By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday,
February 22, 2024
Since the
summer of last year, Joe Biden has spent $130 billion transferring money from
Americans who did not take out loans to pay for college to Americans who did
take out loans to pay for college. Over the next few years, Biden intends to
spend an additional $345 billion in this manner. Question: How are we going to
pay for this perfidy?
Or,
rather: Who is going to pay for this? Obviously, the answer
can’t be “taxpayers.” Sure, in the short run, that’ll be how these transfers
work. But in the long run? After Biden is out of power? Presumably, we are not
to expect that the people who didn’t take out those loans and
spend them on a service that they received ought to be taxed to pay for those
who did? That would be absurd. So I’ll ask again: Where is the cash
going to come from? Are we going to claw the money back from the people who
were given the free ride? Are we going to take it from the universities
themselves — many of which have enormous, unassessed endowments? Are we going
to give a tax break to anyone who didn’t receive this largesse? All of these
options have their upsides and downsides. At least one of them must become law.
Why?
Because what President Biden has done here represents an extraordinary
violation of the social compact, that’s why. This isn’t alms for the poor; it’s
a brazen cash-grab by Joe Biden’s friends. Biden likes college graduates in a
way that he doesn’t like small-business owners, plumbers, or waitresses, so he
has decided to send the property of small-business owners, plumbers, and
waitresses to those college graduates. That’s it. That’s the whole game.
There’s no principle here; the debts owed by others remain untouched. There’s
no reform here; the education system remains exactly as it was before this
started. The game is exactly how it looks: Peter, general contractor, has been
robbed to pay Paul, Ph.D. It’s shameless class politics — and not in that dishonest
boy-made-good-from-Scranton way that Joe Biden likes to pretend. To the
victors, the spoils.
The
civic implications are also grotesque. On Twitter, Slate’s Mark
Joseph Stern says
that John Roberts blocked President Biden’s flagrantly illegal attempt
to conduct a massive one-time transfer because he wanted “anti-Biden leftists”
to “blame the president for their continued student debt.” But this is exactly
the wrong way around. Roberts blocked Biden’s order because, as everyone
— even Nancy Pelosi — knew, it was unconstitutional. It
is Biden who has been attracted to the rank politics of the
thing, having first taken the opportunity to demagogue the judiciary for having
had the temerity to do its job, and then having engaged in an attempt to make
Americans believe that he is bravely defying that judiciary’s order. “The
Supreme Court blocked it,” Biden said this week. “But that didn’t stop me.” Ah.
Already,
this behavior has become habitual. To spend $475 billion on the most privileged people in America could be regarded as
an aberration; to do it hot on the heels of our spending $275 billion on a
loan-pausing program for the very same people looks like an addiction. In the
coming years, that addiction must be broken, and restitution must be paid to
those it hurt. I am not usually of the view that Republicans are feckless and
useless, but if the party does not use its power to achieve that restitution
then I do not know what the point of the Republicans is supposed to be.
Irrespective of the legality of Biden’s piecemeal attempt at a mass jubilee —
and that legality ranges from highly questionable to absolutely laughable —
Congress can change or clarify the laws any time that it wishes. The GOP runs
the lower house within that Congress. If it does not push hard for a change,
then I shall conclude that it does not care. And if it does not care, then it
deserves to wither and disappear.
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