A number of Republicans received Paycheck Protection Program loans, which were forgiven.
The White House tweeted a response to Republican Congressman Vern Buchanan of Florida, who complained about debt relief for college students. He received a Payroll Protection Program loan from the federal government of $2.3 million. The loan was forgiven.
Congressman Vern Buchanan had over $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven.
Buchanan had tweeted:
@VernBuchanan
“As a blue-collar kid who worked his way through college, I know firsthand the sacrifices people make to receive an education. Biden’s reckless, unilateral student loan giveaway is unfair to the 87 percent of Americans without student loan debt and those who played by the rules.”
So it’s okay for the federal government to give Congressman Buchanan $2.3 million, which he doesn’t have to pay back, but not to help college kids drowning in debt with a student loan forgiveness of $10,000-20,000?
Republican Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania complained on Twitter:
Asking plumbers and carpenters to pay off the loans of Wall Street advisors and lawyers isn’t just unfair. It’s also bad policy.
Yeah, all those millions of kids who got student loans are rich now, right?
@WhiteHouse tweeted:
Congressman Mike Kelly had $987,237 in PPP loans forgiven.
But that’s not all:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As I have commented beforeâ¦how come Cuba can afford FREE EDUCATION and rich US canât or wonât? For shame. vg
American-led Western capitalism is addicted to war for its own ghoulish survival. Wars and destruction are the oxygen for US global power and its imperial lackeys. Alexander Ermochenko (editorial Strategic Culture)
>
Cuba provides free education but Cuban people live in extreme poverty. I want a better USA. I don’t want a Cuban model of free services, spoiled elites and mass poverty. Communism is no good.
“Canât or wonât” stood out to me. I wondered where you picked up spelling, so I did a search. I found something similar: “Can’t or Won’t”, which is your spelling minus the €™. I found Can’t or Won’t on a few websites: Americans for Legal Immigration PAC opposing the “invasion of America” by immigrants, an article claiming an FBI conspiracy theory on The Williamson County Libertarian Party blog, a video which had been deleted with the YouTube account terminated, an ad for a book called Mothering Millennials about getting “lazy” kids to work with “tough love”, and a book called Stuck about getting your own lazy self to work. I did not find any references to Can’t or Won’t on any sites promoting free education or Cuba, but only sites one might assume have ties to the Kochtopus. Interesting, huh!
I have to admit to being very impressed with the tenor and timing of response on this. Very uncharacteristic for Democrats and hopefully a lesson and prelude to a more direct, aggressive, truthful strategy. If you’re going to argue a policy point, get right to it and be unapologetic. Not the usual, let’s have a discussion on the merits.
Olaf Schulz won the last German national election because he had a simple, direct message and all messaging was geared toward it. The three themes were: Respect for You, Competence for Germany, and Chancellor for Germany. The response yesterday gives me a little more hope that someone might be getting it. Finally.
I agree. Democrats should address the GOP’s bad behavior instead of ignoring it. Answering back makes the Dems appear more assertive and engaged.
Polls show that Biden’s loan forgiveness is. Wet popular. Even half of Republicans approve. They too have children in debt.
In addition to the PPP loans billions are spent every year to subsidize several industries including agriculture, transportation, Big Oil and Big Pharma among others. BTW the House just passed a $280 billion dollar package to subsidize US chip manufacturing. Few people in Congress complain about ‘corporate welfare.’ In fact, they represent all the special interests that line up to receive it.https://fortune.com/2022/07/28/house-passes-280-billion-package-chip-production-semiconductor-industry/
Corporate welfare is the payoff for lobbyists and campaign contributions.
