The alleged cost of $300 billion for the Biden tuition debt forgiveness plan was challenged by the White House as too high. Then the figure went up to $500 billion. Now the respected University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business estimates that it will cost up to $1 trillion. Putting the merits of such debt forgiveness aside, the unilateral plan to waive up to a trillion dollars without congressional approval is a dangerous and unconstitutional violation of our system of the separation of powers. Those Democrats applauding this plan in Congress are celebrating their own institutional obsolescence.
The Wharton analysis of the student loan forgiveness plan found that the cost could be $1 trillion over a 10-year period.
What is so troubling is that, not only did Biden circumvention Congress with the constitutional control of the purse, but this plan has divided the nation. While supported by a majority, there is intense opposition to the plan and its costs. The polling also shows conflicting concerns and support from the public as they learn more about the plan.
A new Emerson College Polling national survey found that 36% believe the loan handout is too much and 35% believe that it is just right. Thirty percent think it is not enough. Only roughly half of the country believes it will actually help students gain access to a college education. One poll shows roughly half of the country supporting the plan while another poll shows 59% are concerned that the plan will fuel inflation. A NPR/Ipsos survey found 82% of respondents believed the government should prioritize making college more affordable over forgiving student loans.
This is precisely what congressional action is meant to address in vetting ideas and the costs of such ideas. Instead, we are scrambling to learn the costs and expected impact after it is already approved by unilateral action of the president.
The celebration of members of Congress over the circumvention of their institution is hardly news. Members like Sen. Jeff Merkley (D, Ore.) have been calling on Biden to just act unilaterally.
When Madison described the essence of his constitutional vision of the separation of powers in Federalist 51, he declared “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
No branch is supposed to have enough power to govern alone. Once power becomes concentrated in the hands of a president, citizens are left only with the assurance that such unchecked power will be used wisely – a Faustian bargain the framers repeatedly warned us never to accept.
The Madisonian vision has long been on the decline in Congress. One of the lowest points was the State of the Union address by former President Barack Obama when he announced that he intended to go it alone in achieving his policy goals, refusing to yield to the actions of Congress. One would have expected an outcry, or at least stony silence, from a branch that was being told it would be circumvented. Instead, there was rapturous applause that bordered on a collective expression of institutional self-loathing.
Now these members are applauding a president waiving a trillion dollars unilaterally because he knew that he could not get such a massive waiver from Congress. It is precisely what the Framers sought to avoid in a system of shared powers. Yet, even law professors are denouncing our constitutional system as the evil that must be attacked to achieve social justice. The embrace of such concentration of authority in a single politician is precisely what the condemned “constitutionalism” is meant to avoid.
For those who claim to be fighting for our constitutional system and democracy, this may be a good place to start.
“A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money”–Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen. (This statement has been adjusted for inflation. However, it’s far from certain that Sen. Dirksen actually said this, though the statement is consistent with his personality.)
He actually said it, although he said “billions.”
You gotta hand it to good old “Big Guy Joe”. In Venezuela Chavez handed out food vouchers at the poles so people who were starving would vote for him. He got 95% of the vote. Here in America we’re the same thing as a banana republic with a higher price tag. Biden may get some of the vote of the college student but he will lose the vote of the poor sucker who worked hard and paid the debt in full. The blue collar worker will know that he is footing the bill for the college kid. Many Democrats have said (see Pelosi) that this would be a bad move. Biden would have been smarter to let it go until after the election but smarter left town a long time ago. Palm to face.
Biden is brain dead, he doesn’t know the difference from the crap in his pants that he’s eating from chocolate pudding.
Anyone seen Obama’s old crew around, Garland, Rice, the IRS gal that was targeting all non Commie/Nazi Types years back? etc…..
Wonder what they’re up to now?
