I & I Editorial BoardIt’s not entirely coincidental that just weeks after President Joe Biden announced his latest plan to cancel student loan debt, antisemitic protests broke out on elite college campuses across the country. Biden’s bailout schemes only embolden these entitled brats.
Students at some 18 colleges have staged anti-Israel “encampment” protests. At Columbia University (where a four-year degree will set you back north of $350,000), the protests got so out of hand and so virulently antisemitic that a rabbi at Columbia urged Jewish students to “return home as soon as possible” and the university moved to mostly hybrid classes.
This has been going on for more than a week at Columbia and, since colleges don’t have the stomach to stand up to students, protests have spread to Brown, New York University, MIT, Yale, Vanderbilt, Emerson, and Tufts, all of which cost well over $200,000 for an undergraduate degree, as well as other not-cheap schools, such as the universities of Michigan, Pittsburg, and North Carolina, the University of California, Berkeley and others.
Protesters have been heard shouting antisemitic slogans, namely “intifada” and “f–k Israel,” wearing keffiyehs and COVID masks, and carrying signs to “Honor The Martyrs Of Palestine” and express the solidarity of “trans people for Palestine.”
It’s these students who will, as soon as they graduate with their mostly useless four-year degrees in anthropology or peace studies or gender queer theory, start demanding that taxpayers cover the costs of their massive student loans.
After all, Biden is already promising that they won’t have to repay them. He tried to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt early in his administration, only to have the Supreme Court strike it down.
Then Biden vastly expanded the income-based repayment plans so that most students would end up having to pay off only a tiny fraction of their loans, which could cost taxpayers as much as $558 billion over the next decade.
Now he’s announced a new plan to cancel $84 billion in student loan debt.
And who will be the main beneficiaries? You got it, those who attended elite schools.
The Penn Wharton Business Model looked at Biden’s latest gambit and found that the $84 billion in bailout money would disproportionately affect high-income earners. Roughly “750,000 households making over $312,000 in average household income” would be eligible for longer-term student debt cancellation.
Keep in mind that these bailouts are coming on top of massive taxpayer subsidies. Over the past four school years, federal aid for undergraduate and graduate education topped $590 billion, according to the College Board.
Students at private four-year colleges (where the cost of attendance averages more than $60,000 a year) get an average of $25,630 in grants.
The result has been to fuel tuition inflation and create an army of undereducated, over-coddled miscreants who are using your money to intimidate and harass Jewish students, disrupt the education of all students, and who will go on to worm their way into leadership positions in businesses, government and institutions.
It’s long past time to rethink this entire education scam, and there’s never been a better opportunity to do so.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
The Speaker of the House, Mike Thompson, has two things wrong; wrong the inept way Biden gets so much wrong.
1. The speaker of the House and Everyone in Congress have no standing to be intervening in the management of our private universities, even if the universities are going all cockamamie and driving off the rails, which they are.
Mr. Speaker, that is the role of University Trustees! And yes most university trustees, certainly at Penn, my university have not exhibited any if the wisdom for which they were asked to be on the board. Penn’s blundering trustees fired the wrong President!
2. Calling for the resignation of the President of Columbia is upside and backward logic, exactly the inept decision making Biden is well known for.
I would, instead, call for the expulsion of every student at Columbia and the other universities who are so uneducated in history that they are proudly marching and behaving like Hitler Youth, emblazoned with banners showing their complete idiocy praising barbarians, Hamas, who slaughter, dismember, rape, behead, burn and capture innocent Israeli women and children.
A wise strategy, too, for all universities is to replace the admissions officers who admitted these barbaric Youth who shame, degrade and embarrass the best universities in the States. We simply need better students.
And to add insult to injury: Not only do we taxpaying citizens have to pay for these oafs and scoundrels who are getting their 4 year education as a free ride-citizens are paying twice. 1)When they take out their loans the Government issues debt (bonds) to cover it which then is bought by many Americans. This not only adds to the debt it indebts us further because the Government pays interest to entice those who buy its debt. Many believe that this rise in interest rates leads to more inflation, foolish Monetary Policies and lower GNP. 2) The taxpaxpaying citizens then also funds the 4 year vacation of these unethical swine (who, by the way, are always instructing us on “ethical behavior”-while gleefully ignoring their own unethical behavior) when the loans they freely took out are “forgiven” (to bad the Government doesn’t forgive us from paying the debts of these deadbeats).
One more thing: Colleges and Universities-which are the beehive around which the deadbeats swarm-make out like bandits. They get the tuition (guaranteed by the Government and paid for by the Taxpayer). So they have incentive NOT to expel the students-since if the violence prone protesting students were expelled the University would lose its income stream.
What a scam! I am 76 years old and am always warned against fraudsters and scam-artists who want to steal my money. Wonders of wonders, the Government is never identified as such.
From what I have read about this “loan forgiveness” scam, the basis of President Biden doing this is based upon multiple flawed laws and programs created by Congress that enabled this problem. The bigger issue related to this is that these programs were established without termination dates.
As Ronald Reagan said, “There’s nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.”
EVERY government program should have some kind of termination date when the money runs out so that future Presidents can’t just cite that program to expand its application. It would also end battles where the courts have to intervene to try to put an halt to these illegal actions by future Presidents.