Student Debt Forgiveness Isn't Fair?

Back in the bad old days, it was commonly agreed that education was a good thing. That an educated citizenry moved a country forward and that it behooved a government to make this possible.

Then the sixties backlash hit and Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Like all candidates, he made a lot of tough-sounding campaign promises. He was going to eradicate crime, play hardball with the Soviet Union, eliminate wasteful spending and streamline the federal government so that it would operate with the seamless efficiency of your favorite small business.

(This isn't to overlook the promise that he was going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age after bringing home the hostages held within the American embassy.)

To be sure, Reagan benefited enormously from the presidency of Jimmy Carter and his struggle with the Iran hostage crisis. But that crisis also seemed to coalesce conservative frustration with the liberalism that had taken root throughout the seventies and Reagan's landslide victory was the proof.

After his election America went into two recessions that the manufacturing-centric Rust Belt still hasn't recovered from. And that wasteful government spending? It wasn't eliminated, it was re-arranged.

I'm sure most of your remember your mom re-arranging the living room or another room in the house. Or maybe you altered the layout of your bedroom. The dimensions of the room remained the same as was the furniture within. But the room was...different.

Ditto our fortieth president. In his view, he did eliminate wasteful spending by cutting federal aid to education. After all, what point was there in having the government subsidize the liberalizing of American students by aiding their access to higher education?

(Further illustrating the depths of his anti-education stance—and one could add anti-poor--was his deft manipulation of school menus. He was the man behind having ketchup declared as a vegetable in order to cut costs on school lunches—not to mention having them appear more nutritious than they actually were.)

Needless to say, the savings weren't passed on to your folks or mine.

As he so often did, Reagan had a better idea. He would re-appropriate the newly freed-up cash to the Pentagon and its motley collection of defense contractors. Always eager for another handout, those contractors would transform that money into a shiny new thing that would bamboozle our elected representation until they were eager as hell to shell out whatever was necessary for research, development, manufacture and implementation.

(Anyone from that era will recall the ultimate hustle of the defense contractor era, the Star Wars project. It cost approximately thirty-billion dollars (in nineteen-eighties money) and did absolutely nothing. It was scrapped by President Clinton in 1993.)

So. After tripling the nation's debt and quadrupling the defense budget, at least an ever-increasing number of students could be shut-out of higher education.

According to the Education Data Initiative website, college tuition has increased 130% since 1990. (And that's adjusted for inflation.) Off the top of my head, I'm thinking the only things that can compare are the salaries of professional athletes and the cost of healthcare.

Professor's salaries haven't exploded in a similar fashion, nor are schools assuming a student's room and board. Is Chateaubriand (accompanied by a pleasing—but never intrusive—Chateau Lafite '59) adorning dining hall tables these days?

Or is all this money going to Alabama football coach Nick Saban?

Maybe it's the byproduct of the dire warnings we hear to the effect that without a college degree, you're nothing. Pair this with the news of the ever-worsening outlook for low and mid-income families and we have a driver for our nation's fanatical pursuit of higher education.

And yet, what is an enhanced education worth when students are graduating with a debt load that will take decades to pay off? Do the conservatives who endorse this see the long-term effects of shutting out would-be consumers from the economy?

And those are the students fortunate-enough to see graduation day. Many more abandon their education because there simply isn't money available. And that's just the biggest factor which can influence a decision like this.

Since President Biden's announcement that he was enabling eligible students to receive ten-thousand dollars in loan forgiveness, outrage has erupted. Students with six-figure debt say it doesn't go far enough. Conservatives say it's not fair and are challenging its legality.

I am compelled to ask: not fair to whom?

It should be obvious that to the owners of the financial institutions that make these loans, this is a pay cut. This is government interference in what they consider to be sacrosanct domain—their businesses.

Never mind that the United States in the only first-world nation that places access to higher education on such a lofty shelf. Never mind the hypocrisy of placing students into decades-long debt merely for the chance to earn a living wage. Never mind the social stratification these incessant tuition hikes engender.