At 6:21 Anonymous posted a link about farm subsidies by Politico. What she failed to make clear was this sentence from the Politico article. “ But bipartisan lawmakers are now calling for adding as much as $50 billion to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s arsenal in the next stimulus package to help producers stung by supply chain disruptions.” What part of the word bipartisan does Anonymous not understand. Instead it’s just more of the blame Trump for everything game that Anonymous always plays. Like one of those old 78 rpm records played on Biden’s record player thats stuck on a groove and plays the same sound over and over again. Will someone please oh please nudge the needle.
Wait so if next year a bipartisan Congress decided to forgive more student debt, you’d suddenly feel like Biden’s actions here are ok?
The issue is not whether the move has retroactive bipartisan support, it is whether the executive has taken an unconstitutional action by appropriating funds without congressional approval.
In both cases, this happened. Because you never answered last time I asked, please let me know what appropriations bill delegated to President Trump the authority to offer direct bail outs to wealthy farmers.
All presidents do it nowadays, which is unfortunate because it just means we taxpayers foot the bill so that a president can buy the vote of a Florida orange grower or an educated suburban soccer mom.
It would be a good place to start. Good luck convincing people whose brains switch off, as if by magic, the second a dem talking point comes up. The only thing that will get through to them is to feel some of the monetary pain everybody else is experiencing. As in 2008, I don’t know how that happens. The elites’ lives never changed. Why would they care? There are a great many people on this planet so insulated by monetary, often generational wealth that quite literally nothing touches them.
‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’
This is not only an Entitlement Program marauding as Loan Forgiveness,
It is also a massive Trillion Dollar Banking Bailout.
It’s also unconstitutional, but leftists only think about the Constitution when it benefits them.
While I am interested in JT’s conclusion that the loan forgiveness program is a dangerous and unconstitutional separation of powers, I would like to see in future posts or columns a thorough explanation and analysis of that conclusion, including an analysis of the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that explains why the program is lawful.
“The Biden administration says it has the authority to unilaterally cancel student loan debt under the terms of the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act of 2003. According to President George W. Bush, who signed the act into law, it “permits the Secretary of Education to waive or modify Federal student financial assistance program requirements to help students and their families or academic institutions affected by a war, other military operation, or national emergency.” Basically, the HEROES Act was designed to let the executive branch ameliorate the student loan situations of service members fighting the war on terror.”
https://reason.com/2022/08/25/will-bidens-student-loan-debt-cancellation-plan-hold-up-in-court/
You know I’d be glad to paying off the college students loans But I’m Already Payoff the DeadBeat Billionaires Repeated Bailouts of Warren Buffet & his Par, Charlie “Suck It Up” Munger, AIG’s Hank Greenburg tab, JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimond bill, Goldman Sachs, etc, etc…..
So as you can see I can’t afford anymore Deadbeats to support & all their Commie/Fascist Marxist Crap & Wallst’s same type Crap.
Can’t we just send them all to Nazi Ukraine?
*********
Politics
Middle Class Americans Mock Biden’s Student Loan Bailout in Scathing Ad
Infowars.com
August 28th 2022, 12:41 pm
https://www.infowars.com/posts/middle-class-americans-mock-bidens-student-loan-bailout-in-scathing-ad/
While perusing YouTube yesterday I almost fell out of my chair when viewing this opinion from The NewYork Times concerning Democratic governance. I had to look twice because I thought I was viewing something from Fox News. Sure enough it was from the Times. Will wonders never cease. It’s worth a listen. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDgcjVGHIw
Talk is cheap (to the left & the accomplice media).
It takes money to buy whiskey.
always money for a war. but curse those damn graduate students.
How about neither?
People like Skooby want to hate fascists and tyrants but he wants to not have a military?? I guess when China invades Taiwan we can send in some freshly graduated gender studies majors to save us.
Hey Skooby, the Iranians throw gays off of roofs, want to have a strong military to protect against that coming here?
This initiative by Biden* is corrupt vote buying and everyone including ignorant Dems know it. It cannot stand a test in the courts because Biden* does not have the authority to waive repayment of funds like this. It will be overturned. If it is not, then why do we need a Congress from this point on?
Student loans were secularized and those bonds were sold to pension managers around the world, however mostly to pension managers here in the USA. This will cause serious trouble throughout several economies. . This exercise is a Obama/Biden gift to our enemies.
