I want to talk about the recent Biden efforts, the new sort of revived
Biden efforts to cancel student loan debt for college students, not because I actually
care about the policy all that much. It's kind of a red and meat
political issue for people that I don't think has quite as much genuine on the
ground importance as people think. Just my two cents on the whole student loan
issue, I would be totally fine with the federal government for giving everyone's student
loan debt if it was accompanied by actual meaningful reform of the federal student loan
sort of our federal student loan policies where basically there's a limitless supply of federal
funny money just available for college students to get loans to go to college or
worse, to go to graduate programs with very questionable return on investment for that
college student. But the federally subsidized banks know that they're not going to lose
any money. So yeah, we'll give you the loan. We know we're
not going to lose the money. We know we're going to get this money
back because it's the federal government, is you know, guaranteeing it. Uh
So, they are pumping out tons and tons and tons of dollars, and
the universities realize, oh, they're not putting any caps on this, so
we can just keep jacking up tuition costs nationwide at all the colleges and universities,
and these dumb kids will keep taking out bigger and bigger and bigger and
bigger loans. So every year we can increase our tuition by five percent and
just make more money than God. And that's what a lot. A lot
of these elite universities now have more money money than God. Okay, they
are sitting on billions and billions and billions of dollars in endowments, so there's
no motivation to change. Like we always everyone talks about the problem of the
massive increase into it, the unsustainable increase intuition costs. Well, the reason
why there's an unsustainable increase intuition is because the federal government is allowing so much
money in federal student loans. So I honestly don't care that much about forgiving
all student loan debt. If you simultaneously fix the problem, which is stop
the never ending supply of funny money, put restrictions and limitations on the colleges
and universities who have just been making absolute bank that have been just engaged in
highway robbery of American eighteen year olds and worse yet, have been making tons
of money handover fist through. Some of the worst examples of these programs where
universities are making a ton of money for valueless degrees is with graduate programs,
these different graduate programs that will put an applicant one hundred thousand plus dollars into
debt for some kind of master's degree that is really not very valuable and it's
not going to lead to a very valuable job. That's the real killer.
It's not so much people getting undergraduate degrees, it's people getting these graduate degrees
that are totally flippin' useless. And why do I say I don't mind it
as much? Well, listen, everyone, like I understand the antipathy of
I didn't go to college. I chose to pursue another path so I wouldn't
have student loan debt, or I paid off all my student loan debt.
Why should I be forced through my taxes to pay for the student loan debt
of a bunch of these improvident idiots who took out these huge loans and don't
have a way to pay it back. That's not fair. Why am I
being forced to that? They took out the loans themselves. I understand that
reasoning. I share some of that sentiment. What I'm telling you is that
you're already gonna have to do that anyway. Specifically for the worst of those
loans. The moron who took out the one hundred thousand dollars loan for a
master's program in some artsy flartcy degree, you know, underwater lesbian filmmaking or
whatever. That person is never gonna pay that loan back. Right, that
person's never gonna pay that back. We're we're covering that like that unquestionably,
so the worst of these loans we already have to pay back. I wouldn't
mind paying off student loan debt if it were accompanied by meaningful reform of how
student loans work. Now, there's another way of looking at this, which
is, why are we paying off student loan debt? What is it about
college students, or what is it about college graduates or master's program graduates or
doctoral program graduates. Why are they so special and so deserving of debt forgiveness
as opposed to holders of other kinds of debt. Why not forgive credit card
debt? Why not? It's debt People similarly with credit cards, made improvident
choices that put themselves into debt. Maybe they were taken advantage of the same
way that a lot of people are. You know a lot of people argue,
Look, you're eighteen years old, you're applying for college. A whole
generation of baby Boomers has told you that the path to success is college.
