Tag: student loans

Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Biden Student Debt Forgiveness Scam

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1.5 Trillion Hole

Let’s say you’re a high school senior looking forward to beginning your college career.

Warning: the caution lights are flashing red.  The American post-secondary education system is in shambles extracting what often turns out to be a lifetime of indentured servitude for more than half (55%) of bachelor’s degree recipients (2020). Don’t believe me? At this very moment, 15% of all American adults report they still have outstanding undergraduate student debt. Student loans now outpace auto loans by close to half a trillion dollars ($412 billion). In fact, student loan debt is second only to mortgage debt. Why so much debt? It’s not just our own government, add in the private sector, the financial community getting rich off the misery of young Americans and then there’s rapacious colleges both public and private. Over the past twenty years the average tuition at public colleges and universities has risen 144%, many times greater than the rate of inflation. The easy availability of student loans has sparked a veritable gold rush— college presidents being paid like corporate CEOs, senior administrators living high off the hog, expensive vanity building projects, and football and basketball coaches making off with multi-million-dollar salaries. Like the football coach at the University of Alabama who will make $10 million this year. The worst obscenity of all — forgiving student debt won’t cost the average American one cent in extra taxes. The same can’t be said for the $64 billion dollars going to Ukraine, most of which will land in the coffers of U.S. defense contractors and Ukraine oligarchs. Don’t think students deserve a debt jubilee? Read Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Biden Student Debt Forgiveness Scam and maybe you’ll change your mind.

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Let Them Eat Cake —The New American Way

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Nary a peep of protest on the streets. No sign waving, no marching, no anything. Yet here we are on the crest of an 8.5% inflation tsunami. The statistics are mind-boggling —gas up 38%, beef up 20%, used cars up 40%, everything the American people buy: food, fuel, rent, clothing, up double digits. How about that summer vacation that you can’t afford to take or the visit to grandma that isn’t going to happen? The biggest burden falls on the 45 million students who are up to their eyeballs in debt beholden to crooked bankers, hedge fund sharpies and, would you believe it, their own government. What happened? $1.8 trillion owed by sixty-five percent of college graduates to the tune of almost $40,000 each.. Remember the crowds on the street protesting the Iraq war? It was young Americans who got the movement going. Back in the day, Vietnam protests were student generated. But forty-five million students in debt peonage don’t have the time or energy to protest. Stifling dissent is becoming the new American way. But curbing protest is not the only reason to hog tie students with huge debts. Profit has become a constitutional right for rich Americans. Banks raking in the dough of cash-strapped students. Defense contractors and their investors pocketing billions as the Biden administration prolongs the Ukraine war with more killing machines. The oil companies take a back seat to no one when it comes to thievery. Where are the government regulators when gas prices explode? Good question. Enough corruption in plain sight to start hundreds of mass protests. But the young people are no-shows trapped in a market-based higher education system that hands out rewards to providers at the expense of recipients. Maybe that’s why both Biden and Obama made campaign promises about debt cancellation and free public college that they had no intention of keeping. It’s not just the first amendment that’s on the verge of disappearing, there’s much, much more. In Let Them Eat Cake — The New American Way, we follow the money and discover the enormous profit center forty-five million Americans have become.

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U.S. Colleges on the Dole While Students Wind up Debt Slaves: All in a Day’s Work in the Empire

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Student Loan Burden

“The elite universities including Princeton and Yale admit more students from the top 1% of earners in America than from the bottom 60% combined.” (Equality of Opportunity Project) Shocked? Isn’t that business as usual in the empire where the rich, particularly the super-rich (aka politicians’ best friends) get to ride roughshod over the rest of us? If you’re a university whose annual cost to attend is $76,000 and climbing, doesn’t it follow that 70% of your students will come from the top-earning 20% of families. 20% will come from the top 1%. (“It’s a big club and you aint in it”- George Carlin)). It started over a hundred years ago when the sixteenth amendment gave Congress the power to levy taxes. Included in the new tax law was a provision allowing college and universities a free ride in the form of a tax exemption. The colleges cashed in. At the end of FY 2018, the four richest universities had endowments worth $119 billion (that’s Harvard, Yale Stanford, Princeton). What are the federal taxes due on $119 billion? If you’re a non-profit college: zero. On college-owned real estate. Once again zero. (Out of the goodness of their hard hearts, Yale agreed in 1990 to throw a few shekels into the city coffers, like the $8.5 million they coughed up one year for the 340 acres of prime real estate they own in downtown New Haven.) It wasn’t supposed to become a gigantic windfall. What it was supposed to be was a mutually beneficial arrangement — tax exemption from the government in return for these institutions providing a range of public services to their communities. If you think that’s what’s happening, you’re sorely mistaken. Find out why higher education has devolved into the playground of the super-wealthy by reading “U.S Colleges on the Dole While Students Wind up Debt Slaves: All in a Day’s Work in the Empire.”

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Up To Your Eyeballs In Student Loans? Stuck In a Minimum Wage Job? Afraid to Get Sick?

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Welcome to Life in Exceptional America

American Exceptionalism

Birth to death in the American imperium. If it were a play, most of us would be done for by the second act. Behold in act one the risky and expensive business of giving birth and the budget-busting costs of daycare. Act two features a generation of education moguls getting rich while U.S. children get a second-class education. Act three spotlights even more massive debt, helped along by spiraling education costs, sky-high student debt and a job market of mainly part-time, minimum wage, contingent jobs with zero pensions. The epilogue completes the rout: the “golden” years tarnished by bipartisan support for entitlement reform, which turns out to be a naked attempt to screw the vast majority of Americans out of the benefits they worked their entire lives to earn. Life in exceptional America has a long tail of discouragement, debt, and despair. Why then do we stand in reverent silence, head gear removed, hand over heart as the Star-Spangled Banner is sung? One place you won’t find a comforting answer is in: "Up to Your Eyeballs In Student Loans? Stuck In a Minimum Wage Job? Afraid to Get Sick? Welcome to Life in Exceptional America."

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Eating Her Young: America Reinvents the Law of the Jungle in Her Own Image

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“I am 30 years old. I went to college to get a better job. But now I regret going. I originally owed $70,000, have been paying for nine years and now owe $157,000. I can barely afford to go to the dentist or doctor. If there’s an emergency, I have to rely on credit cards or retired parents. I am living at poverty level and would have been better off not going to college. I’m never going to be able to buy a house or save money. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to enjoy life again.” (Kristina M.)

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