As the global economy starts grinding to a halt, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) seems keen on making sure young folks in the country get one final squeeze from the system.
According to a March 28 article from the Associated Press (AP), the U.S. ED is rolling back the SAVE plan from the Biden era after a federal court defined it as illegal earlier in March. The SAVE plan allowed borrowers to repay at lower interest rates, allowed loan forgiveness and allowed monthly repayments at a rate of 5% of the borrower’s monthly discretionary spending.
Nicholas Kent, deputy secretary of the Department of Education, said “the days of unlawful loan forgiveness are behind us,” according to AP. Kent added that it was the Trump administration’s view that students who take out loans should be repaying those loans.
What is comically beyond parody is that on March 30, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with ABC News, “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran. You’d have a much different country.”
Not 48 hours later, President Donald Trump made this statement at a White House Easter luncheon on April 1:
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal level. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country,” according to NBC.
The hypocrisy and stupidity are astounding, truly. How can people still support this government? Rubio says the Iranians should spend their money on programs to support their people, and Trump argues we should do the exact opposite. They do not want to support welfare programs that would help millions of Americans and actively worked to get the SAVE plan overturned, which will make borrowers’ lives harder, and for what? So we can carpet bomb Iran because they supposedly wanted a nuclear bomb?
According to reporting from The Guardian, the Iran War cost the U.S. $12 billion after only the first six days. If reporting confirms that the U.S. is maintaining that $2 billion per day expenditure rate, they will have spent $82 billion on the war as of the printing of this article on April 9. That is enough to cover a debt-free college program for the U.S. and still have money left over.
It is pathetic that the administration cannot be bothered to make college free at the point of service, let alone make repayment of loans easier for young graduates. It is also insulting to the intelligence of the American people to make the two-faced comments Rubio and Trump made.
Iran probably would have spent their money on public welfare programs if it had it. Iran has been under extreme U.S. economic sanctions for more than a decade and has had some degree of U.S. economic sanctions imposed since the founding of the current regime in 1979.
To imply that Americans are somehow not equally deserving of that type of treatment from our government is ignorant. Millions of Americans have been struggling with rising costs both before and during this war, with it only projected to get worse. Washington just cannot be bothered to care because Honeywell, Boeing, Raytheon and the rest of their ilk are getting money hand-over-first to blow up some country halfway around the world.
Timothy Fitzpatrick can be contacted at
tfitzpatrick@kscequinox.com
