Some rando jumped into my mentions on the twitters in reply to a twit of mine about student loan debt forgiveness with the riposte, “but what about PPP loans”? I blew it off because it was so monumentally stupid as to be unworthy of discussion. I mean, there was nothing about the PPP, the congressionally enacted Paycheck Protection Program, that bore any relation to presidential forgiveness of student loan debt under the guise of a national emergency response to COVID.
And then it happened. First, former Southern District of New York United States Attorney cum drug warrior and black man enslaver turned dream date of the chic left for being fired by Trump despite prisons filled with black and brown people for drugs, Preet Bharara.
Some people criticizing student debt forgiveness are learning there are PPP tapes
— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) August 24, 2022
But Preet, having traded in his Drug Warrior post to be a Social Justice Warrior after Trump, whom he was more than happy to serve, threw him under the bus, will take validation wherever he can find. But the White House? And that wasn’t the end of it. Even Krugman in the Times?
And many people have taken advantage of those procedures. For example, businesses owned by a real estate mogul named Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy on six occasions. During the pandemic, many business owners received government loans that were subsequently forgiven.
The issue raised here isn’t whether you favor forgiving student loan debt. It’s a very complicated issue on many levels with serious arguments for and against. But raising something as insanely false and disingenuous as the PPP loans to blunt what’s being dishonestly characterized as the right wing opposition.*
The arguments range from the simplistic moral complaint that if you take a loan, you should pay it back, to the false equivalence of a program approved by Congress, the branch of government with the authority to make legislative decisions, which was intended to be forgiven when put to its intended use from the outset. To conflate the two is mind-bogglingly stupid, and that hasn’t seemed to dissuade people who, one might expect, are more serious than to proffer arguments that would be impressive in a kindergarten debate into the sphere of public commentary.
“What about PPP loans” was good for a chuckle by some rando troll on twitter, whether because he was that dumb or he was betting I was, but Preet? Biden? Krugman? What is going on here that these putatively intelligent and serious people are raising such flagrantly dumb, disingenuous and dangerously bad arguments?
We have become a nation wallowing in the worst, most irrelevant and most irrational arguments around to win a point against the other tribe. At best, it rallies the simpletons who are already in agreement by giving them what, to their mind, makes sense even if it makes them look like the tribe of blithering idiots. And in the battle for time squandered on nonsense, the effort required to unexplain idiocy is at least a magnitude of effort greater than spewing it. It’s not worth the effort.
And lest anyone see this as an opportunity to contrast Biden with Darth Cheeto, today is not the day to test my tolerance for the logical fallacy of tu quoque. Whether the argumentation in favor of this executive action is honest, relevant and rational has nothing to do with Trump or anyone else.
Still, there will be a fiscal cost. Is this the best way to spend that money?
As I said, the question is: Compared with what? Given the choice, I’d spend money on children rather than adults — and aid to families with children was, in fact, a big part of Biden’s original spending plans. But he couldn’t get those plans through Congress, while debt relief is something he can probably do through executive action.
Do it for the children is the last refuge of the intellectually bankrupt. We made those loans available for the children so that anyone who wanted to attend college could, even if they lacked the financial ability to pay. And states cut funding, college tuition skyrocketed, and the loans kept flowing. Were they too young and stupid to grasp how bad their decision to assume all that debt while majoring in grievance studies was? Did they have parents, guidance counselors, anyone with half a brain, to guide them? Arguments invariably swirl around the most egregious examples, the extreme outliers as if it’s normal, whereas the “typical” (whatever that means) student loan debt is under $25,000, such that a $10,000 wave of the hand cuts 40%+ off the top.
There is much to consider, not the least of which is the serial transitory policy choices designed to appeal to the most simplistic tribal partisans of either tribe at the expense of the great many people who can both feel the pain caused by the extreme debt load on many well-intended, if misguided, young people for degrees which will never produce the income needed to pay them off and the false promise that a college diploma at any cost is better than no college diploma.
Much like the arguments about racism, sexism and the various other invented -isms that drive our divisive discourse, heavily ladeled atop the “but they’re children” deceit of emotionalism and moralism, they are doomed to achieve no real solution to the intransigent social and societal problems that are very real and pervasive. We are engaged in a battle of lies, and no one is saved. And whether one tribe is worse than the other when it comes to dishonesty and idiocy does not change the fact that we’re engaged in a spite battle of disingenuous claims doomed to fail and produce misery for all.
This is no way to run a nation. Not if you actually care about people, about children, and want to see real problems fixed.
*There are a great many, perhaps even a majority, of Americans who are not right wing who do not agree with this action. The media and proponents may prefer to pretend it’s only right wingers who disapprove, but that doesn’t change reality. There are a lot of liberals and moderates who saved their pennies and paid for their education, only to see themselves punished for their sacrifice and responsibility. There is no talking this out of existence.
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