Let’s call this what it is. This is another unconstitutional and Lawless act by the Biden administration and Democrats. They claim to be protecting democracy, but do everything in their power to violate the Constitution which is the ultimate law in our country. John truly surely understands that every aspect of what has been done in this vote buying scheme is unconstitutional, and just plainly state that.
This is not even vote buying.
Those who are brought out to vote for democrats by this will get ripped off.
It will be challenged.
It will fail.
It will not happen.
There is no way that Biden will be allowed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on his own personal authority.
But left wing nuts who think they are getting a free ride, will then blame republicans for taking away what Biden was never free to give.
Of course it is. Just like farm subsidies!
Farm subsidies were passed by the legislature and approved by both Democrats and Republicans. They were not put in place by a signature of a President. Of course straw man analogies are not unusual by Anonymous. It’s your right wish to be ruled by a king but most of the rest of us would prefer that a proper legislative process to be adhered to when it comes to the spending of our tax dollars. You can say all hail to the king but I’ll have to pass. There are subsidies that I do not agree with but I accept them now with the idea that they may be eliminated later when they have been reevaluated. I do not expect that such duly passed subsidies will be eliminated or employed with a stroke of a Kings quill.
Hey, ATS! I would be fine with ending farm subsidies.
Then you would have to pay us our true value of what we produce. Food.
You think food prices are high? Imagine paying me $15 for a gallon of milk. $12 for a pound of ground chuck. $20 for a pound of bacon.
Sorry, man. Upstate South Carolina is beautiful, but I am a free market guy (like most fiscal conservatives should be). I don’t support government handouts to farmers earning $900,000 a year. I would rather import my food from the rest of the world.
Just a heads up for thought, what if no one no longer takes dollars for their product?
I’ve a 50 trillion currency note from Zimbabwe.
I’d be glad to trade it to anyone for 20000 head of cattle delivered.
Any Takers?
Actually, nobody in any part of the government should simply cancel loans made on the backs of the American people as that is simply a form of stealing. Moreover, those who accept any debt cancellation is like the person who borrows let’s say $2k from a neighbor, pays back $500, but then another person who was assigned to monitor the payback of the loan simply declares the loan repayment no longer necessary and tough luck to the lender for the remainder.
For those who may simply have their debt “cancelled” by the government, they should be advised that they still owe the debt that cannot be so “cancelled,” so they cannot merely claim that “the government cancelled my debts so there is nothing I can do.” Wrong! To pay back their obligation to the American people, they will have to contribute to the general fund in one form or another. Otherwise, they are participants in the stealing of the money even if declared “legal, etc.”
In response to your analogy, it would be like that third party saying you no longer have to pay the remaining 1500$, so we are going to make all the other neighbors on the street pick up the balance, that’s what the government is doing, coughs*, excuse me, Biden is doing.
Passing out $1 trillion of taxpayers’ monies to a select group of residents — bypassing completely the Constitution — would seem to be a “high crime”.
You mean like the $168 billion the USDA gives annually to farmers? Over ten years, that is >$1 Trillion.
Anonymous, farm subsidies were passed by the legislature. If you have a problem with farm subsidies you should bring it up with your Democratic friends who voted for the farm subsidies bill. The point is that the proper legislative process not ruled by the decree of a king is what we expect in a nation comprised of laws by the consent of the governed. This is a basic tenet of the formulation of our nation. What part do you not understand
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/14/donald-trump-coronavirus-farmer-bailouts-359932
Please show me where Congress approved Trump’s usage of $28B in bailouts funneled through USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation.
Trump used this Depression-era alphabet soup agency, basically making him FDR.
Even worse, it allowed farmers earning less than $900K per year to receive money. Hardly “working class” folks.
Trump also circumvented Congressional approval to pay for his fiscally irresponsible border wall. If your recall, Congress shut down for 35 days because it refused to fund it in 2018. In all, Trump used $19B for his border wall, using funds not allocated by Congress for this purposes.
Neither party cares about fiscal responsibility these days. Buying votes, whether it is Obama with the auto bailouts, Trump with farmers/nativists, or Biden with student loans, is the new norm.
How many billions of dollars are taxpayers giving to the government and states to fund social programs that find its way in the pockets of illegals that are pouring into said border? 🤔
And …? The House impeached him twice but never thought the farm “bailout” (as you put it) worthy of a high crime, likely because Congress had provided such “bailouts” (as you put it) before. Repositioning budgeted funds as Trump did with the wall is know as “administration” which is why the President and his folks are there. If you don’t like what they did, sue them (many did) or vote against them (many did). Congress has acquiesced to the Administrative branch in its legislation and oversight on a more frequent basis (apparently, Congress decided they could be re-elected by doing nothing especially after they saw Biden elected President with the same inactivity) especially in the past 50 years. The states need to reclaim their power under the Constitution; I’m confident then that the power Congress seeks will be available only by reclaiming Constitutional power from the “phone and pen” Administrative state.
Please take note that these subsidies were voted upon by Congress and signed into law. The loan forgiveness, not so much,,,
Imagine if Donald J. Trump were to wave his presidential wand and grant 500 billion to 1,000 billion in loan relief or similar appropriations for a particular constituency.
Joe Biden’s handlers must be held to account, not just by jawboning about how they can’t do this and hope to get away with it — they must be held to account in such a way it costs them on a personal level —
Obama did the DACA thing although he said at the time that he knew it was illegal what he was doing — that was just one example of the excesses of his 8 years in office, including aiding and abetting in using the levers of the government again Trump while he was a candidate, and even afterwards.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/14/donald-trump-coronavirus-farmer-bailouts-359932
And this only includes direct relief. We don’t have to imagine…
It’s only income redistribution when it benefits the educated workforce, ya know, the one actually generating the majority of this country’s GDP. When all the money and subsidies gets funneled to rural workers in red states, that’s just common sense.
So only people with college degrees are valuable to our economy? Next time your toilet is clogged, please call someone with a PHD in Gender Studies.
Educated workers generate more economic output per hour worked than non-educated workers. Allocating capital to them is therefore putting money into the hands of those who’ve shown they’re most capable in generating value and will show the greatest ROI. Unless you think the government holding onto that money would be more efficient?
Hey, ATS!
All us uneducated, rural workers we produce something you need everyday: Food.
Every time you open your fat maw to stuff your fat face, thank a farmer.
I dont need your fat over educated gender studies butt.
You got a bad attitude punk
Well if they are making all the money, then why can’t they pay their loans?
Someone please post the authority that grants the President the power to issue such an Executive Order? Where in Constitution or Federal Law does the President possess that power to spend 300 Billion to One Trillion Dollars without Congress passing a Bill beginning in the House of. Representatives and approved by the Senate?
Anyone care to post that authority and defend it?
Why are. not the Republican House and Senate Leadership not filing a Law Suit or taking other official action to stop this madness?
Look at the Rinos in charge. THAT is why. Uniparty who hate Trump because he exposed the corruption of our government….both sides.
I read a story once about how a statue of King Henry the VIII in a museum had the cod piece worn away in admiration by the hands of British female museum visitors. It makes me wonder if a statue of King Biden will be so adored by his female followers on the left. King Henry the VIII could declare the law with a stroke of his pen so why can’t King Biden do the same. My Lady Pelosi once said that the King does not have the power to declare an appropriation to be law with out the consent of the governed. Now she too strokes the frontal accoutrement of the Grand King Biden. Where is the respect for your vote given to send your representative to Congress to represent you interest. The phrase “no taxation without representation” comes to mind. The stroking should come to an end.
WHERE IS THE SUPREME COURT???
CONGRESS HAS NO POWER TO TAX TO PROVIDE STUDENT LOANS OR TO PAYOFF STUDENT LOANS
COURTS MUST EXECUTE JUDICIAL REVIEW OF ACTS OF THE EXECUTIVE AND LEGISLATIVE BRANCHES
___________________________________________________________________________________________
“The doctrine of judicial review holds that the courts are vested with the authority to determine the legitimacy of the acts of the executive and the legislative branches of government.”