You feel like you have to do this, so you take out when you're
really not very mature and really not very understanding, you take out this big
fifty thousand dollars loan so you can go to college. Without thinking all this
through. Well, credit card companies take advantage of young, stupid people too,
put them in debt. Also, why aren't we paying off credit card
debt? Why aren't we paying off any other kind of category of debt medical
debt? Medical debt is heartbreaking. It's essentially always for people who didn't do
anything wrong, people who had the bad luck to get sick. The reason
why Democrats are so focused on student loan debt is because it's a political favor
to their constituency. The young, the relatively young, basically millennials, people
in their thirties, the oldest of whom is maybe around forty. Basically the
forty and undercrowd are the holders of all the student loan debt in America,
and that cohort of people tends to be more liberal. So the Biden administration
is basically it needs to, you know, it needs to kind of gin
up its base to turn out to vote. Biden administration is trying to find
a way. Hey, maybe I can forgive all those people student loan debt.
All these young people stop being angry at me over Gaza, over the
Biden administration supporting Israel too much. Although at this point I feel like the
Biden administration has made exactly zero people happy. I think the pro Israel side
is thinking Biden is being disastrously not pro Israel, and the pro Gaza side
thinks it still thinks that Biden is basically a war criminal and a genocide enabler.
So I think he's perfectly made both sides angry. Anyway, Biden has
this real problem with young voters because of the Gaza situation, and he's trying
to find a way to ingratiate himself with them. So he's back at it
with the student loan thing. Now, the real debates that have been happening
over Biden's student loan efforts have not been so much. I mean, there's
been some about the policy merits and demerits of forgiving student loan debt, which,
as I've said, I am somewhat ambivalent towards. I wouldn't mind forgiving
student loan debt if you are meaningfully reforming the system. Of course, Biden
is not meaningfully reforming the system, so in that sense, I'm more opposed
to it. The real debates, though, over Biden's attempts to reform the
student loan debt have been at the level of constitutional law. The Biden administration
has been unable to pass an actual law and actual statute through Congress that would
forgive student loan debt. That would be the appropriate way of going about it.
That is how laws are written in the United States America. The House
rights, you know, the House or the Senate, write of law.
Then the other house within Congress votes on that same law. So the House
agrees to something, the Senate agrees to something, and the president signs it.
That's a law. That's how we make laws in America. The Biden
administration is just trying by hook or by crook because they know they can't get
enough popular support to actually pass legislation. Even when they had the House.
In the Senate for the first two years of Biden's presidency, they couldn't get
sixty votes in the Senate to do anything, which with the filibuster rule in
the Senate, to advance most pieces of legislation, you actually need sixty votes
in the Senate, not just fifty plus one. And now Republicans control the
House, so Democrats know there's no way they're going to get any debt forgiveness
through the House. So Biden has to resort to trying to find some way
through executive action, through an executive order, or through some federal executive agency
doing some kind of rulemaking in order to forgive student loan debt. So effectively,
the exercise that the Biden administration has been engaged in is to go through
the United States Code and look at every random statute that's ever been passed in
human history and try to find a statute that if you squint at it and
you interpret it in this really broad sense, could be interpreted in such a
way as giving President Biden the authority to forgive student loan debt President Biden or
an executive official under him. So the first round of attempting to forgive student
loan debt was looking at this bill called the Heroes Act, which was passed
right after nine to eleven. It was basically this realization Congress had after nine
to eleven. Okay, we have all these people signing up for the military
after this national disaster, this national emergency event like nine to eleven. It's
putting these new military members. Actually, the way it was happening, it
was putting military members in almost like a worse debt position than they would be
had they not signed up for the military. So basically, the Heroes Act
allowed the Secretary of Education, a federal executive official appointed by the President under
the president's authority. And you know President is the head of the Department of
Education. Okay, he's at the top of its org chart the Secretary of
Education and answers to him. Secretary of Education was authorized to forgive student loan
debt for certain categories of people in order to not make them worse off in
response to some kind of national emergency. The Biden administration took that act,
that that post nine to eleven Act that was clearly responding to an emergency like
nine to eleven and the military response afterwards, and said, well, COVID
was a national emergency, so the Secretary of Education has authority to forgive pretty
much everybody's debt. It wasn't something, so it wasn't really following the statute.
