shameless. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona’s credibility is non-existent; as public schools graduate illiterates en masse, he believes that there’s an “overreliance on tests” and wants “NEA [public school teachers union] members at the table from the beginning to guide the work on assessments.” Now, Cardona is telling us that the Inflation Reduction Act and Biden’s student loan bailout together “really cancels itself out ... it offsets each other in terms of inflation.”

Let’s see if we’ve got this right. Having Washington spend $433 billion and increase taxes by $739 billion, enforced by 87,000 intrusive new IRS agents, will be offset by having the federal government spend as much as $600 billion taking on student debt that the students promised to repay. Government spending, artificially super-sized consumer spending that bloats demand above and beyond supply—are we now being told that these things no longer exacerbate inflation? Did some fearless Galileo, unknown until this month, appear on the scene and overturn a defective Ptolemaic misconception of the economic universe?

Former President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary and former President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council chief Larry Summers doesn’t think so, fearfully writing on Twitter: “Student loan debt relief is spending that raises demand and increases inflation. It consumes resources that could be better used helping those who did not, for whatever reason, have the chance to attend college. It will also tend to be inflationary by raising tuitions.”

Of course, colleges are going to surge their costs in reaction to what amounts to a massive federal subsidy for the purchase of their increasingly questionable wares—one result being less accessibility to college for those in more modest income families, the very antithesis of the American Dream. Another consequence will be the further division between blue and red voters, the elites and the deplorables, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-heads and Donald Trump’s MAGA voters.

Harvard’s Jason Furman, who was Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers chairman, isn’t buying the snake oil either.

“Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless,” Furman wrote on Twitter, as he methodically debunked the series of erroneous claims in the White House “fact sheet” on the debt forgiveness plan.

This is Robin Hood in reverse, an anti-Robin Hood who moonlights as an arsonist bent on burning and devaluing whatever cash the poor have left after his raid is complete. That Biden’s scheme is a vote-purchasing operation is undeniable; those with advanced degrees overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.

Still, it leads one to wonder whether the real mission of the Democratic Party is to propel us into a grave economic national emergency, perhaps a global one. When eminent left-of-center economists such as Summers and Furman have no doubt that Biden is toying with an inflation powder keg, when the White House and most congressional Democrats seem buoyed by the southern border being an international joke and a national security threat, and when they seem oblivious to Chinese and Russian expansionism and Iranian nuclear arms ambitions, maybe their wish is that in an all-out calamity, voters will see Big Government as the only thing to turn to.

After all, as thuggish ex-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel quipped: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

All the better if you can cause one.

This is Robin Hood in reverse, an anti-Robin Hood who moonlights as an arsonist bent on burning and devaluing whatever cash the poor have left after his raid is complete.