– DOJ https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/judicial-review-united-states
_______________________________________________________________________
Congress has the power to tax for ONLY debt, defense and infrastructure (general Welfare – ALL WELL ADVANCE).
Congress has no power to loan money to individuals and groups of individuals.
Congress has no power to tax for individual welfare, specific welfare, particular welfare, favor or charity.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Article 1, Section 8
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States;…
Something that saddens me.
The lefties on this blog are becoming more strident, angrier, less polite, and far louder (we will see certain lefties post 10 and 20 responses to the same article).
It is almost as if having failed to win the argument through logic, they think that insults and repetition will win the day.
Degrades the blog.
Monument,
As I have mentioned before, they seem desperate, even shrill at times.
However, I do have to thank them for insight into wokeism and what a threat it is to America.
If it were not for them, I would not be so well informed now.
Monument,
I have noted the sudden silence of the wokeisters on wokeism.
For that matter, a few of the regular leftists are suddenly absent.
I am thinking they have become aware that wokeism is being soundly rejected by the majority of people. Hence, they are focused on Trump only.
A vote at any cost (to the tax payer). This latest attempt to garner votes is only a prelude for more to come in September and October.
Comparing student loan forgiveness with PPP loans is a false equivalence.
State governments shut down businesses. Business owners still had to pay rent, utilities, and taxes. PPP loans enabled them to keep paying their employees. If the government forces your business to close, it owes you recompense. A PPP loan only covered payroll and a few operating expenses. It didn’t make you whole. It didn’t undo the damage and financial catastrophe of getting shut down. Then the government paid people $600 a week NOT to work, which made it harder to get employees back when the shutdowns eased.
When you take out a loan, you give your word that you will pay it back. You pledged your word for the loan, and you received the money. You owe the money. Not me. Not your neighbors. It’s not our loan. It’s yours. Pay it back. When you take out a car loan, you owe the money. Not your neighbors. When you buy a house, you owe the money, not the renters in the apartment complex down the street.
People get in over their head in student loans, racking up as much money as it takes to buy a house, in some cases. Many don’t analyze the cost/benefit ratio. If you borrow money to obtain a degree, it should be a useful, marketable degree that will enable you to get higher paying jobs than otherwise. Don’t take out $150,000 in student loans to get a degree in comparative gender studies or gender queer literature. We taxpayers are not going to pay for your hobbies so you can be qualified to work at Starbucks. We taxpayers are also not going to pay for the degrees of doctors, lawyers, and other white collar workers who will make more money than most of us.
There are already scholarships for those who cannot afford college. By all means, improve the network of scholarship programs, and help students find scholarships. One means to improve this is to better train high school counselors. The counselor at my high school was incompetent.
Loan forgiveness, or shoveling more taxpayer money on the bloated university system, creates upward pressure on the cost of college tuition. Like the student loan programs, it will just make college more unaffordable, as universities keep jacking up the price and giving themselves raises.
Any politician, pundit, or Jack on the street who compares loan forgiveness with a PPP loan either doesn’t understand the difference, or is selling propaganda.
Why is it bad policy for the government to subsidize education, which is essentially what this is? We already give similar “hand-outs” to individuals for loans (mortgage interest and property taxes are tax deductible) and companies (subsidies to farmers, businesses if they invest in opportunity zones, etc…). It’s better for society if more individuals are educated; on the whole it results in more innovation and productivity. Most students also don’t major in “useless” fields like underwater basket weaving. The most popular majors are things like business, health, engineering.
State governments have been cutting back on funding to higher ed since the 80s, this merely starts to put more of the responsibility back of the government instead of the individual.
Anonymous asked, “Why is it bad policy for the government to subsidize education.”
First, there are scholarships available for those without financial means. We can improve and expand merit-based scholarships to academically gifted students who otherwise could not go to college. That is, indeed, a good cause, but this method is more targeted to those in need, who, and this is critical, would actually succeed in college.
