National Review: Don’t Forgive Student Debt

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

Blumpf has been fired.

It was White Independent and Moderate voters who fired him in every swing state. I’ve been arguing that financially strapped, rightwing White male Independent voters weren’t motivated to vote for him in 2020. They came out in force for him in the Center in the 2016 election. In the 2020 election, his appeal was more narrowly limited to the Right and he won more conservatives and Republicans.

National Review:

“This week, the Left has intensified its calls for President-elect Joe Biden to forgive student debt via executive order, perhaps as much as $50,000 per borrower. Such a move would constitute both awful policy and an abuse of the discretion that Congress has granted to the executive branch in this area.

It is often said that Americans’ trillion-and-a-half-dollar student-loan debt is a “crisis.” It is not. As Beth Akers of the Manhattan Institute has noted, the typical four-year college graduate who borrowed starts with a debt of $28,500, which he can eliminate with 20 years of $181 monthly payments. By way of comparison, bachelor’s-degree holders outearn high-school grads by something like a million dollars over the course of their lives. College costs too much, but not so much that we need to feel sorry for the most educated people in our society.

What about those with far higher burdens? These large sums normally come from graduate studies, not four-year degrees, and are disproportionately possessed by folks with relatively high incomes, including doctors and lawyers. Higher undergraduate debt is also often the result of a deliberate choice to attend expensive private colleges rather than more affordable public ones, and to turn down avenues such as military service that can pay for college. Moreover, many students from truly modest means are already given significant grant aid. On top of that, the problem of truly unmanageable debt has already been addressed — and at the expense of federal taxpayers. …”

Donald Trump was elected in 2016 because he was perceived as a Moderate on economics. By 2018, he was seen as more rightwing than Ronald Reagan on economics after he threw his support behind Paul Ryan’s agenda on health care and corporate tax cuts. Presto, the Blue Wall came back.

In the 2020 election, the GOP had a DISMAL showing with Independent voters, Moderate voters, White college-educated voters and Millennials. 1/2 of Millennials are Independent voters.