Is there a special interest, media-anointed “victim” group, or bogus “crisis,” to – or about – which Sen. Elizabeth Warren won’t pander or stand as self-sanctified savior?
Throughout her long and fantastical journeys in government and on its money-making legal and real estate periphery, she has shown a knack for tossing up a dizzying array of poses (American Indian, concerned about housing costs) in the manner of comedian Rip Taylor (RIP) tossing glitter on a crowd.
And, now, once more, college loan recipients – specifically female (can one even claim there are females in Warren’s woke, overly sensitized, gender-sanitized, world?) college loan recipients -- are her go-to card in the virtue-signal game.
As Ashe Schow adroitly observes for DailyWire, the faux-Indian offered more faux “information” in what sure looks like a pandering expression of selective “care” about college debt holders when, on March 24, she Tweeted:
Women owe over two-thirds of student debt. Canceling student debt would help give millions of women a fair shot at starting a business, saving for a home, and pursuing their dreams. Student debt is a gender justice issue. It’s time for @POTUS to act.
Acting comes to mind when one thinks of the stately senator from Massachusetts, but it’s acting of a more theatrical sort.
This is particularly valuable to remember when studying her claim, and when looking at the history of how government involvement in college loans and grants contributed to titanic price increases in college so-called “educations.”
First, the immediate claim. To stick with the comic theme, Schow rips it to shreds in his DailyWire piece, and others have added their own insights to bolster the argument that Warren’s statements about women owing over two-thirds of student does not show any connection to reality.
He notes:
As The Daily Wire has previously reported (twice, actually, over the past three years) women do not hold two-thirds of student debt. They hold just over half. Warren is repeating a claim made by the Women’s March and Time’s Up, which includes bad math. Warren at least left the numbers out of her tweet to avoid people pointing out her math was bad, but her tweet is still wrong. There is $1.7 trillion dollars’ worth of student debt owed, and women owe $929 billion of that – which is 54.6%, not two-thirds.
Now, before we move on, it’s valuable to recall that all of these debtors willingly acquired their loans and chose these burdens. But, of course, Liz Warren not only tries to paint them as victims, but as “gender justice victims.”
Schow adds:
The implications from Warren’s claim are also wrong. The tweet and Leftist history of claiming women victimhood suggest it is unfair that women hold so much debt. In reality, women are doing better than men when it comes to college debt. Women make up 59.5% of all college students as of spring 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported, while men made up just 40.5% of enrollment.
This means that while women make up 59.5% of students, they hold just 54.6% of the debt, while men – who make up just 40.5% of students – hold 45.4% of the debt.
Oops.
But, again, to stay focused on the percentages is to stare at a sub-topic in a larger propaganda photo about which Liz Warren wants people to be concerned, and it’s not anyone’s concern but those who took the loans.
This is the typical socialist play: collectivize the risk, forcing payments from people who had nothing to do with the problem, and concentrate the benefits on not just the people who get the college experience and then don’t have to pay back the entire loan, but also on the colleges, which rake in the bucks and get to keep increasing their charges thanks to the government artificially increasing demand.
A more perfect example of moral hazard could not be found.
If you would like a deep dive into the decades-long history of government subsidies pushing up college costs, pushing kids into schools they would not normally attend, shifting many of those kids away from tradesman skill-sets that could leave them earning more with lower debt, please read my May 26 2021 MRCTV piece that predicted the coming push for college loan “forgiveness” which is, in fact, a shifting of college loan costs onto people who never took out the loans.
In part, I noted that previous Oval Office occupants have “forgiven” huge swaths of debt, and done so through the same politically-tinged screening process that Warren pushes.
It started with Obama’s announcement of the ‘PAYE’ or ‘Pay As you Earn’ change in the way the unconstitutional Department of Education would handle repayment of federal college loans. In a change announced in 2011 and implemented in December of 2012, this Executive Branch action saw the feds cap yearly repayments of ten-year college loans for single people at ten percent of the debtor’s annual gross income. But that wasn’t enough for Obama, so in 2014, he announced an expansion to his original re-work – and this was an expansion that actually saw a cut-off point beyond which loan recipients would no longer have to pay a dime.
Isn’t that nice of them? And by "them," I mean, us?
Of course, we didn’t have a say. We just pay.
I also noted that, despite Biden putting off “Executive” action, the way Warren wants him to do it (or the way she is promoting it in order to make it seem like some incredibly important “gender justice” issue, when the feds shouldn’t have offered college loans in the first place) the collectivists and obsequious GOP were going to keep pushing for it.
As I warned almost a year ago: It’s coming. Beware.
You likely didn’t need that warning at all. But it’s probably a good idea to warn a few friends about this, because Warren and her ilk will not stop until they pilfer even more from us, and blow the horns of “virtue” as they do.
Sen. @MarshaBlackburn: "Joe Biden really has earned that 55% disapproval rating, hasn't he?" pic.twitter.com/kZqLcapBpI
— MRCTV (@mrctv) April 4, 2022