These aspects constitute a conservative wet dream. But how do they further the ambitions and abilities of the United States? How is a nation denying so much of its citizenry access to higher education advancing itself? How does this line-up with the ideals espoused by the founding fathers?

If you ain't got it now you ain't never gonna get it?

As the citizens of so many big cities see on a daily basis, hope is a critical element in a functional society. Hope is what keeps us moving forward, stretching ourselves to grasp the next branch on the tree. Hope is what keeps us engaged.

Without it, we are a dispirited population with no skin in the game. People who, incorrectly or not, feel that if they have nothing to live for, you don't either. While an admittedly extreme example, I see it in the seventeen-year olds armed with automatic weapons, killing, raping and carjacking; utterly unconcerned with your life or their own.

We can change this. But first we have to want to.

Boomers vs. Millennials

Apparently, there can't be two demographics of Americans who aren't debating each other. This after coming across multiple articles recently that either feature millennials disparaging boomers as the recipients of unending wealth and good fortune or ones that are pleas to the world at large to understand and stop trashing millennials.

In response, I offer this.

When I'm not apologizing to millennials for allowing global warming to happen, I do things they don't.

Like not spend my workday breaks sitting in an idling car as I update my social media accounts and look for revenge porn.

(We all appreciate the generous contribution of extra greenhouse gases. But um, don't expect a thank you note.)

Or vote.

Finger-pointers that they are, millennials have identified baby boomers as the generation we should loathe. Boomers have lived a life of ease while theirs has been a ceaseless struggle to survive.

Fine. If you must.

Despite your compulsive need to be and do things differently, you're just like us.

I can safely say that at a certain age, yes, we disrespected the previous generation, too. We ignored their accomplishments and instead, focused on how unlike us they were (as if that ought to mandate a stretch in prison).

By our standards, they were racist and sexist and hideously unevolved. What was their problem, anyway? Ignorant of history, we ignored their evolution from the generation which proceeded them.

Sorry to again make you seem less-singular and amazing than you are, but does that sound familiar?

Yes, you have been buffeted by two economic maelstroms, the Great Recession and now the fall-out from the COVID19 pandemic. And yes, it sucks.

But you know what? Thousands of boomers graduated straight into the Reagan recession of the early-eighties. And if someone with a degree in accounting or education was having a tough time landing a job, imagine the uphill climb of someone armed with an English degree.

And as you are (presumably) so well aware, job gaps scare would-be employers even more than unannounced IRS audits.

Despite being a boomer, another downturn occurred in the early-nineties. And another one following 9/11. You of course remember the Great Recession.

So. Let's see, that's one, two, three, four, FIVE recessions my fellow boomers and I have had to gut out.

If that's your definition of a life of ease, fine.

It's not mine.

Want to hear about how my life as a college-educated candidate for living-wage jobs ended at fifty because I happened to have been in the middle of a cross-country move and was thus unemployed when the recession hit in 2008?

Didn't think so.

Want to hear about the jobs I've had since? Or about the humiliation I endured watching sitcom after sitcom making the same insipid joke about people living in their parent's basement (which my wife and I were sadly forced to do)?

Yes, we had affordable college tuition and childhoods in which we played freely in parks with whomever happened to be there, because our parent's lives were blissfully free of the fear and suspicion incubated on social media.

We enjoyed affordable concerts and sporting events. Ditto family vacations, which we somehow survived without individual DVD players or the joy found in mindlessly scrolling through a phone.

We didn't suffer the insidiousness of social media cruelty when classmates found us not sufficiently identical to them.

Yes, your college tuition is absurd. Your debt load an outrage. And life without a degree has gotten tougher. Owing to ever-increasing levels of automation and the off-shoring of jobs, finding living-wage work that doesn't require a college degree is harder than locating a reasonable Trumper.

