The Left Hates Talking about the Cold Hard Numbers

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, August 29, 2022

 

As John mentioned late last week, an analysis from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton school concluded that Biden’s student loan bailout will cost taxpayers between $600 billion and more than $1 trillion, much more than the $300 billion figure that had been thrown around before the decision.

 

You will notice that on social media, the usual response to the criticism of the student loan bailout is to accuse critics of being selfish, heartless, cruel, bitter, angry, and so on. (Or they hallucinate that you own a bar and took Paycheck Protection Program loans.)

 

You notice no one who knows anything about the student loan program is arguing, “oh, this decision won’t cost taxpayers that much.” No one is arguing, “this will bring down the cost of higher education in the future.” No one is arguing, “this decision will encourage people to be more careful about taking out large loans, and more diligent about paying back what they owe.” No, the argument is that those who oppose this are bad people, who have bad values. You are allegedly a bad person if you expect people to pay back money they owe and promised to pay back.

 

I was reminded of a comment from the first debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, after Romney had made an effective argument for means-testing entitlement programs and giving states more control how they administer programs such as Medicaid. Obama pivoted: “I want to talk about the values behind Social Security and Medicare and then talk about Medicare.”

 

As I wrote at the time, “Obama wanted the topic to be on the warm and fuzzy feelings about the subject, instead of the numbers, the long-term solvency, the details of the reform proposals. He looked like a student who hadn’t done the readings and who wanted desperately to steer it towards a previous chapter.”

 

People who think the numbers undermine their argument, or who don’t know the numbers, or who don’t care about the numbers always want to shift the discussion away from cold hard facts and figures and towards touchy-feely “values” and feelings.

 

The fact that you don’t care about the numbers doesn’t make the numbers go away.

 

Sure, covering $10,000 in student loans may turn out to be extraordinarily expensive, do nothing to mitigate the high cost of higher education, punish those who did the right thing and create a moral hazard. But it feels good to progressives, so it must be the right policy.