Why Are the Republicans so Angry About Student Loan Relief?

The student debt crisis is largely one of the Republicans’ making. Among the main reasons college became so unaffordable is the slashed state contributions to their state college systems, started during the Reagan presidency, largely brought about because of the George Bush recession and the Mitch McConnell “nickel and dime recovery,” and engineered by Republican state legislatures. Of the 49 states analyzed over the full 2008-2017 period, 44 spent less per student in the 2017 school year than in 2008. The average state spent $1,448, or 16 percent, less per student in 2017 than in 2008. Per-student funding in Pennsylvania – and six other states – fell by more than 30 percent over this period.

The terms of student loans are so unfavorable to students – where you can repay more than you borrowed over time and still owe more than you borrowed – because the Reagan DOE and Republican Congresses wrote the terms that way. Student loans could have been done like FHA, directly by the government or under strict regulations, but instead were created to give total freedom to predatory lenders.

And the worst offenders – for profit “colleges’ that write predatory loans and often deliver nothing, but leave students saddled with debt – were created in an unregulated market by the Bush administration initiative to privatize as much federal money as possible and undercut the “leftist” university system.

An entire generation now is saddled with debt that no generation before ever experienced . This doesn’t just affect their standard of living. They can’t buy a house, start a family, start a business, dream, make plans. Our entire economy is impoverished.

So, Biden took some meaningful steps to fix this problem. It’s not just the debt he extinguished. He also set a limit on how much you can be charged and fixed it so people won’t be looking at a bigger loan than what they borrowed a decade later.

Wow, you’d have thought he created a federal healthcare program, or investigated an insurrection. Why are the Republicans so angry? Because it’s so unfair to all those kids who learned a trade and didn’t go to college? The Republicans? Really?

The Republican party, collectively, is the most lightly taxed group since the income tax was instituted and the most heavily subsidized group ever. Tax cuts. Massive shift of tax burden from Red to Blue states. Home mortgage deductions (a housing subsidy that dwarfs affordable housing subsidies, by the way). Capital gains. PPP.

Come to think of it, why are handouts to business (PPP) ok and aid to individuals (enhanced unemployment) “just encourages people not to work?” Why are students who have been working for a decade “too lazy to work?”

Well, there are four reasons.

  1. Meanness. Whether it’s the crowds laughing when Trump says to beat protestors up, the people who laugh and cheer when the US loses the Olympics, or the people who say “serves them right” when they hear about families separated or a truckful of dead immigrants, or the guy in the crowd who shouts “yes!” when the question “So should people without insurance just die?” is asked, there is a current of mean-spiritedness. In the Republican party. A group that is extremely comfortable is nevertheless resentful at the idea that anyone else is “getting something they don’t deserve.”

  2. Double standard. People who get tax breaks and PPP giveaways are “hard working” and “job creators.” People who file for unemployment or whose standard of living would improve if the minimum wage went up or who can’t go back to work because there’s no child care are “freeloaders” or “don’t want to work.” There was a brief moment when the food pantry lines ballooned with middle class workers in the early days of the pandemic that there was hope of a more compassionate “there but for the Grace of God …” response, but the federal aid largely allowed the middle class to float through

  3. Avoid a Biden win. Republicans took active steps to prolong the Bush recession, even though it meant their own constituents suffered additional years of high unemployment, foreclosures, and stagnant wages just to deny Obama a win. They were very frank about it. Similarly, they recognize this can be a win for Biden and so once again they’re fanning the flames of white resentment.

  4. Defund the Left. Sierra Club. Planned Parenthood. Teachers unions (public schools). Liberal colleges and professors. ACORN. Unions. Before they were identified as socialist Antifa lovers, before the Q-anon ravings about pedophile rings, before “the deep state,” the left were already identified as an enemy to be defeated. Public schools and teachers unions? Charter schools. ACORN registering voters? Invent a scandal and get them barred. IRS and ATF? Shrink their budgets and deny them leadership. Colleges? For profit colleges. Defund them. A generation saddled with debt undermines the entire system.

The problem with the Republican party is, they don’t care how much you suffer.

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This series is written to promote political discussion and organizing. Permission is given to use this in fact sheets, talking points, letters to the editor, etc. We’d appreciate if you notified Gettysburg DFA (leonsreed@gmail.com) of any uses. Written by Leon Reed.

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