In Joe Biden’s “Emergency Action Plan to Save the Economy,” the president-elect proposes to “[f]orgive a minimum of $10,000 per person of federal student loans.”

Wait, some protest. That would be a subsidy for the more well-off, at the expense of the less well-off. They have a point.  “[D]ebt relief overall, the New York Times notices, “would disproportionately benefit middle- to upper-class college graduates … especially those who attended elite and expensive institutions, and people with lucrative professional credentials like law and medical degrees.”

In truth, I don’t have a big problem with student loan forgiveness.

Student loan debtors have a better case than most for relief. They spent their entire young lives being told they absolutely must go to college, and then got lured into borrowing money to do so precisely because the loans were “guaranteed” by the government, please don’t read the fine print. They got caught in a long con, put over on them by Big Government, Big Finance, and Big Education.

I’d rather see “forgiveness” done by treating student debt just like other debt in bankruptcy proceedings than just automatically writing it off and billing the taxpayers. If Donald Trump can escape the consequences of his poor business judgment no fewer than six times through bankruptcy, surely student borrowers deserve one bite at that legal apple.

But let’s talk about the “poorer people subsidizing wealthier people” complaint. “The majority of student debt,” Kevin D. Williamson notes at National Review, “is held by relatively high-income people, poor people mostly are not college graduates, and those who attended college but did not graduate hold relatively little college-loan debt, etc. ”

Student loan debt is hardly unique in that respect. Due to life expectancy differentials, low-income black males subsidize the retirements of “middle class” white women through the Social Security system. The primary beneficiaries of food stamp and school lunch programs are large farms and agriculture enterprises, not poor families and students. “Defense” spending is partly corporate welfare for contractors and partly a “workfare” jobs program for, mostly, “middle class” youth.

The main function of the state is to redistribute wealth from the productive class to the political class. That’s inherently an upward redistribution, and the “middle class” is half-fish, half-fowl: Partly productive class, partly a hodgepodge of political constituencies well-positioned to grab a share of the grift as bribes for their continuing support.

The difference between most of those “middle class” constituencies and student loan debtors is that, whatever their economic class, most of those debtors were young and naive when they were drawn into a scam that was really about funneling big money to banks and schools, not about equipping them for success.

We, their elders, enjoy no such excuse.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“2020: The Worst Year Ever,” reads the cover of Time magazine’s December 14 issue.

“There have been worse years in U.S. history,” admits author Stephanie Zacharek, but not, to her way of thinking, since World War Two.  Between a heavy hurricane and fire season, police violence and the accompanying protests, a circus of a presidential election, and a global pandemic, Zacharek opines, none but the oldest among us can remember a year nearly as bad.

Just how bad a given year was is, of course, a matter of opinion, but Zacharek’s opinion on 2020 strikes me as overwrought in a way that’s becoming increasingly typical of whiny American poor-us-ism.

Lately it seems everything has to be described in a superlative manner. Natural disaster. War. Police violence. Political craziness. You name it, we just can’t seem to accept that it’s part of a continuum. Everything absolutely, positively must be the mostest or the worstest of its kind, ever.

I don’t remember World War Two. I don’t even remember 1968. But that particular year lived on in our collective memory strongly enough, for long enough, that I remember (and sometimes still see) the shudders of those who lived through it.  Some high points:

In January, nearly 400 people died and thousands were injured in an earthquake in Sicily. North Korean forces seized the USS Pueblo. The Tet Offensive began in Vietnam.

In February, police killed three students at a civil rights protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

In March, American troops murdered somewhere between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians at My Lai in Vietnam.

On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots ensued.

In May, seven weeks of mass unrest began in France and at least 46 tornadoes struck At least 46 tornadoes struck ten US states in one night, killing dozens  and injuring thousands.

In June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, California.

July saw the first recorded cases in the 1968 H3N2 flu epidemic, which killed somewhere between 1 million and 4 million worldwide and as many as 100,000 in the United States (no, not as many as COVID-19, but the population of the US was less than 2/3 what it is now). It also saw four days of rioting in Cleveland, Ohio after a four-hour gun battle between police and the Black Nationalists of New Libya left seven dead.

In August, more than 200 died in an earthquake in the Philippines, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and police rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, abducting and injuring hundreds.

In October, soldiers opened fire on a protest in Mexico City, killing between 350 and 400, and 30 years of “The Troubles” kicked off after police in Derry, (Northern) Ireland,  truncheoned civil rights protesters.

Yes, 2020 has been a pretty crappy year, but let’s try to keep a little perspective here. There’s never been a year that some people didn’t think — at the time — was the worse year ever. And even if you can’t think of a single good thing about 2020 right now, I can point at least one out for you: It’s almost over.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Many (though not nearly all) of my friends on the Republican side of the bipartisan aisle are utterly convinced that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” to produce a fake victory for Joe Biden — that Donald Trump actually won, and had his victory stolen via a vast conspiracy to manufacture false votes and fraudulently switch real ones.

None of my friends on the Democratic side are buying it. Neither, it seems, are the courts. Nor am I.

So far, the evidence produced to substantiate the claims isn’t just unconvincing, it isn’t evidence. In substance, the argument is that 1) if voter preferences didn’t change between 2016 and 2020, and 2)  if the preferences of mail voters didn’t differ from the preferences of  in-person voters, a Biden victory was so statistically unlikely as to be suspicious.

But voter preferences DO change between elections, often in numbers sufficient to change outcomes from election to election in “battleground” or “swing” states.  That’s why that handful of states are called by those names. The margin between winner and loser in those states is always slim. Only a few minds need changing, or a few previously lazy voters motivated to turn out, to reverse the previous result.

As for mail versus in-person voter preferences, Donald Trump and the Republican Party spent the months leading up to the election telling their base that mail voting is suspect and in-person voting is better. The utterly predictable and completely non-suspicious result:  Mail voting went Democratic in a big way, while some Republicans who intended to vote in person decided at the last minute to catch a Seinfeld re-run instead of standing in line in the rain for two hours to participate in the real-life show about nothing.

All that said, yes, the presidential election was rigged. The next American presidential election that ISN’T rigged will be the first in living memory.

No, it wasn’t rigged to ensure a Biden win, or a Trump loss.

It was rigged to ensure victory for the status quo and for our de facto one-party system.

It was rigged by party committees, by state legislatures, and by the  Commission on Presidential debates.

It was rigged with committee rules, state ballot access laws, and debate requirements intentionally designed to keep both “major party” dissidents (e.g. Tulsi Gabbard) and third party and independent candidates as far off of voters’ radar as possible.

It wasn’t rigged to benefit a particular person. It was rigged to preserve a system: The post-World-War-Two, military-industrial complex-centered “consensus” system.

The rigging worked. If you don’t believe me, ask any progressive eyeing Joe Biden’s cabinet appointment announcements. He’s staffing his  administration with corporate lobbyists, party loyalists, and long-time ladder-climbing sycophants.

Exactly like Donald “Drain the Swamp!” Trump did. His election victory was anomalous given his rhetoric, but even if he had meant what he said, the system’s second line of defense  — some people call  it the “Deep State” — would likely have proven up to its job.

The election game is always rigged to produce business as usual.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY