Do They Ever Learn Anything in Washington?

Donald Trump.  Bernie Sanders.  Occupy Everywhere.  The Cubs winning the World Series.  So many things have happened that nobody ever expected that the Tea Party has become a distant memory.  An even more distant memory is what started the Tea Party.  It wasn’t Obamacare or the bailout of the Wall Street bankers, though both of those added to the Tea Party’s fury.  Rather, the Tea Party started on February 19, 2009 on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli unleashed a rant, on air, against an Obama administration plan to bailout homeowners facing foreclosure and help them refinance their mortgages”:

“Do we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages?  This is America!  How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?” 

The Tea Party grew to be many more things and to represent many other concerns, but this is where it started.  With Washington asking people who worked hard and scrimped and saved to pay their mortgages, to bail out people who bought too big of a house or turned their house into an ATM, constantly refinancing and taking the extra money out to spend on other stuff.  These people couldn’t pay their mortgages, and the Administration wanted to bail them out.

Well, it’s happening again.  Except this time, it’s not mortgages; it’s student loans.  The Obama administration’s response to college costing too much was to increase the availability of student loans¹ and for the federal government to take over the lending instead of involving private lenders.  Not surprisingly, debt skyrocketed.  So the Obama administration came up with a plan to forgive student debt and cut down on loan payments. Except the plan is just for some people. People who have worked hard to pay off their loans, maybe even using retirement savings to pay off their loans.  Nothing for them.  But other borrowers will get some of their loans forgiven. 

But even here there are favored ones and unfavored ones.  Graduate students, who borrowed more – and will make more – than undergraduate students, will be eligible to get more of their loans forgiven.  The more you borrowed, the more you get forgiven.  The kid who cut corners to keep his student loans down, doesn’t get as much forgiven as someone who borrowed and borrowed.

Also, how much you get forgiven depends on who you work for.  A nurse who works for a public hospital gets lots more forgiven than a nurse who works for a for-profit hospital, even though they are doing the same job.

Benefits to some and nothing to others.  Giving more to those who weren’t responsible and less to those who were.  It sounds just like what the Obama administration was proposing in 2009 for homeowners whose mortgages were in default.  Now they are doing it again.  As I said, do they ever learn anything in Washington?
----------
¹ Which let colleges raise tuition even more.