Extend Student Debt Relief, You Fucking Idiots

The Biden administration announced this week that they will not, in fact, be extending student loan forgiveness, even though the pandemic is still raging. It’s a fun little song and dance Democrats love to do, where they deliberate for an abusively long time over a very easy decision, and then make the objectively wrong, absolute least popular choice.

The joke here is the part where people say we have a two-party political system. The joke is all the vaccinated and boosted people who got COVID the same week they found out their government is failing them. The joke is that we were told this wouldn’t happen, we were specifically promised that this presidency would not let us down in this specific way!

I honestly don’t really know how to be funny about this; it’s such a massive failure. It’s a dereliction of duty on such a grand scale that it’s hard to believe these people just get to go home at the end of the day, that they sleep at night, that they think it’s remotely interesting whether or not President Joe Biden likes Senator Joe Manchin as a person, that they think anyone in America should give one-tenth of a shit for one second what their opinions are on anything while they are just openly not doing the job for which we are paying them. We are paying them in an economic crisis—and in a deadly global pandemic—in which they get paid leave and paid vacations and decent health insurance and COVID tests provided at their workplace. Meanwhile we get… what? A useless, do-nothing government for which we can’t even ask for a much-deserved refund.

I don’t care what Joe Manchin is like as a person. He certainly doesn’t care what I’m like as a person, even though it is arguably his fucking job to care about all of us, or at least those of us living in West Virginia. Still, it seems not unreasonable to want Congressmembers, and people in government generally, to have a broad sense of compassion and concern for the entire nation.

And it’s not just Joe Manchin: Is Nancy Pelosi thinking about the parents who have been working from home with small children for nearly two years now, running on little sleep, no time off, and zero support from a society that refuses to have any kind of infrastructure supporting parents or children, unless of course those children happen to be zygotes, in which case there’s a cute little cosplay team in black robes ready to have the backs Democrats don’t have?

It’s gross that we even talk about education debt in terms of “forgiveness.” The literal fucking 18-year-olds who took out those loans didn’t do anything wrong; they were shanghaied at a too-young age by a system built to yoke people to an often insurmountable burden in an economic system that is increasingly unworkable for anyone without significant family wealth—and not income, but wealth, specifically. America has a weird fetish for the notion of “working people,” but it actually hates them. America prides itself on its “higher education,” but it actually believes people who pursue it deserve to be punished, unless they’re from an elite enough class to buy them absolution. Why else would we be discussing forgiveness? Why else would these opportunities be seemingly intended only for people whose families can drop hundreds of thousands a year to finance the bloated salaries of university presidents living in university president mansions?

Debt has been the American way for too long, and it needs to not be anymore. The same people who lament the debt ceiling (a fiction) approve a $770 billion defense budget at a time when we are not at fucking war. We are, however, experiencing a massive public health crisis. Do you know how much it would cost to vaccinate the entire world? $50 billion. Do you know what Elon Musk’s net worth is? $162 billion. Do you know how much he pays in taxes? Hahahahahahahah HE DOESN’T. HE DOESN’T PAY TAXES.

While campaigning, Joe Biden pledged to cancel at least $10,000 of education debt per person. In a speech after he was elected, he said that student loan cancellation was a crucial part of any plan for economic recovery and “should be done immediately.” It is truly outrageous that Donald fucking Trump, America’s absolute no-contest worst president forgave student loans, but this administration, which ran on repairing the mistakes of the previous one, won’t make that a priority. Biden, on the other hand, punted to Congress, according to NBC News reporter Lauren Egan—Congress, so widely known for doing the right thing, or really anything.

For some reason, since campaigning and even since the early days of being elected, Biden seems to have completely forgotten what he apparently knew then about the lived experience of too many Americans: that they were working hard for too little money, continuously crushed under too much debt, and in the crosshairs of a broadening housing crisis.

Sure, the president of the United States likely interacts with normal people far less than a candidate on a campaign trail. But his administration’s general attitude toward the critical position Americans find themselves in across so many categories these days is, frankly, disgusting. The government’s dereliction of duty on a collective, effective COVID response has been appalling. We should be in a much better position than we are. Instead, we have the White House literally laughing at the notion of providing rapid tests to all Americans, something MANY other countries are doing, and refusing to pass even emergency measures for paid leave that would allow people—in particular, the large number of hourly wage workers in this country, many of whom don’t eat if they don’t show up to work—to get vaccinated and also stay home when they’re sick.

The instability of the American political landscape is such that Biden may very well be a one-term president, and we face a real risk of going back to something as bad or worse as we had before. The American public needs him to act like a one-term president and take bold action as though it is our last chance, because it really is. The Democrats’ insistent clinging to a status quo that serves, it seems, lobbyists and few others, is an embarrassing rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titantic—an egregious waste of time when that is one of the many resources we do not have to spare.