Leftist Activists Already Get Student Loan Forgiveness

So Could Conservatives, But They Haven’t Tried

The student debt problem is a crisis that requires forgiveness of those loans at great cost to the taxpayer, or so we are told.

There certainly is a problem there, to some degree. Student loan debt is about ~$1.86 trillion, with federal loans making up a little bit over 90% of all student loan debt.¹ These immense loans cannot be gotten out of in bankruptcy court, and were issued as irresponsibly as they were taken. The resultant burden has created a painful set of conditions for many graduates, and appears to be a significant problem leading to delayed or non-existent family formation amongst younger people.²

It has, as could be expected, led to no small degree of combustible discontent. Further, non-dischargeable loans that are issued to irresponsible borrowers and secured only by one’s person and labor are about as close as it comes to “usury,” so the issue has some appeal on the right as well as the left.

There are responsible solutions to the problem. One would be to make them dischargeable in bankruptcy court. Another is to pass a law requiring university endowments to invest in nothing other than the (dischargeable in bankruptcy court) loans of their students, which would encourage cost-cutting at universities and taking a closer eye to the expected financial returns of education loans. There would probably be fewer indebted LGBTQ+ Poetry Major students under such a debt issuance regime.

But that sort of restrained and moderate solution is typically not what is proposed. Instead, those knee-jerk populists who have made this their issue just want total forgiveness of student debt, or an indefinite pause on student loan debt payments. Meanwhile, the mere suggestion of such an idea often brings out the worst in the non-populist political sphere, which tends to gloat about younger people being poor because of dumb loans and deride the idea of reining in the out-of-control student debt situation that is causing increasingly large social issues.

This witch’s brew of acrimony also tends to obscure a larger issue: student debt is already dischargable if you are a professional activist, and the left has taken advantage of this for almost two decades to build up a massive corps of such activists. The right, whether out of indolence or ignorance, largely has not. I’ll explain below, and show how the right should use the existing program to build patronage networks that substantially improve its political position.

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[AUDIO] Leftist Activists Already Get Student Loan Forgiveness

Your Taxes Fund Debt Relief for Leftist Activists