But you can blame almost all of that on the Republicans you can't quite motivate yourself to vote against.

True fact: the meteoric rise in college tuition began with one Ronald Reagan, whose conceptualization of the presidency was to cut spending. And he kinda sorta did. Yes, he indulged every Star Wars-inspired defense scheme presented to him by our selfless defense contractors, but he did slash federal support for higher education, too.

And that set a long line of dominoes falling leading to our current outrageousness.

So that's a good thing, right?

(Don't forget: this is the same guy who had ketchup declared as a vegetable so federally-funded school lunches would appear more healthy than they actually were. Beginning to see a pattern here?)

But I digress.

So. Where were we? Oh yeah. Your life sucks. And mine has been a magic carpet ride.

You have been showered with expensive gifts from overly-indulgent parents all your life: cars, computers, cell phones, video gaming devices, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

When you were in high school you “slept” (wink wink) with your girlfriend under her parent's roof.

Seriously?

Ever try to have sex in a car when you're 6'3” and it's twenty-two degrees out because there was no where else to go?

You're gay? Bi-sexual? Suffer from gender identity issues or are polyamorous? Wow. You get a parade. We were faggots, dykes, queers, transvestites, sluts, whores et. al.

You got a trophy for going to school? Really?

Speaking of which, did you ever walk there?

Millennial males never had to learn how to seduce a woman. They simply dumped something in her drink while she was in the ladies room and voila! Compliant (if unconscious) partner.

(Which isn't to infer that I in any way, shape or form endorse this or envy you. I don't. Those of you who partook in this are feral sub-humans.)

Your mommy and daddy sued your teacher, the school district and the district's superintendent because you didn't get an 'A' in Applied Physics?

I got yelled at and was told to shape up or prepare for a life busing tables.

There was the millennial female who shone a brief ray of light by suggesting that boomers were too materialistic and should value experience over stuff. Alas, she said this while camping out overnight at an Apple store waiting for the next generation iPhone.

Sigh.

Dear millennial, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I'm sorry you feel another generation had it exponentially easier than you. That must make getting out of bed really hard.

Yes, your lives are fraught with insecurity and uncertainty. Global Warming alone is a game-changer.

But you have to admit: you're awfully faint-hearted when it comes to voting. No, Democrats don't have all the answers. But they're certainly less-toxic than the vermin on the other side of the aisle.

Instead of focusing on which generation is most-deserving of your contempt, why not puzzle-out the answer that will unite Americans in a concerted effort to preserve the radiant blue-green jewel we call Earth?

Change the culture!

Should you prove to be the better generation at getting that done, no one would be happier than I.

Have at it.

Mark Janus Seeks the Right to Work

In so many ways, Mark Janus is a very fortunate man. He works for a state agency in Illinois—the same state that has nearly bankrupted itself gifting employees like Mr. Janus with plump, well-fed pensions.

But that's not enough. Our poor, put-upon Mr. Janus has his knickers in a twist because he has to pay $45 a month in union dues for his membership in AFSCME.

As a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, Mr. Janus feels he should keep everything he makes. He feels he shouldn't have to pay taxes and fees and especially union dues, which is certainly interesting given the talking points his political party of choice likes to trot out.

Mark Janus should get his sewage treated, meat inspected, roads repaired and libraries stocked and staffed (not to mention his union representation) for free, but god forbid the poor, the disabled and the elderly get help with, well, just about anything.

Because that would make them freeloaders.

But conservatives like Mr. Janus aren't. 

Got it?

In the words of Mr. Janus' lawyer, “AFSCME takes political positions that he doesn't support and advocates for more spending and higher taxes.”

I would like to invite Mr. Janus to work in the private sector, where after airing his complaint he would be told that thanks to the miracle of At Will employment, he was free to leave. 

Of course, Mr. Janus would never leave his public-sector job because that would mean giving up his union-negotiated salary, union-negotiated benefits and that oh-so-sweet union-negotiated pension.

