XPost: alt.politics.liberalism, alt.education, talk.politics.guns
XPost: va.politics

<governor.swill@gmail.com> wrote:
X-Invalid: >
X-Invalid: > Obama and Biden are both idiots. They flunked math.
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Message-ID: <704d8208a84e1f8d8f3b0fbb61402043@dizum.com>

President Joe Biden’s plan to have the federal government pay
off hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans has
received blistering criticism, all of it deserved.

It’s a constitutional offense: Congress is supposed to authorize
sweeping spending programs, not the president acting on his own.
It’s economically risky, given our persistent high inflation.
It’s perverse distributionally: A lawyer-doctor couple making
$249,000 together will be able to walk away from debts.

It solves none of the structural problems of higher education
and its financing and may make them worse . It is socially
destructive, too, threatening to exacerbate the growing divide
between Americans who have college degrees and those who do not.

To top it all off, it may not even pay the political dividends
the Joe Biden administration seeks. A significant number of
Democrats in tough races this fall have already repudiated
Biden’s giveaway. Sometimes harshly: Tim Ryan, running for the
Senate from Ohio, says that “waiving debt for those already on a
trajectory to financial security sends the wrong message to
millions of Ohioans without a degree working just as hard to
make ends meet.”

Ryan and the others are implicitly betting that Biden’s action
will cost the Democrats votes, at least where they live. It’s a
judgment that reflects a hard lesson many Democrats learned in
previous decades.

During the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins
reportedly set forth the party’s basic political strategy: “We
will spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect.” Biden’s
student-loan gambit omits the second step, but otherwise the
political rationale is the same: Help out millions of people,
and they can be expected to be grateful — and to vote on their
gratitude.

It seemed to work for decades. But the New Deal majority started
to show cracks in the 1960s and broke apart altogether by the
end of the 1980s. Many, many books try to explain why. A common
theme: The Democrats and big government ceased to be identified
with middle-class values and interests. They were out of step
with public sentiment on work and welfare, on racial politics
and crime policy, on religion and patriotism.

That’s why Bill Clinton, seeking to reclaim the presidency for
the Democrats after they suffered three defeats in a row,
carefully broadcast a different message. He made a show of
supporting the death penalty for violent criminals. He promised
to end welfare as we know it. And he chided a minor celebrity
who had spoken glibly about murders committed by black people.
At the same time, he stuck with the party’s core commitment to
use federal power to help those who, in his words, “work hard
and play by the rules.”

At a low point in his presidency, he told a columnist the lesson
he had drawn. He had run into trouble, he said, by forgetting:
“Values matter most.”

Clinton’s makeover was successful, so much so that in the
decades since his presidency both parties have become friendlier
to federal activism. But Democrats may have gotten so carried
away by rising tolerance for big government that they have
misunderstood why it happened in the first place.

The most serious political vulnerability of Biden’s debt write-
off is not that it will increase the deficit, although it will.
It’s that it contradicts widely held values. Instead of helping
people who are down on their luck or rewarding them for working
— as government programs from the earned-income credit and
Social Security do — it undoes part of a freely made bargain.

The lawyer can still earn a handsome living from his degree, but
he no longer has to meet the obligations he accepted in return
for the expense of getting it. Millions of people who work hard
and play by the rules, as Clinton put it, are made into suckers:
the people who paid their debts or made sacrifices to avoid
borrowing so much in the first place.

Americans who never attended college at all but have other
debts, from mortgages to car loans, will get no relief from
Biden’s edict. But they may have to pay for it, through higher
inflation or higher taxes, even though a lot of the
beneficiaries are better off than they are. That’s going to
strike many voters, even ones who favor expansive government
programs, as unfair, because it is.

Contemporary Democrats are already paying a price for the
perception that they think Americans with college degrees are
better than everyone else. Funneling hundreds of billions to
Americans who have attended college — invoking something called
the “Heroes Act,” no less — will reinforce that perception.

Conservatives have often deluded themselves into thinking that
big government as such is unpopular, and had many occasions to
learn otherwise. But it’s popular only to the extent it aligns
with voters’ values. Democrats might be about to get a sharp
reminder of the point.

To contact the author of this story:
Ramesh Ponnuru at rponnuru@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-27/biden-s- student-loan-scheme-may-backfire-on-democrats

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