This galaxy take on student loans tries to convince us that loan forgiveness is “not actually costing anyone any money.” It received a disturbing amount of likes and shares, which means it’s being taken seriously, so here’s the breakdown.
▪️It begins by giving a hypothetical scenario where the lender is charging a 365% interest rate, which is well into loan shark territory. In this scenario, yes the lender could still profit despite forgiving some of the interest accrued, but student loans avg around 7% interest, entirely different.
▪️All money for Federal student loans originates from the US Treasury, which is then sent to the Dept of Education and then to students. Congress appropriates this money each year. It is funded through federal tax dollars (or borrowing) and absolutely costs money.
▪️When recipients repay their loan, this is sent back to the US Treasury (via a student loan servicer middleman). Ostensibly, this would repay the initial taxpayer money sent out, if everyone repaid their loans. If the loans are forgiven, the US Treasury takes the hit.
▪️Pretending it’s not costing money because interest accumulates is nonsensical. In the meme’s hypothetical scenario of 365% interest, yes. But at 7% interest, when the CPI is currently above 8%, the government (i.e. taxpayer) is already losing on the loans.
▪️And that’s if everyone was paying and there were zero costs associated with administering the loans. But people aren’t paying (there’s still a moratorium), there are always defaults, and there are administrative costs.
▪️Plus, not only is $10K per borrower being forgiven, Biden’s order also changes the income-based debt repayment program (IDR) to cap payments at 5% of discretionary income (income exceeding 225% of the poverty line).
▪️Thus, an individual making $75K/yr would only be responsible for $2,221/yr ($185/month) whether they borrowed $20K or $200K. And after 20 years (now sometimes only 10 years) the remaining loan balance is forgiven (i.e. absorbed by the US Treasury).
▪️The result is this will cost a lot of actual money. The Wharton School estimates ~$500B over 10 years, but the real impact could be the changes to the IDR, which could easily cost over $1T as new borrowers change their behavior (take on even more loans).
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/8/26/biden-student-loan-forgiveness
▪️This meme is correct on one aspect, your taxes aren’t paying for loan forgiveness, because the government isn’t adding new taxes to pay for it. It will simply add to the debt, which will be paid by future taxpayers and/or through inflation. But it will certainly cost someone actual money.
As with the leftist freak out over “banned books” this is not banning books, it’s still easy to get Harry Potter and bookstores should be able to limit whatever books they want for whatever reason. But not only does it show a double standard, the rationale is far less justifiable than removing certain content from school libraries. At least there the justification was the content of certain books are inappropriate for children, clearly not every book should be available in a school library. Here, there’s no argument about the content they just don’t like the author’s politics!
Because news came out about his letter to the FBI, revealing he was a nutcase. The letter was rambling and incoherent, claiming he was trained by the US military off the books, and that Walz had instructed him to kill Amy Klobuchar so he could run for Senate. None of it made any sense (Walz is not running for Senate) and none of the assassinations made any sense, even in a diabolical way.
Nearly all of his hit list was Democrats (including Walz) and abortion clinics, but he was supposedly working for Walz?! Plus, one of the guys he killed wasn’t even on his list, and others were no longer in office or deceased. None of it makes sense from any coherent angle.
Basically, it appears the guy was mentally ill and neither the left or right can use the incident to push their agendas anymore, so the story was dropped.
This is so dumb. First, this means LA began as Spanish land founded to support Spanish missions (i.e. colonialism). Which contradicts their entire premise. But the reality is that Los Angeles is a quintessential American city.
▪️When the US acquired California in the 1840s, LA was a small town of less than 2,000 people. It was basically nothing. It became large only after the gold rush and the railroads completed in the 1870-80s, which brought thousands of new settlers and a booming commercial center.
▪️But LA had a major issue limiting its growth, no water. It wasn’t until Mulholland found a water source and built an aqueduct down from Northern California that LA had the infrastructure to grow into a major city.
▪️Then, a combination of oil, real estate and the film industry caused it to boom in the early 1900s. Post WWII, industries like aerospace continued its spectacular growth. Calling this “Mexican land” is a brain dead take. Neither the Mexicans, Spanish nor ...
