The High Cost of the Race to the top

Ya’ know what makes me sick?”  With that rhetorical question, the popular cultural commentator and radio provocateur, Earl Pitts, “Uhmerican,” summed up my response to those who are politicking to forgive college loan debt. 

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I speak four languages: English, French, Red Neck, and Blue Collar, and “loan forgiveness” doesn’t make sense in any of them.  I’m not toting that note. Here’s the unabridged version of what else I would say:

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“Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Tell me again. Slower this time. You want the government to do what? Forgive and pay up all student loans? OK, let’s break it down: you went off to that big name school that you couldn’t afford, and now you have this ginormous debt hanging around your neck like an albatross for the next 20 years; and you want to look down your entitled nose at people like me, who went to a community college and then worked their way through the Slippery Rock State Colleges of the world, while we pay off your cancelled debt through our taxes. Am I wrong or am I right? Well, friend, good luck with that.”

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I don’t care what Merle Haggard says, there’s no such thing as “free Bubble Up and rainbow stew.” No free money.

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Somebody, somewhere, pays.

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Recently, that old meme of “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime,” got turned on its ear. Now it’s “Give a man a fish every day and he will expect you to feed him for a lifetime.”

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Or better: “Let a man see you fishing, and you’ll be fishing for him for his lifetime.”