Biden Shows Up to Push Me Away

Pres. Joe Biden campaigned in Madison yesterday. He showed up in my town to give me reason to want to vote against him.

Biden’s message was about how hard he’s trying to get around a Supreme Court that has told him that a president — any president — doesn’t have the power to do what he so badly wants to do, which is to pay off the college loans of people who don’t feel like paying them back. Biden’s actually proud of the fact that he has already, through all kinds of backdoor means, been able to have taxpayers — including those who never went to college or who dutifully paid back their loans — pick up $144 billion in college debt.

Now let me stop here and stipulate that, as a strictly political matter, what he’s doing makes sense. Generally speaking, paying off student debt is popular, though public opinion on this topic is complicated. People support it until you explain that they’re paying for this with their tax dollars. Then 60% are opposed. But the Republicans simply have not been able to get that message through. “Debt forgiveness” sounds like the debt magically disappears or that banks will have to absorb it. Also, Biden has been especially weak among younger voters who are now doubly skeptical because of what’s happening in Gaza. I want to beat Trump, so on that level I can’t fault Biden for showing up in a college town and pandering to students.

But that doesn’t make this good public policy and it doesn’t make it right. Close readers of YSDA will note that I have mentioned this more than a few times in the past. I hate college debt forgiveness. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. I have offered a dozen reasons why I hate it and you can read those here, but I think it goes so deep with me because it’s personal.

As a kid, growing up in the blue collar town of West Allis, I was a saver. I saved every five bucks I got for cutting grass or shoveling snow or, later, painting houses. A few weeks after I turned 16 I got a job at McDonald’s. Now I was into real money — $2.35 an hour — and all that went into my savings account for college.

I wanted to go to the UW Madison. I was a pretty good student. I applied. I got in. But then I had to do some hard thinking and some hard accounting. My parents had made it clear from the start that I was on my own for college. In fact, to prepare me for that, they had me pay half my tuition for my senior year of high school at Thomas More. I looked at my life’s savings, which was something over $3,000, and I added up tuition and living expenses over four years and I concluded that, even with a part time job and working summers I couldn’t make it work. I never considered taking out a loan.

So, instead of coming to Madison I lived at home and went to UW Milwaukee for my freshman and sophomore years. I kept working — washing dishes, working on a loading dock — and saving. I finally transferred to Madison for my final two years. And, because I graduated a semester late, I did end up taking out a small loan. I dutifully paid it back over a decade.

Now, I know what you’re going to say. That was then. College is a lot more expensive now. It is, but the principle doesn’t change. I would hope that, faced with today’s set of circumstances I would still act responsibly and — here’s the crucial point — without a sense of entitlement. It never occurred to me that my parents would pay for my college and the notion that the taxpayers should have to pick up my costs would have been beyond strange. I was an adult. This was on me to figure out. And I was doing it because I wanted to learn what I could in college and also because I figured I’d earn more in whatever job I got afterwords. I did not think I was doing society a favor.

So, sure the numbers are more challenging, but you still need to make sacrifices. Maybe you don’t go to a school you can’t afford. Maybe you go to a local school and live at home when you’d rather be away. Maybe you skip a semester abroad or you work part-time. Maybe you take a year off and work and save. And maybe you major in something that will pay the bills after you graduate. The point is that if you don’t want to graduate with debt you can’t handle, you don’t have to and it’s on you to figure out how to accomplish that.

I hate student loan forgiveness because to me it’s a fundamental question of values. I believe in hard work, personal responsibility, sacrifice, individualism and even some stoicism. Paying off loans is about getting something for nothing and it rewards the savers and the spendthrifts, the careful planners and the careless, alike. It treats people as members of groups instead of as people with individual circumstances. And nobody who is demanding this will say “thank you” if they get it. For some reason they seem to think it’s owed to them.

So, I don’t just see this as bad public policy (which it is), I don’t just see it as being an overstep of presidential authority (which it also is), but I view this as just flat out wrong. Something that actually rewards and encourages some of the worst human traits.

In fact, I feel so strongly about this that this one issue could force a personal realignment. If the Republicans had someone more palatable on offer, say Nikki Haley, I might well vote for her because of her opposition to student debt forgiveness alone, never mind all of the other things that I disagree with her about. This runs that deep with me.

But the Republicans have Trump and Trump is a non-starter. Not only will I never vote for that awful man, but as long as he leads his party, I will never fail to vote for any Democrat for any office, no matter their position on student debt or any other issue. I will do nothing to aid and abet a party of hard-right, Christian nationalist neo-fascists.

So, I’m stuck. The student debt giveaway would be a deal breaker for me if these were normal times, but these aren’t those. Biden knows this. He can take my vote for granted while he tries to buy the votes of young liberals with my tax dollars. For now, it’ll work. I have no place else to go.

Of course, this will be challenged in the courts and I hope that Biden is stopped again, but that he is reelected nonetheless because the alternative is too awful. If I knew that the cost of defeating Trump was this debt forgiveness scheme, I’d suck it up and pay it. Because that would be the sacrifice, that would be the hard choice between disagreeable alternatives. That would be the adult thing to do.