Yes, Mr. Janus wants his cake and a big, giant fork.

And to be honest, so do I.

I can only dream of not paying taxes to the circus headed by Donald Trump and what I call Republicants because they stand for nothing I believe in and everything I don't. But if I want to enjoy the benefits of living in America, taxes must be paid.

Of course, this is much, much bigger than Mr. Janus and his wallet-busting union dues. It's about defunding unions and consequently, Democrats. It's about the tragically mis-labeled Right to Work statute.

Because in the addled logic of right-wingers like Mr. Janus, Democrats and unions are the enemy. Even as they provide a secure and comfortable living for him.

One party rule is clearly the best path forward because even as Mr. Janus rails against the effects of prolonged one-party rule in Illinois, Republicans controlling everything forever would somehow be different.

This because businessmen would be running things.

Perhaps you know how great things were the last time wealthy businessmen were in control. The salad days of the late nineteenth-century. The Industrial Revolution.

Employment was so abundant men worked six days a week, for ten, eleven and twelve hours a day. And not just men. No sir. Those free-thinking, egalitarian businessmen opened up their factories to everyone. Even kids.

And thanks to their generous wages, upward mobility was never more prevalent. Frugal, industrious folk could save enough cash to have stew—with meat—once a week. Or dream of a visit to a cobbler and a new pair of shoes. Or buy a coffin for ma when she died during childbirth.

Yes, life was grand.

Then those goddamn Democrats and their confounded unions screwed everything up.

Thanks to their unswerving dedication to make life better for everyone (i.e. even people who didn't possess millions of dollars), people could not work seventy hours a week and still have a shot at living quarters that included light, fresh air, indoor plumbing and electricity.

They could even afford to see doctors before they died at forty-five of black lung or tuberculosis or dysentery.

But as the best and the brightest conservative minds have pointed out, this sucked.

It sucked because unlike you and me, the folks organizing labor and effectively fighting the offal in the executive wing for a fair share of corporate profits needed money to live. This is where the heresy of union dues enters the picture.

And if that weren't bad enough, some wise-ass got the idea for an urban sewage system. And another for consumer protections. And yet another for an agency that would promote public health.

And boom! We had taxes.

You have to agree this was pointless, wasteful stuff.

Through the widespread implementation of Right to Work statutes, we can—at long last—cede control to Republicans and their healthy, inclusive, we're-all-in-this-together agenda.

Anger is a very unhealthy state of being. It's what makes us cut off our nose to spite our face. It's what makes bloggers post inarticulate rants—like I did last Thursday. When we're angry our thinking is muddled. Our actions lamentable.

Do we really want to destroy unions? Do we really want to remove the checks-and-balances a two party system provides? Do we really want to hand over one-hundred percent of everything to Republicans and wealthy businessmen?

Are we really so naive?

So many things in the United States of America could be better. Our leadership. Our government. Ourselves. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't the answer.

We don't burn down our houses when we discover an insect infestation. We call an exterminator. And despite my howling indignation about so many facets of twenty-first century America, I don't generally advocate for revolution.

Yeah, blowing stuff up and smashing windows is lots of fun. And who doesn't enjoy a roaring fire now and then? But in the end it mostly wastes time and energy. And the clean-up is a bitch.

Mr. Janus, the vast majority of taxes go to the public good, except in places like Illinois where the *ahem* pension obligation threatens the economic well-being of the entire state and demands an inordinate share of tax revenue. 

Whining about higher taxes and political positions as your employer slavishly seeks to honor its pension commitment to you is questionable at best and off-the-charts hypocrisy at worst. Now would be a good time to mention that Janus was a two-faced Roman god.

Tell you what, Janus. Why don't you file a suit alleging your pension is too generous, and that instead of threatening the entire population with higher taxes and service cuts, your employer should instead increase your union dues and scale back your benefits?

You know, show some of that individual responsibility you Republicans are always crowing about.

Yeah. That's what I thought.