Certainly, that's what the Supreme Court determined when the Supreme Court struck down
that Biden executive action. The Supreme Court basically was like, look, you
can't just take some random statue that you just squint at and interpret it as
broadly as you can in order to sort of, you know, put a
camel through the eye of the needle, basically to try to put the square
I'm using metaphors like crazy over here, put the square peg of student loan
debt forgiveness into the round hole of some random prior federal statute that really wasn't
designed for broad based national student loan debt forgiveness. Well that's what the Biden
administration is doing now with a different federal statute. So the Higher Education Act
is According to this editorial from National Review, the Biden administration has instead made
the Higher Education Act the object of its motivated reasoning and proposed multiple programs within
the Department of Education to transfer student debt piecemeal. A few billion for public
employees here, another few billion for people who graduated from bad programs there.
The administration's announcement contains no total cost estimate. In many cases, the debt
will be erased automatically, with no requirement that the recipient even applied for it.
And it's just as unconstitutional as the previous efforts. Okay, now,
when we return, I'm going to dig a little bit more into this,
and I'm gonna dig a little bit more into this again I sort of find
the policy goal. You know, Yeah, debt is really bad problem.
A lot of these people got taken advance, taking it for a ride when
they were eighteen years old. Wouldn't be the craziest thing in the world to
forgive debt and reform the system. But that's not what the Biden administration is
doing. And let's also when we return, I'm going to talk about how
this group of people is actually, in some ways the least needing of student
loan of debt forgiveness. There are all kinds of other categories of debt holders
that need forgiveness far more than college graduates. That's next on the John Gerardy
Show. Student loan debt is maybe the last kind of debt that we should
be forgiving as far as the hardship of the people who have it. Now,
I'm not saying student loan debt is fun. I know it is not.
My wife and I worked for a long time payoff for student loan debt,
and it was a very satisfying feeling when we made the last payment and
gave each other a high five and got something good for dinner that night.
It's a very satisfying feeling to do that, and we recognize not everyone has
the stability and has way more debt than we had. Debt is a really
bad thing, okay, And having student loan debt sucks, and having that
anchor, that kind of economic anchor around your neck when you enter the workforce
sucks. But it's also the case that holders of student loan debt have better
jobs and higher incomes than most cohorts in society. So the policy reasons for
wanting to forgive debt. Yeah, they're good policy reasons for wanting to forgive
debt. There are all kinds of young people been saddled with debt because of
various different kinds of bad things that exist within the economy within a federal policy.
People hold credit card huge amounts of credit card debt, or big home
loans, or there's all kinds of debt that people have. But this idea
that student loan debt is this uniquely important thing that we have to eliminate.
It's not the focus of it. The focus on it is basically because President
Biden needs to get reelected. He needs this historically liberal leaning block of people
to vote for him. If they don't come out and vote for him,
he will lose. So he is basically bribing them to go vote with this
Save program, which is basically looking at he's again trying to sort of look
at He's just sort of created this program to look at different sort of categories
of debtholders, So people who were in bad programs, people with hardship,
people in this category of people in that category. And it's gonna cost something
like four hundred and seventy five billion dollars over the course of ten years,
like forty five billion dollars per year. That's a ton of money. Now,
you know, maybe in the grand scheme of the current size of our
federal budget is so immense that maybe forty five billion a year is just to
drop in the bucket at this point. Nonetheless, it's it's not just though
that he's giving out this money to people. He's also not fixing the root
problem. Now where is this going to end up. I think it's gonna
end up back at the Supreme Court again, and I have to imagine it's
going to have the same end result of the Justice as saying, hey,
you can't just take some statute, some old statue that didn't have something to
do with broad based national federal student loan debt forgiveness and interpret it in such
a way to fit this goal that you want. I think the Supreme Court's
probably going to slap it down. I think the Supreme Court's probably going to
get ticked off that Biden is very Biden's rhetoric, by the way, about
talking about the Supreme Court is you know, for Democrats who have been ranting
and raving about President Trump's violation of norms so much over the last five or
six years. Biden's way of talking about it is very norm violative that he's
basically just saying, well, we're going to show the Supreme Court. No,
when the Supreme Court says it, that's the law of the land.
