OPINION:
Robbing the poor to give to the rich.
That is President Biden’s entire domestic policy in a nutshell.
Whether it is his party’s “Green New Deal” scam, his open-borders corporate cheap labor scheme or forcing American taxpayers to fork over billions of dollars in weapons and cash to his son’s business associates in Ukraine, Mr. Biden is waging a full-scale war on the American taxpayer — particularly middle and lower income working Americans.
The latest scam to defraud innocent taxpayers is his $300 billion vote-buying program to force working Americans to pay college tuition for rich children to get “gender studies” degrees from colleges and universities that actually teach children that there are more than two genders in the human species.
If you made this up, nobody would believe you. You would get wrapped in a straight jacket and hauled to the funny farm by men in white coats.
But in Mr. Biden’s America, this is actually happening.
This latest scam involving student debt is particularly galling because it is a problem that was created by the federal government in the first place. For 50 years, Mr. Biden has devoted his political career to Washington creating this problem.
In a desperate effort to produce more gender studies experts in America, politicians in Washington created federal student loan programs. These programs saddle students with massive debts in exchange for useless degrees from fancy colleges and universities.
Because, really, America needs more experts in underwater basket weaving than, say, electricians or plumbers. Manual labor is what illegals streaming across the border are for, according to Mr. Biden and Wall Street Democrats.
The results of the federal government’s predatory lending program have been as obvious as they are devastating.
Students piled up unimaginable debts without any marketable skills for a job that would pay off those heinous debts. And since the federal government was shoveling billions of dollars in student debt to colleges and universities, those colleges and universities jacked up their tuition rates five times the rate of inflation.
As a result, these same colleges and universities have piled up massive, untaxed endowments larger than the GDP of 25 countries — combined! And that is just Harvard alone.
Meanwhile, the students who got snookered into these debts are left penniless, their credits are destroyed, and they have no marketable skills to get out of the situation that Mr. Biden and Washington politicians led them into in the first place.
Now comes the part in this Ponzi scheme where new suckers need to be found and forced to pick up the tab. That new sucker would be you, the innocent American taxpayer.
And as is always the case with every Ponzi scheme run by the federal government, there are always various grades of losers — kind of like Dante’s rings of hell.
There is the poor student who got suckered into the scam in the first place. Then there are all the students who chose to go to community college to avoid all the predatory debts — who now get to pay for some rich kid’s degree in gender studies.
Perhaps the ring closest to hell, however, is the responsible student who decided to get a degree from a fancy college or university who sacrificed for years — taking on extra jobs, skipping vacations and working seven days a week — to pay off all his or her college loans.
Now they are free and clear and ready to enjoy all the just rewards for their wisdom, hard work and sacrifice — only to be handed the bill for a bunch of snot-nosed brats with degrees in gender studies and underwater basket weaving.
The only winners are colleges and universities that have piled up billions upon billions in profits with help from the federal government’s student loan program. It is the largest bailout in history — and a bailout of an industry that doesn’t even need the money.
If the government really wanted to do something about all the pernicious debt students have been conned into piling up for useless degrees, Mr. Biden would go after Harvard and all these colleges and universities and start liquidating their endowments to pay children back for the useless degrees they got and predatory lending practices they have suffered.
A good, very small first step would be to start taxing these endowments instead of hiring 87,000 armed IRS agents to terrorize innocent American taxpayers into paying for Mr. Biden’s $300 billion boondoggle.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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