OPINION:
One of President Joe Biden’s final kiss-offs to the American people is another $4.28 billion in student loan forgiveness, adding to the nearly $180 billion from that same pot he’s gifted to almost 5 million borrowers, all so they can avoid paying their duly contracted education-related obligations. That, as the nation’s debt has soared to $36 trillion, and the national deficit, to $1.8 trillion.
And the big brewing fight in Washington, D.C., is over the legitimacy of a Donald Trump-created department that’s tasked with cleaning the federal government’s spending sheets of inefficiency and waste.
Well, ain’t that something. This is classic Big Bureaucracy.
Spend other people’s money until the money runs out — and then cry and warn about the need to keep spending other people’s money or people will suffer, people will face hardship, people could even, gasp, die.
The fact is, politicians love to keep the people in debt as a form of control. The larger the national debt, the more taxpayers are called upon to pay for that debt; the more tax dollars are centralized in Washington, D.C.; the more politicians are put in control of disbursing those tax dollars; the more the citizens must rely on the politicians for receipt of those dollars; the more power politicians accrue; the less independence, freedom and ability to self-govern the citizens retain.
Debt is a form of slavery.
A government that regularly raises the level of debt for citizens to pay is a government that is not working for the citizens’ best interests — but rather for that of the political class. And with enough debt, this political class quickly becomes the ruling class.
“Four years ago,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a press release announcing the newest batch of tax dollars for student loan “forgiveness” — the socialist’s way of describing theft, but that’s to digress — “Four years ago,” he said, Fox News reported, “the Biden-Harris Administration made a pledge to America’s teachers, service members, nurses, first responders and other public servants that we would fix the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and I’m proud to say that we delivered.”
The $4.28 billion is to pay off the loans of these public workers.
So taxpayers not only pay these workers’ salaries. But they’re also, thanks to Team Biden, paying off these workers’ debts.
That’s after Elon Musk and Vivak Ramaswamy, the Trump picks to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, found so much pork in the latest stopgap spending bill Congress tried to pass that it was dubbed the “Cramnibus bill” because of all the lines and pages and sections of unjustified, unwarranted and unconstitutional spending. Yes, unconstitutional. Remember the Constitution?
That’s the document that gives Congress the power to spend and tax to provide for the general welfare of the entire country — a clause that also includes the congressional mandate to use this tax money to pay debts. Congress is pretty good about the spending part; politicians are really creative in stretching the “general welfare” provision to include about any imagination under the sun. Where Congress lacks is in the debt-paying part — except when it comes to paying off debts of special sections of society who are believed to be possessed of benefit at the ballot boxes. For example: Biden’s big socialist student loan payoff to derelicts who don’t want to honor their contracts and financial obligations.
DOGE is facing an uphill climb. Not only are the financials monumental — and probably cloaked and hidden from detection. But the fight with politicians to cede their pork projects — which is to say, to cede their power — will prove even more significant.
“Sen. Chris Murphy is questioning why Democrats are taking Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ seriously,” The Hill wrote.
“Like,” he said, “why are we acting as if this is legitimate?”
On The New Republic’s “The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent” podcast, Murphy said: “It’s not a department” and “it’s being run by two billionaires, people who have no idea how important basic government services like Medicaid, Social Security, Veterans benefits are to regular people.”
That’s a hoot.
As if multi-millionaire politicians who live in bubbles of tax-paid entitlements are “regular” folk who understand what it’s like to fend off illegals in the streets; sacrifice fine dining for medical prescriptions; and take one, possibly two, maybe three, maybe more, forms of crowded public transportation to get to a $20-per-hour job each day that barely pays the food for the family — and then turn around and ride the same crowded rails and busses to get home.
A real man of the people, that Murphy.
His attitude is far too often the norm on Capitol Hill, though. Whether Democrat or Republican, progressive or socialist, left-leaning, right-leaning and all the leaners in between, the debts of America are enslaving American citizens.
Minus the politicians, of course. Minus the politicians and those they choose to join them in their never-ending, never-fulfilled quests for power and control.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
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