Student loan forgiveness: you get to pay more

 

Rick McKee’s cartoon seen on PowerLine’s "Week In Pictures"

The Democrats really do want more of your money.  At American Spectator, David Catron reports on the case before the Supreme Court concerning the cancelation of student debt; he begins:

Last week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court concerning the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness plan predictably focused on arcane legal theories such as the “major questions doctrine.” Relatively little time was devoted to the profoundly inequitable structure of the program. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch did note that it would provide benefits to certain favored persons while ignoring the very real costs it would impose on others, but no one mentioned a fact that will gall most taxpayers — it would cancel student loans for college dropouts.

Remarkably, the Biden administration and most Democrats see this as a selling point for the plan. The White House fact sheet puts it as follows: “Nearly one-third of borrowers have debt but no degree, according to an analysis by the Department of Education of a recent cohort of undergraduates.” The Democrats justify canceling these loans because tuition costs have risen, ignoring evidence that the loans have driven that increase. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) claims: “Up to 4 in 10 people with student loan debt weren’t able to graduate, many because of high costs.… Canceling student loan debt would change their lives.”

The problem is that the $400 billion program would also “change the lives” of millions of Americans for the worse. How? It will raise the stealth tax known as inflation. . . .

Read the rest here.

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Impeachment theater

image credit: the superfins.com

Some pundits see this feeding frenzy over the House’s plan to Impeach President Trump as a deliberate attempt to distract from anticipated indictments and now the Biden Ukraine/China scandal.  Neither Adam Schiff nor Nancy Pelosi is specifying what might be presented formally as Articles of Impeachment, which is why Andy McCarthy calls the whole thing an “impeachment show for television.”  David Catron at the Spectator has another take:

It should by now be obvious to the meanest intelligence that the Democrats are determined to impeach President Trump with or without credible evidence that he has committed any act resembling “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The “whistleblower complaint” that Nancy Pelosi used as the pretext for launching her ersatz impeachment inquiry contains little but hearsay and fabrication, while her claim that it proves Trump has “violated the Constitution” fails the laugh test. In the end, however, impeachment is less about offenses committed by the president than the desire of the Washington establishment to put down what they see as a peasants’ revolt.

Impeachment is, in other words, an attempt to restore the old order that the voters overturned in 2016. It seeks to annul that election and return us to the nascent totalitarianism of the Obama era, an incipient autocracy the Democrats expected to be nurtured during the presidency of Hillary Clinton. Thus, when the hoi polloi got above themselves and put Donald Trump in the White House, his removal from office became the primary objective of Washington’s self-appointed Optimates. They began planning Trump’s impeachment before he was inaugurated because he is the leader of the insurrection, and they know full well that it can’t be put down until he is gone.

House Democrats must impeach the president despite the near impossibility of securing a conviction in the Senate. Indeed, their need to do so is more urgent now than ever because of the booming Trump economy and the weakness of their Democratic presidential candidates. As Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), who has introduced several abortive impeachment resolutions, put it in May, “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”

Mr. Catron's full article is here.

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Governor Kasich and Senator Portman on Obamacare

art credit: Conservative Review

The Washington Examiner reports:

Ohio Governor John Kasich said Sunday the collapse of the Republican healthcare bill in the U.S. Senate was a "good thing," but was adamant the policy debate was not over.

David Catron at The American Spectator blog named Portman as one of the six Senators whom he describes as liars, frauds, charlatans – well, you get the idea:

The following Republican Senators demonstrated [last Wednesday] that they are liars and frauds: Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Dean Heller (Nev.), John McCain (Ariz.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and Rob Portman (Ohio).

. . . if a Republican won the 2016 presidential election, the same bill [as an earlier partial repeal bill] or something very similar could be quickly passed by a GOP-controlled Congress and signed into law. Every single Republican who ran for the House or the Senate in 2016 made similar statements, including the six charlatans listed above.

These mountebanks, all of whom voted for “clean repeal” when Obama’s inevitable veto made it safe and politically expedient to do so, voted against a virtually identical bill [last week] — knowing full well that President Trump would sign it. In other words, they consciously betrayed their constituents, their party, and the nation as a whole.

At least we know where Kasich and Portman stand.

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