My Post about Biden's Student Loan Plan, Etc. at Bari Weiss' Common Sense
Check out my 'TGIF' column commenting on the biggest (and smallest!) stories of the past week.
I’ve got a guest column up at Common Sense, the excellent Substack Bari Weiss and crew started after she left The New York Times in 2020 (read her resignation letter here). If you want to skip right to it, click here now.
I’m friends with Bari, whom I respect greatly not just for her critique of legacy media and related institutions but her commitment and follow through in building an alternative outlet for the sort of work she believes in. It’s one thing to bitch about the Times, but it’s another thing altogether to actually leave it and start constructing your own shining city out there on the frontier. I’ve lived my entire professional life in alternative spaces, partly because I never had access to mainstream institutions (whether academic or journalistc), so in a way I never had to make that sort of choice. It can’t be easy.
Her wife Nellie Bowles is another refugee from the Times, where she covered tech and business (read two of her standout stories: this one on businesses struggling in post-riot Kenosha, Wisconsin and this one on pandemic sperm kings; whole Times archive here). She’s going on maternity leave and so won’t be writing TGIF, a great weekly feature she created that wraps up big stories and small, with a side dish of commentary, for a few months. I’m proud to be the first guest fill-in.
Please check out the whole piece by going here (I believe most or all of it is available to the reading public). I don’t always agree with what I read at Common Sense but I always find the work interesting and provocative.
Here are some snippets from my TGIF column to whet your appetite for the full thing, which is about 3X as long and covers about a dozen more topics and stories, ranging from pro-Salman Rushdie demonstrations to Ron DeSantis’ weird Top Gun campaign ad to my gloss on a fantastic new must-read biography of Grover Cleveland (yes, really).
→ Student Loan Forgiveness, Including for Many, Many Wealthy People: I’ll give President Joe Biden this much credit: He knows how to get people to stop talking about inflation, at least for a few minutes.
Between the Mar-a-Lago raid by the F.B.I., which honestly seems like it happened a decade ago, and this latest gambit, generalized price hikes seem about as pressing right now as Hunter Biden’s body dysmorphia. However constitutionally iffy, Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan may be in the first place (in July, Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted the president does not have “the power for debt forgiveness”), the actual nuts and bolts of it are terrible all on their own.
The plan’s top-line takeaway is that borrowers making up to $125,000—almost twice the median household income—will be eligible to wipe out $10,000 in debt, with poorer borrowers able to walk away from twice as much. The total price tag could be around $330 billion over the next 10 years, or the equivalent of more than $2,000 per taxpayer.
The impetus to forgive student loans stems from the notion that it saddles relatively young, relatively poor people with so much debt that they can’t get on with adulting–you know, borrowing money to buy a car or a home, or to bring the next generation of taxpayers into this wretched world. But virtually all—about 90 percent—of student loan borrowers are paying back their loans on time, which suggests that the individual amounts aren’t too much for them to handle (about $300 per month, according to the website Student Loan Hero, but that amount can vary wildly based on type of institution, type of degree, age of the borrower, and more). And it’s fair that the borrowers pay, since they get most of the benefits (about $900,000 in extra median lifetime earnings for men and $630,000 more for women). Canceling the debt merely shifts it onto other taxpayers—including people who already paid their student debt or didn’t go to college at all.
I approach this topic as someone who debt-financed my undergraduate years. Student loans made it possible for me to attend a four-year residential college, and I would have loved to have been relieved of 10 years’ worth of about $250 monthly payments. I remain a fan of debt in general—it’s really one of the greatest inventions in human history when used wisely. But something has gone terribly wrong when people who voluntarily sign up for money and can afford to pay it back get to skip out on the check. Last year, I participated in an IntelligenceSquared U.S. debate on this very matter, which you can check out here:
…For a few, brief, shining moments, we didn’t think about inflation, until, alas, there it is again, partly because the president’s plan is obviously inflationary: It sends a huge amount of new money into the economy….
→ Historian Attacked for Suggesting Historians Study History. Speaking of history, the president of the American Historical Association, James H. Sweet, really stuck his foot in it when, in his most recent column for the group’s newsletter, he suggested that academics should encourage grad students seeking PhDs to study older periods, especially those before 1800.
Sweet, an expert on the African diaspora and New World slavery, also had the temerity to criticize The 1619 Project as motivated more by present-day politics than an abiding interest in what really happened in the past.
“Too many Americans have become accustomed to the idea of history as an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions,” lamented Sweet, a complaint which rings true to my ears as a journalist with a Ph.D. in American literature (where we often discuss finding a “usable past” specifically to authorize current ideas or trends). One major difference between history and activism is that the former seeks to explicate the past in all its murkiness and ambivalence. The latter seeks to find the one moment or phrase that advances whatever argument you’re making right now.
You can guess the response to Sweet’s thoughtful and edifying essay by knowing he quickly posted a note to the top of the column in which he takes “full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused.” Since it’s Friday—thank god it’s Friday!—and the bar has recently fallen so low, I’m choosing to be happy the piece was written at all and that, at least as we went to press, it hasn’t yet been taken down….
→ Well-Behaved Kids Seldom Make History, But Free-Range Kids Sometimes Sustain Brain Damage: This footage of kids crashing on a metal slide at Detroit’s Belle Isle Park is a wonder to behold, a reminder of a kinder, gentler America where kids really got banged up at amusement parks. If they can survive this, student loans will be a piece of cake….
Again, whole thing here. Please click through to check it out!