Incredibly, student debtors don’t have lobbyists nor do they make big donations to politicians.
retired teacher– My general understanding of “corporate welfare”: privatizing profits and socializing losses [losses meaning bail-outs during the inevitable crashes due to the volatility of laissez-faire capitalism]. Usual methods: (1)govt gives big tax breaks to big corporations which are offshoring jobs and profits, net results: (a)many fewer jobs supporting middle-class QOL here, and (b)corporate revenues to support public goods are shifted onto middle-class [which cannot support, so they wither]; (2)govt provides opportunities for onshore facilities to import foreign labor willing to work for cheaper than American stds [whether that be highly-educated for IT/ tech, or illegals for low-skilled labor (where govt makes no effort to enforce laws on employers)], net results lower/ stagnating wages for all involved; (3)the Amazon model: govt exacts low or zero taxes on big onshore facilities receiving & transporting cheap foreign goods nationwide via non-unionized low-paid American workers, enabling owner to salt away huge profits which are distributed neither to workers nor to public goods.
How do you see the $280 billion dollar package to subsidize US chip manufacturing fitting into that picture? It sounds good to me—maybe I’m naïve. We need onshore mfg of goods that are crucial to national security—by which I mean, being able to run basic economy regardless of foreign-trade vicissitudes. Chip mfg seems to be one of those. I would put pharmaceuticals right up there with the chips—let’s grab back mfg of our crucial medicines from India et al. The other two biggies would be agriculture and oil/gas, but I think (?) we have enough natural resources onboard to manage those without as much effort. [Correct me if I’m wrong, y’all! Just an amateur here.]
(sp) Corpulent Welfare
Ruskycheera can’t help spreading FSB spam. FYI – “Strategic Culture Foundation” is yet another toxic junk Russian disinformation riff from a Moscow think tank. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Culture_Foundation
There are many hypocrites that are Republicans that also badmouth social safety net programs designed to help the working class when times are challenging. At some point in their lives, many working class Republicans also rely on unemployment benefits to survive financially, but they support and vote for Republicans that are against all social safety net programs: unemployment, Section 8 housing, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, all programs that many working class Americans rely on throughout their lives to survive during hard financial times, and those working class Americans belong to every political group out there, even Traitor Trump’s theofascist MAGA lunatics.
Lloyd—I agree with this, in general, in this window of time. But I often wonder if this isn’t an attitude primarily promulgated by aging boomers who were working class/ mfg/ agricultural—out of touch with labor force realities of the recent decades. In other words, people who are dying off as we speak. They hark back to obsolete experiences. There are a lot of them still alive and still voting GOP. They downplay those periods when they survived on unemployment insurance. They ignore that they survive thanks to Soc Sec & Medicare, somehow imagining that because their grandparents didn’t [& their parents sidestepped around it], no one really needs it. [The theory being: if there were no taxes at all (like in their great-grandparents’ day?), they could pay their own way? Hahahahaha…]
That doesn’t explain the younger generation of Trumpers [Elise Stefanik & co], but I’m thinking they’re mesmerized by the Trump-cultists’ faux resurrection of those antique paradigms, which of course ignore the abject poverty of the elderly pop in those days—whose lives were made a bit easier by an agricultural & immigrant extended-family model that no longer exists– & of course most of them lived only until they were 65-ish…
In 1935, when Social Security started, the average life expectancy was 65, and in 1935, the poverty rate for the entire U.S. population was 64.9 percent up from about 50% before the Great Depression.
It’s been almost a century now and most people alive today didn’t live during that time so they have no idea what it’s like to live without a social safety net. The reason we have a social safety today was because of the Great Depression and the poverty rate back then that even before the Great Depression hovered around 50%. And there was no national social safety net, unless the state you lived in had one to help its citizen avoid starvation.
Lloyd – your reply triggered a bunch of memories. I answer you below under general comments to get more margin space.
HyPPPocrites
Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States, and to cut themselves BIG, FAT CHECKS OF FREE MONEY FROM THE TAXPAYER, BABY!!! The rest of this Constitution will be completed after we members of the Constitutional Convention get back on our yachts from our new vacation homes in the Caymans. Kiss our white butts!
