On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to “forgive” $10,000-$20,000 of student loans, circumventing Congress while simultaneously violating the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
Not only is this plan illegal, as the president doesn’t have the authority to spend unappropriated money, but it is downright offensive to those of us who paid off our student loans. It is even more offensive that the same people who insist that young people shouldn’t be burdened by their outstanding loan balances tend to believe that young people have the capacity to fully consent to body mutilation and chemically induced sterilization.
Leftists have been whining about the “burden” of student loans for many years. Articles packed with anecdotes have told us how young men and women struggle with huge loan balances while working barely above minimum wage.
Covid may have thrown us all a curveball, but let’s get one thing straight: If you can get a fake penis made with a skin graft of your wrist at 18 (or younger, according to some), you can take care of your own loans. If 18-year-olds are mature enough to understand the long-term consequences of genital mutilation and wrong-sex hormones and are empowered to irreversibly disfigure themselves, they are mature enough to pay back their loans.
It is a despicable, infantilizing notion that high school seniors cannot read terms of service or solicit financial advice from their parents and mentors about how to manage personal debt or that they cannot research the economic environment they might graduate into and what options they have for repayment.
People act like income-based repayment doesn’t exist. It does, and there are other kinds of repayment plans available, as well, that allow people to repay their loans in a way that accommodates their lifestyle.
Are 18-year-old adults capable of making their own life decisions (like killing their preborn babies, getting sex-change surgeries, or even joining the military) and handling the consequences, or are they not?
Biden’s proposal for so-called student loan forgiveness is clearly a political maneuver to curry favor with younger voters who were hit hard by rampant inflation during Biden’s tenure as president.
In reality, the burdens presented by student loans are largely exaggerated. In 2014, Brookings found that college grads spent more on transportation and hardly less on entertainment than what was spent on their student loans. In 2022, the average car payment was $430 for a used car, well above what the median monthly student loan payment is, according to the Federal Reserve: $222.
Furthermore, Covid lockdowns may have thrown a curveball to recent college graduates, but there has been a moratorium on repayment for two years. Americans were even given stimulus checks to assist with financial burdens that arose from the lockdowns.
The idea that adults, who signed legally binding loan agreements, need taxpayers to bail them out, especially while they are still under a repayment moratorium, is grossly offensive.
The generation of college debt holders who would benefit the most from Biden’s proposal is the most privileged in history. For these same people, comprising the largest faction of the “woke” demographic who understand the world as a matrix of oppressors and oppressed, to sit in their air-conditioned apartments and tweet confetti emojis from their iPhones in celebration of the prospect that other people will pay part of their student loans is peak hypocrisy. For a generation so concerned with “equity,” they really don’t care about what is fair.
Leftists need to be consistent in assessing whether young adults can make serious life decisions that have long-term consequences. Operations such as transgender surgeries pose harsher long-term consequences than taking out student loans.
If young adults are mature enough to make permanent, major changes to their own bodies, they are mature enough to repay the money they borrowed to go to college.