You can't just ignore Supreme Court decisions and just keep doing the thing you want
to do. That's a very norm violative thing. If Trump were doing it,
people would be talking about this grave threat to democracy. But Biden does
it and it's totally fine. But this is the problem. Obama discovered this.
Obama cracked this code, and I think presidents are just going to follow
this example for the rest of time. Obama was trying for years to get
the Dream Act passed. Congress would not pass the Dream Act Dream Act,
which would give legal status to people who came into the country unlawfully but while
they were children. And Obama said, look, we shouldn't be penalizing these
people who came over because they were children when their parents brought them over,
Like, we shouldn't be penalizing these people. We should give them some path
to legal status or citizenship or whatever. And Republicans wouldn't play ball. The
Republicans wanted other immigration concessions, and Democrats and Republicans couldn't agree. So Obama
just got f up and decided to just do the Dream Act via an executive
action. He created the DACA program, and Biden. Obama himself had said
repeatedly he didn't have authority on his own to create the DACA program, to
create basically the Dream Act via executive order. Obama had reiterated that several times,
and then all of a sudden, he just does it via executive order.
And when Trump comes into office and tries to get rid of the DACA
program because he thinks it's not constitutional, it gets challenged and the Supreme Court
set actually upholds the DOCA program because they said Trump didn't follow appropriate procedure for
getting rid of it, in spite of the fact that DOCA was probably unconstitutional
to begin with. DACA is still on the books, guys. Obama did
that in what was I think it was twenty fifteen, sixteen, I believe
like right before he left office. It's still on the books eight or nine
years later. So I think presidents are incentivized to I have, if he
authority to accomplish this goal, I have via an executive order. It's very
iffy whether I actually have the constitutional authority to do this myself versus whether Congress
needs to do it. So I'm just gonna do it, and I'm just
gonna throw this spaghetti against the wall and I'm gonna see if it sticks,
and if the Supreme Court strikes it down. Okay, the Supreme Court strikes
it down, but I get to brag to my supporters I did this.
And guess what. You don't know how the court cases are gonna go.
Maybe I can design it in a way that the Republicans who are angry about
it don't have standing to sue. Maybe I can get it tied up in
the courts for years and years and years. In the meanwhile, it's accomplished
the thing I want. So that's what Biden's. Biden's just decided, that's
what I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna keep issuing these executive orders where I
have very flimsy, iffy legal justification, legal grounding to do what I'm doing.
I'm just gonna throw this spaghetti against the wall and I'm gonna see if
it sticks. And I think more and more presidents are gonna feel and probably
it's gonna happen with I hope it happens with Republican presidents. I mean,
if this is what Democrats are gonna do, why the hell shouldn't Republicans do
it? I think this is just gonna be what president how presidents govern.
More and more, Congress can't agree on anything. The Philibuster rule in the
Senate basically prevents Congress from agreeing on most anything substantial. So why not issue
executive orders? See what happens when we return? Why do liberals care so
much about Palestine Gaza specifically but don't care about Armenia? I will I want
to examine the psychology behind it. Next on the John Girardi Show, I
want to talk about the psychology of why liberals are so dedicated to the cause
of Gaza and Palestine but not so dedicated to other causes of other people groups
who are being invaded and or colonial colonized. Okay, now, and with
Gaza, let me see if I can lay out my somewhat complicated John Girardi
thoughts and feelings about it. I don't see why with the Israel Gaza conflict,
the United States needs to provide federal funding to Israel for military stuff.
They seem to be doing just fine. I feel like I also don't know
that we need to be providing funding for the other side. I obviously I
don't like the idea that there are civilians dying, or that there is a
humanitarian crisis happening. Is it America's responsibility to fund humanitarian aid for every single
conflict zone in the world. We clearly don't think so. I'd rather give
humanitarian aid than military funding. Am I confident that humanitarian aid going to Gaza
is used? Well? No, not necessarily. Am I confident that the
about anything I hear about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza? Am I confident about
anything I hear about casualty figures among civilians and non combatants in Gaza? No,
The only source of info we have for civilian deaths in Gaza is from
Hamas, a horrible, evil terrorist organization. More and more I sort of
wish that the United States just had nothing to do with Israel and Palestine whatsoever.