“A question for Twitter wise ones: When Congress passed the GI Bill of Rights, was there an outcry from an earlier generation of veterans who had paid their own way through college?” Dean Baker
Excellent
Right on, Joel. The divide-&-conquer methods since ’80s [Reagan] & ’90s [Gingrich] have actually gotten at least 50% onboard with the concept, “hey we were screwed by the govt/ economy, why shouldn’t today’s students be too?” They justify this paradigm by picturing themselves– as student-loan debtors who managed to pay it off– now being reqd via income taxes to “pay off” loans of “slackers” unlike themselves. With zero acknowledgment of facts as to the spiraling costs of college since their days, or the increased pressure for BA due to economic changes over last 43 yrs. And apparently little concern for the threat to economy of our now-huge bubble of student debt (which means righting it is of interest to all taxpayers).
$10k per student loan = 0.007% of the cost of a bachelor’s today. The average US student loan is $33k; $10k = 30%. Interesting factoid: state govts alone have disinvested in public higher education by 30% since 1980…
$10k = 0.007% of the average US cost of a bachelor’s degree [all studs, state & priv].
The average amount of student loan debt per debtor in the US is $33k. $10k is very chunky and helpful for that “average” debtor. Which is a good thing. It is equivalent to 30% of their outstanding debt.
Interesting factoid: the average disinvestment by our state govts in our state colleges & universities since 1980 also equals… 30%. 73% of US college students attend public institutions.
Looks like some kinda justice to me.
In response to Lloyd’s 8/27 8:38pm post: thank you for those spot-on stats. They really resonate with me: my Mom was born in 1928 & conveyed lots of Great Depression- era reality my way. I particularly remember her telling me of friends and neighbors whom she watched leave their nearby homes [in a mid/upper-mid community], carrying what belongings they could manage from houses the banks had reclaimed. The only reason her family [an extended family squeezed into a 3-br home] were spared was because it was U housing– her gf was a prof. He was a generous man who helped whoever he could in those days. By the time he died in late ‘40’s, his fraternity brothers took up a collection to get him buried.
Mom spent her growing-up time divided between both grand-parental homes: the other was a wealthy home, pre-Depression. That grandfather in youth—aided wife & brother-in-law, working-class people—had founded in early 20thC what became a national mfg co based on family recipes, door-to-door sales, and a patented canning method. In Gr Depression, the elders divvied up their mansion to accommodate even shirt-tail relatives during the Depression. But in the mid-‘30s, gf’s brother tried to parlay the family shares in some sort of deal & was swindled, leaving the family with far less than they’d started with—not an unusual story in those days. [He hung himself!] That national brand was bought out successively, diminishing fam wealth rapidly – the heirs were swiftly reduced from wealthy to middle class by the 1940s.
My mother used to caution me as I was growing up that one’s idea of whether being on a track to success or victimized by society was entirely based on general social expectations– trying to explain that in her youth no one expected to be rich or comfortable or even making ends meet. That there were never any guarantees. But early during the Bush II admin she woke up—she was no slouch—she’d figured out precisely what that bunch [& working on it since Reagan admin] were up to, & never was even tempted to vote Rep again in her last 15 yrs of life.
Forgiving all student debt would not only spur the economy while providing for sustained growth but would not boost inflation as I demonstrate in my book, Coffin, S. V. (Ed.) (2021). Higher education’s looming collapse: Using new ways of doing business and social justice to avoid bankruptcy. Rowman & Littlefield.
Stephen, I agree. Relieving millions of people from the burden of college debt would free them to invest in their future not pay off their past.
When I was three to five in the 18950s and starting to be aware and remember the world I was living in, our parents bought their first home from a bankrupt developer at an auction.
The house wasn’t finished. It was framed with a roof and wrapped in tar paper. When we moved in, there were no windows, doors or finished interior walls. The inside was all 2x4s and ever room as visible from anywhere, even the one bathroom with its toilet and sink. That was the first room my dad boarded up with plywood.
That happened soon after my godfather helped my dad get a job with the unionized concrete and gravel company he worked for and the first time in my parents life they were earning a livable wage together.
My dad drove a rusty pickup ruck and every payday, he came home from work with doors, windows and other building supplies as my parents slowly finished that house they’d paid cash for without a loan.
