If the tea party wants to win seats in Congress in 2014, it needs to go for the jugular — and that means taking on the student loan crisis.
Americans are a combined $1.3 trillion in student loan debt, thanks in part to incessant messaging that everyone needs to get a degree regardless of interest, ability, or earning potential. This massive burden on the economy will implode at some point and drag the faint gains of the housing market down with it. Lenders won’t approve a mortgage for a young person hemorrhaging $500 a month for student loan payments. That which can’t continue forever, won’t.
The untapped potential of this constituency on this issue could re-orient the political landscape. When’s the last time you heard a Republican pointing out that non-dischargeable student loan debt entrenches income inequality? With 40 percent of households run by someone under 35 struggling to bear the student debt burden, this should be a no-brainer for the tea party wing of the GOP, a great tactic to outflank Democrats and establishment Republicans alike.
But no one has jumped on this proposal yet. The Associated Press listed a few possible reforms this week that would lessen the student loan burden. All but one come from Democrats. What the hell, Republicans? Why are you letting your opponents lead the charge on a fiscally conservative issue?
Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren is slamming the federal government for renewing its lucrative contract with by Sallie Mae, a company that violates consumer protection laws and rakes in millions in profit. Communist Van Jones is over at CNN, shaking his pinko fist at the system that cruelly locks borrowers into seven percent interest rates. President Barack Obama implemented the Income-Based Repayment Plan back in 2009, which lets borrowers negotiate payments that won’t gobble up half their incomes. What was the tea party doing while the Democrats gained ground on this critical issue, cheering another futile repeal effort of Obamacare?
The Democrats will simper and sigh about crushing student loan debt, promising alienated millennials that they’ll pass a bill to forgive all student debt — and they’ll keep promising this in perpetuity to get young Americans to vote for them, but they won’t deliver. They’ll blame their failure to pass meaningful reform on the Mean Old Party while they continue to enrich their comrades-in-arms and chief diversity officer buddies at taxpayer-funded universities.
It’s clear that the Left’s handwringing about student loans is meant to pave the path for a truly nightmarish scenario: mandatory, taxpayer-funded college. You can bet that as soon as Elizabeth Warren climbs on her 2016 soapbox she’ll begin pushing to make “access” to “higher education” a “right.” Translation: You need to pay for your neighbor’s kid to toil for four more years of indoctrination — and if you don’t like it, you’re totally racist. Since when does the left have a “right” to demand that young people and their conservative parents fund their political enemies?
Tea partiers should organize protests across college campuses across the U.S. Shove the anti-capitalism rhetoric in liberals’ faces: Why are hard-left professors guaranteed permanent job security, no matter how outrageously they behave, while a normal American can lose his job and have his whole life ruined for “insensitivity”? Why are colleges immune from the pressures of the free market and hike tuition with impunity? Why are college presidents sitting comfortably in the “One Percent” bracket while they blather about “college affordability”?
And who knows? If it comes right down to it, a bailout might not be so bad. One trillion dollars is less than the $9 trillion that the government used to bail out the big banks in 2008, after all (and let’s not forget the Democrats came out on top after that debacle). But let’s not reward bad behavior — this proposal shouldn’t encourage more students to enroll in the same leeching system. No, no. After borrows are relieved of their debt — and automatically disqualified from receiving taxpayer funding in any form ever again — it’s time to fill in the money pit of American higher education.
Burn down the administrative offices, salt the campuses, send everyone home from freshman orientation. They can learn about heterosexist, cis-privileged fascism on their own time if they please, without taking out massive loans. The tea party can issue a set of policy proposals to rebuilt a different educational system on top of the smoking ruins that works for every American — and their tenacity should cow arrogant teachers’ unions into loosening their hold on the K-12 education system.
The tea party should sing one uniting anthem: Academia delenda est. The academy must be destroyed. Defunding the student loan scam should be the tea party’s first priority in 2014.