That it seems to me to be an almost intractable and well nigh insolvable
problem that I just don't know that decades of American interaction with the issue has
actually improved the situation at all. So it's not to say I don't care
about the lives of people there. But guys, guess what. There are
plenty of horrific war zones and humanitarian crises that happened all over the world that
for some reason we don't care about, but for some reason we do care
about Gaza, Palestine, Israel. So I guess I'm I question whether why
America needs to be involved in it at all. And this instinct that we
have in American politics that you know, Democrats really support the cause of Ukraine.
Therefore we got to give them fifty billion dollars of military funding. Can
we just say good for you, you know, good for you, Ukraine,
but we're not gonna give you fifty billion dollars. Similarly, Republicans,
we stand with Israel. Here, we stand with Israel, and so we
got to give them, you know, ten billion whatever it is in military
funding. Do we have to give them ten billion dollars? Why does our
support for a country necessarily mean giving spending tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars
on weaponry? Because guess what happens when you do that? Now you're involved
now it's not just a vote to give another country weapons is basically a vote
that America is declaring a proxy war. We're not gonna fight, but we're
gonna give you all the money and materiel so that you fight. Which,
by the way, Russia notices that America is waging a proxy war against it
via its proxy Ukraine. The Islamic world notices that America is waging a proxy
war against the innocent victims of Palestine, the noble freedom fighters Hamas. That's
the way it gets described in the Arab street so called. That's the way
it gets described throughout the Middle Eastern world. They notice that America gives Israel
weaponry and they get super angry about it. So, I guess I just
don't understand this instinct of we support you. Therefore, here's a bunch of
military aid. Well that is now involving you in the conflict in ways that
can have impacts on your long term national security, your foreign relations with all
these countries in ways that it wouldn't if you said, hey, we are
calling for diplomatic resolution of the problem. We think this is wrong. Maybe
we need to have trade embargoes or whatever. That's different from We're gonna give
you weapons and tanks. You can kill these sons that you know what now.
Anyway, that's the Joan Juraradi attitude towards this is. I don't want
America to be involved in more proxy wars around the world. If we are
going to be involved in proxy wars, though, I have often asked,
why aren't we fighting a proxy war for Armenia. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians
have been displaced from their homes, thousands of Armenians have been killed by Azerbaijan.
This is a topic of serious concern to thousands of people who live in
the San Joaquin Valley who are of Armenian descent, who are seeing their homeland
threatened. And Azerbaijan is clearly sick knowing that it wants to invade Armenia more.
It's already invaded then Gorno Karabac region. It has destroyed. It's engaged
in cultural genocide, destroying churches that have been around since the twelve hundreds.
It's engaged in this horrific destruction of life of property. It is a completely
unprovoked, unjustified attack where the United States government has given military weaponry to Azerbaijan
as it's engaged in this horrible in this horrible invasion. It's terrible, it's
a terrible thing. No one gives a rat's rear end about it other than
members of the Armenian diaspora in America and Europe, and people like me.
I guess who I care about Armenians because I have friends and neighbors who are
Armenian. Nobody cares about it, And I guess this is the thing I
don't understand. There is obviously emotional and an affective connection on the part of
certain political groups in America for certain kinds of conflicts, and it seems to
shift depending on how old you are and your political affiliations. Older boomer liberals
are totally dedicated to the cause of Ukraine. They've been waving Ukrainian flags,
They've been putting Ukrainian flags on their Twitter bios, They've they've been very dedicated
to the cause of Ukraine. Young liberals totally dedicated to the cause of the
Palestinians, and they have this deep, effective connection to what they perceive as
the horrible suffering of the Palestinian people against the ruthless, brutal Israeli occupier regime,
and it's this mindset that, Look, I'm not saying Israel hasn't done
bad things in its past. When Israel got the land in nineteen forty eight,
Now, in fairness, a lot of Jews were already living there.