My mother’s younger brother told me what it was like to work for the railroad in the Dakota’s before he was hired full time. Every morning, the want-to-be employed workers would gather at the railyard near Deadwood and wait in the cold for the someone from the railroad to show up and tell them how many men they’d hire to load and unload boxcars that day. He said there might be a couple of hundred men in the crowd praying they get work that paid pennies for an hour of labor.
The railroad foreman said how many tokens he had for the men they’d hire that day and then he tossed the exact number (usually 25 to 35) into the crowd of men. Anyone that got a token had work for the day. The next day, it started over. Eventually the railroad workers unionized and my uncle ended up with a full time job.
This was the US before WWII, during the early years of labor unions getting organized and off the ground after the violent years when the Robber Barons hired thugs to kill, maim, cripple and kill union organizers before President Toddy Roosevelt put a stop to that.
1950s. I thought I deleted that 8. Sorry about that.
Great story. How about a Great Depression story from my wife’s uncle Ira (also true)
Ira Coons grew up on the borderlands of Nebraska and Wyoming. Agriculture there consisted in his day of sugar beets and potatoes. When he was very young, his father got his legs caught in a potato digging machine and lost both of his legs. The family, now destitute, spent the harsh winter of 1933 in a wall tent in Mitchell, NE burning cow dung (dried chips in the sun) for heat. The wall tent was the social welfare safety net in his day.
To me the greatest irony of his upbringing was that he never appreciated the idea of a social safety net. Roused by the appeals of Gingrich and Reagan, he groused about this ethnic group and that government giveaway, seeing his own experience as a personal triumph over adversity (he fought in WWII and worked at the post office). Through his foibles, I loved Ira, and I looked past things that bothered me about his life philosophy.
I think the movement against the Social Safety net is primarily driven by libertarian-theofascists (think ALEC and the Walmart Walton family) that thinks if you are a member of the working class and aren’t useful every second of your life to increase the profits and power of the ruling class (them), you should be eliminated.
Most of the money if not all of it that is behind the war against the Social Safety net in the US comes from multi-millionaires and billionaires that do not need it, … unless through stupid, greedy and careless investments, they lose the source of their wealth.
For decades this misleading propaganda campaign has influenced some members of the working class to support destroying a program designed for them when times are hard.
An excellent post today from Heather Cox Richardson in her series Letters from an American reflecting on the new attitude from Dark Brandon in the White House:
Biden’s calling out of today’s radical Republicans mirrors the moment on June 21, 1856, when Representative Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts, a member of the newly formed Republican Party, stood up in Congress to announce that northerners were willing to take to the battlefield to defend their way of life against the southerners who were trying to destroy it. Less than a month before, Burlingame’s Massachusetts colleague Senator Charles Sumner had been brutally beaten by a southern representative for disparaging slavery, and Burlingame was sick and tired of buying sectional peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough. The North was superior to the South in its morality, loyalty to the government, fidelity to the Constitution, and economy, and northerners were willing to defend their system, if necessary, with guns.
Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southerners by calling them out for what they were, and northerners rallied to Burlingame’s call.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-27-2022?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
You gotta wonder?
Did Matt Gaetz use part (or all?) his $476,000 PPP loan to pay for sex with that underaged girl?
Would she be considered one of his “employees” for the purposes of the loan?
So does Matt Gaetz have an Uber business for underaged girls?
Well known socialist billionaire Charles Koch got a $1 million PPP loan, half of which was forgiven.
https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus/bailouts/loans/koch-industries-inc-1947547207
Guess who is now whining about — and scheming to overturn — the student loan forgiveness plan?
Groups funded by Koch.
Americans for Prosperity, an organization founded by billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David, also expressed outrage at the Biden administration’s plan, wailing that “this shameless handout will only push education costs even higher, cause people to take out even bigger loans, and set a dangerous precedent that the government will just come along and erase their debt in the future.”
https://truthout.org/articles/dark-money-groups-are-scheming-to-bring-down-bidens-student-debt-relief-plan/
These people are just pathetic excuses for humans.