Second, I already wrote that such blanket loan forgiveness will actually lead to increased tuition costs in the long run. Student loans dumped a windfall of cash in the laps of universities. This created market pressure for them to increase tuition costs, and create unmarketable fluff majors that are absolutely worthless in the jobs market, but it appeals to students who are not academically prepared, but have money to spend they couldn’t otherwise earn through a scholarship. With loan forgiveness, universities figure that students now have an additional $10,000 to borrow in their budgets. From the students’ perspective, if the US government forgave loans once, they’ll do it again. That incentivizes them to borrow more money than they can afford, assuming they’ll be bailed out again. Within a few years, you’ll have a whole new crop of college graduates, with more debt than ever before. Then the wailing and teeth gnashing will begin again to forgive more money at taxpayer expense, and that will lead to higher tuition, and then 4 years later…
Third, this is an income redistribution scheme that will benefit people making up to twice the national income average and 10 times the poverty line. While it’s been described as a way to help poor kids get to college, scholarships do that. Why in the world should blue collar taxpayers pay for the college tuition of people from families making $125,000? College graduates make more money than other demographics, yet they’re the ones who benefit from the $10,000 loan forgiveness, off the backs of people who didn’t go to college.
Fourth, this will add to already historic inflation. People already have a difficult time keeping the lights on, and affording gas and groceries. Now they have to get squeezed even more, by 87,000 IRS agents, to pay for the college degrees of doctors, lawyers, and gender studies majors. Not only is this helping upper income families, but the higher inflation it will produce will make it even harder to make ends meet.
You assume the country would be better off if more people went to college. Why? If every bricklayer, construction worker, and plumber went to college, instead of going into the trades, would the country be better off? It is indisputable that universities have proliferated useless degrees to cater to students that are not academically prepared for college, but have money to spend. Those people are not better off with a degree they can’t use. The trend is for the expansion of LGTBQ+ majors and similarly unmarketable degrees. Just a few decades ago, most people went to college for specific qualifications for white collar jobs. Now, they just go to get a degree, any degree, and then figure out what they want to do afterward. That’s why there are people with PhDs working unskilled jobs saddled with high debt, which was one of the motivations for student loan forgiveness. Instead of reducing the number of unmarketable degrees that aren’t worth the high cost of tuition, Biden just added to the pressure to create more of them.
This punishes people who saved up for their kids’ college, worked extra jobs, worked during college (like I did), and those graduates who forwent vacations, travel, and partying because they worked 2 jobs to pay off their student loans. It punishes people who were responsible, and that has a deleterious effect on society as a whole. It’s a slap in the face to the responsible, and those who are younger, who will just miss this handout, will feel that’s unfair.
You said, “this merely starts to put more of the responsibility back of the government instead of the individual.” Why do you think this is good? With this kind of thinking, we can make government responsible for our housing costs, health care, all education costs…in short, just like Venezuela. Putting all individual responsibility in the hands of government requires the abdication of individual rights, and it tends not to end well. In this case, Biden circumvented the separation of powers, and Congress’ power of the purse, to the tune of $1 trillion dollars, but you’re defending it because you like the result.
Karen S,
An outstanding response!
The unmarketable degrees part. By mandating DEI courses for graduation, they there by create an entire industry of self-interested useless degrees and positions.
When I drive over a bridge, I am thankful there was one or more engineers who crunched the numbers to successfully have it built safely. And to the guys who did the actual construction. Those would be blue collar workers.
Same goes if my electrical power was provided by a nuclear power plant the people who engineered it, and run it.
Medical? From the doctors, to the nurses, to the pharmacists. Okay, the administrators and insurance companies, not so much.
Any of those DEI . . . nope. Got no use for it. Heck, astronomy, oceanography, geology are far more interesting than anything DEI. More practical too. If I were forced to take a DEI course, I would do the bare minimum to get a C. And then promptly forget it.