Jews have been living in that region for thousands of years. Palestine was not
even really a political entity. It was part of It had been part of
the Ottoman Empire, it was part of Jordan, et cetera. Okay,
so yeah, I would feel bad for Palestinian settlers who got kicked off their
land or you know, Muslim persons. I guess Palestinian as a category didn't
necessarily exist in nineteen forty eight. I feel bad for anyone who got kicked
off their land and out of their house in nineteen forty eight when the Jews
took over. I guess I just don't understand the affective connection to modern day
from modern day American young liberals to the cause of those people from nineteen forty
eight, and the idea that that historical wrong must guide all of our policy
going forward, and that Israel can never lay legitimate claim to any of the
land that they occupy militarily I mean, I don't know how many conflicts all
over the world, how many nations have their borders defined by wars of questionable
legitimacy, settler or annex agreements of questionable legitimacy. After a certain number of
decades, people just make different arrangements and decide to move rather than wage the
war of sixty seventy eighty ninety one hundred years ago. And I don't understand
why it is that young liberals so care about the cause of Palestinians as opposed
to the cause of anyone else in the world who's been unjustly treated. Look,
if you want to make an argument to me, the Palestinians have been
unjustly treated, Okay, I'm open to listening to it. Why do you
care about that twenty times more than the plight of Armenians? Why do you
care about that eighty times more than the plight of I mean, how many
shifting allegiances and political setups have there been in Africa that have resulted in thousands
of people dying in horrific, bloody conflicts. Why do we care about this,
especially for Again, I'm not saying the Israeli record is spotless, but
look at who's running Gaza. What is it about Hamas? These Islamic fundamentalist
lunatic terrorists who, if they met the average woke American super left wing college
student, would want to execute him or her Like how many how many LGBT
identifying American liberal college students who are waiving the Palestinian flag on their college campuses,
how many of them might genuinely be executed by Hamas if they went to
Gaza and said, Oh, I'm here with I'm a guy, I'm here
with my boyfriend. Hi Hamas. I know that fundamental Islam is so notoriously
accepting of same sex couples and definitely don't execute gay guys. Why this effective
connection when we return? I think I might have something to explain it,
and I think it all has to do with colonialism. That's next done the
John Girardi Show. I've been struggling with this question of why do young liberals
have such a deep affective connection to Palestine in the cause of Palestine, specifically
Gaza right now, over and against the gazillions of other conflicts that have happened
in the world over the last thirty years, where groups of people have been
colonized or oppressed, or militarily invaded, or treated unjustly. I don't understand
it. I have suspicions about two reasons. One, Palestine is an example
of Western colonial settlement. Are perceived to be Western colonial settlement when the British
own territory was given over to create a new state of Israel in nineteen forty
eight. Yes, a lot of the people living there already were Jews,
but a lot of Jews came there in the wake of World War II,
after the horrors of what had happened to European Jews during World War Two,
and the perception among there's nothing worse for young American college students and the college
professor crowd than Western colonialism. Colonialism is evil, not just the actual colonialism
of European powers controlling areas and governing areas, but also even intellectual colonialism,
as they call it. They want to decolonize the curriculum. Don't study Aristotle
and Plato, those dead white guys, as if with an ancient Greek we're
going to be talking in categories of black or white. No, you should
read you know this person, you know this far less important person than Plato
or Aristotle, who happens to be a modern person of color. All Right,
When Azerbaijan invades Armenia, well it's not Western colonialism, so they don't
care about it as much. When Russia invades Ukraine, well they're both kind
of Western in some broader sense. It's not really Western colonialism. It's just
too you know, it's two Western powers sort of duking it out. Palestine
is sort of the last instance of the British West supported, and there's some
sort of race thing, white European Jews coming and colonizing brown people's land,
although really I don't know that there's that big of a difference as far as
skin color between Jews who live in Palestine and Palestinians. The other reason is
maybe there's some lingering antipathy for Jewish people. That'll do it for John Girardi
show. We'll see you next time on Power Talk