Like to think as time goes on, we recover from this insanity, and start downsizing these positions in the corporate world. To a degree some companies are seeing the writing on the wall: Go woke, go broke. Not lost on me Netflix has 86ed a number of their woke, low/no profit programs. You cannot invest that kind of money that only appeals to, what? 0.001% of the country? Sure, the wokeists are trying to inflate that number by sexualizing children when they are young and impressionable. More and more parents are either opting out with homeschooling, or the numbers of people who traditionally voted Dem are turning to the GOP. That would be your Asian, and Hispanic minorities.
As others have noted, a college degree full of wokeism, may not be worth that six figure loan. So you got a PhD in DEI studies. Great. Now get back to work and make me the cappuccino I ordered.
I guess the “trickle down” economics of Reagan is dead…
I agree with most of what you said here, but as a libertarian, I wish conservatives had similar thoughts about hypocritical agricultural subsidies and Trumpy tariffs to support a mercantilist concept of foreign trade.
I see this as a direct government handout that is no different from Trump’s tariffs on Canadian milk. Hello, Wisconsin, you beautiful battleground state!
“I guess the “trickle down” economics of Reagan is dead…”
“No such theory has been found in even the most voluminous and learned histories of economic theories, including J.A. Schumpeter’s monumental 1,260-page History of Economic Analysis. Yet this “Trickle Down” Theory and “Tax Cuts for the Rich” non-existent theory* has become the object of denunciations from the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the political arena. It has been attacked by Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton and Professor Peter Corning of Stanford, among others, and similar attacks have been repeated as far away as India. It is a classic example of arguing against a caricature instead of confronting the argument actually made. Thomas Sowell.
“I agree with most of what you said here, but as a libertarian, I wish conservatives had similar thoughts about hypocritical agricultural subsidies and Trumpy tariffs to support a mercantilist concept of foreign trade.”
In principle libertarians and many conservatives reject the “Trumpy” tariffs, but their use was based on the security interests of the US and would have disappeared if those security interests were satisfied. Some think everything is clear cut, but that is a fallacy.
“I see this as a direct government handout that is no different from Trump’s tariffs on Canadian milk. Hello, Wisconsin, you beautiful battleground state!”
I am not voicing my opinion of this action, but there was a trade dispute involved.
I would like to see the end of agricultural subsidies.
Then you would pay me my true worth to produce something you need everyday: Food.
That is right. Pay me my true worth to produce all those things in your fridge, in your pantry.
For my uneducated labor, $15 for a gallon of milk. $15 for a half dozen eggs. $20 for a pound of bacon.
Pay me for my true worth, for my labor to feed you.
“It’s better for society if more individuals are educated.”
It’s also “better for society” if more people are physically fit. Does that justify forcing me to pay for their gym membership?
Redistribution schemes are always rationalized on collectivist grounds — on what’s “good” for society. And they always evade the question: Who pays?
“Redistribution schemes are always rationalized on collectivist grounds — on what’s “good” for society. And they always evade the question: Who pays?”
Sam, people need to read Bastiat. The Known and the unknown.
The problem is too many can only see what is in front of their noses, forgetting the rest. They miss the unknown part of paying the price, which is vast and multiplied by the disruption of the marketplace.
Odd….my neighbor could not get financing from a Bank to buy a Dump Truck….and the government was not interested either.
I backed him and he put up his life’s savings and bought that truck…..and generated 17,000 US dollars revenue this month.
Yet now he is having to pick up some Jerk’s College Loan Debt?
Folks….even those who are going too benefit from this….are still going to have to pay far more than they gain in extra taxes, lower wages, lack of jobs, and higher costs for everything they manage to buy in the future.
But watch the dummies fall for it and sell their vote to the Democrats who will pay them using tax money…..coming from the very ones that sold their vote.
If their degrees and Grade Point Averages cannot provide them a job that lets them pay off their debts….they are responsible for that themselves….and do not deserve a bail out.
Band aid that doesn’t address the real problem (which is the absurdly high cost of education) but it’s nice to see actual people get some help from USG instead of the usual corporate welfare queens.