Student Loans, Death, And Taxes

“I’ve got Doctor Euthanasia’s home number for that eventuality.” – Absolutely Fabulous

They should thank their student loans – I don’t think they could ever repay them.

I had another theme picked for today, but that’s okay – it can wait for a few posts. It’ll keep. But when I heard that Joe Biden was planning on relieving up to $10,000 in student debt for all borrowers that make less than $125,000, I was astonished.

The late genius P.J. O’Rourke described exactly this situation:

“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on virtually everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.

“Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

First, $10,000 doesn’t sound like all that much, right? Further, that would wipe out entirely all the debt from about a third of the borrowers. So, I pulled out my calculator. A third of 45,000,000 is 15,000,000 people, who presumably vote. Assuming that their average debt . . .

That’s $90 billion. Ugh! Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much money. I checked the numbers again, and was, like, um, that’s right. So what about the other two-thirds?

I assumed that some of them made more than $125,000 a year – Biden’s cut-off for his “gift”. I decided to play it conservatively – assume that only 25,000,000 people would get the full $10,000 airdropped into their lives. That’s another $250 billion.

Altogether, that’s $340 billion. $340,000,000,000.

This is an astonishing sum for someone to just give away as free money. And forget the moral hazard associated with doing this – paying debts is honorable, especially when everyone else is required to. You’re not a loan.

I guess someone didn’t get the Barbie® they were looking for from Santa Biden.

But since (spins wheel) at least Bush II (and you could argue Nixon was on the bandwagon, too), the competition by presidents of either party has been to shovel the most money out the door to people as fast as they could in year two of their presidency to juice the economy so all the cylinders would be pumping when their next election hit. And since they only have two terms, who cares what happens then?

People vote in favor of good economies, so a good economy going into the 2024 election will help get votes.

Originally, that $340,000,000,000 bought a lot of nonfat vanilla lattes on the way to Introduction to Feminist Non-Binary Ancient Indigenous Australian Literature 201 at good old We Have A Climbing Wall University. I’m betting that $340,000,000,000 will buy a lot of votes from the graduate-level baristas that took that class.

What will be the result of all of that extra cash floating around the economy?

It does look like it will be tax free . . . but I’m betting lots of those folks wouldn’t cheat on their taxes, I mean, what kind of example would that be for their 23 dependents?

It’s hard to tell. Normally, I’d say almost certain inflation. I think that even Biden is dimly aware that all of the previous inflation has destroyed the housing market – sales are down over 20% from last year. That destroys a lot of value. And if the market drops?

The bigger question is this: giving a single politician the unilateral authority to make multibillion-dollar decisions on a whim is madness. It turns the executive into a king, handing out largess to whoever he feels like. I mean, if Biden remembers.

But what other powers does a king have?

The power of death. And that’s in play up in Canada.

3.3% of deaths? Those are rookie numbers, Canada!

They are rookie numbers, and Canada is doing its best to pump them up. Remember, coffee is only for closers. And Canada wants to be a closer. Read a headline the other day – a Canadian veteran has PTSD. Doctor’s suggestion?

In Canada, if you’re feeling suicidal, apparently the authorities want you to get help. As in someone to help you kill yourself.

Yup, Canada suggested he run away to go live on a farm where he can run and play, like all those goldfish I had as a kid. Except in this case, if you go to a doctor because you have a cold, they’ll suggest, without you asking, if you want to have a dirt nap instead. Okay, not a cold. But PTSD.

I can’t imagine why they’re suggesting that. Perhaps it’s because it’s cheaper to bury someone than to give them “free” healthcare?

Suicide? That’s the last thing I’d ever do.

Oddly, it turns out that when people have goals, values, and the prospect of a decent life ahead of them, euthanasia is an idea that doesn’t sound so good.

Except to them. And if it’s you dying.

Huh, somehow they no longer sound like Santa. Because? He isn’t real. If you want to know how they really feel, re-read the Tweet® above.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

34 thoughts on “Student Loans, Death, And Taxes”

  1. But when I heard that Joe Biden was planning on relieving up to $10,000 in student debt for all borrowers that make less than $10,000, I was astonished. You are sure about the amounts?

  2. I’m hoping that these people become infertile from the jab or simply don’t want children. Dated an ultra left woman for 3-4 months on the mid-90s who had that attitude. Both her son & daughter became flaming libtard gays.

    Why date someone like that? As Steve Martin was told in “The Jerk”, she had a “special purpose”.

  3. It’s a well played move for the time before the mid-terms. If he gets away with it, those that take the money will vote for Democrats. If he doesn’t, those that wanted the money will know the demon Republicans were the problem, and vote Democrat. Therein lays the problem. It’s Democrats, and it’s time for them to be labeled as the criminals they are. After that, prosecute them for treason, and send the entire lot to Somalia for a new life.

      1. Punish? But it’ll raise the intelligence quotient both there and here. Everybody wins!

  4. My wife and I talked about the racial aspect this morning. What the Bolsheviks really wanted was a blanket forgiveness of student “loans” just for black and brown people but the problem is that while the woke Whites talk about racial equity, what they want is daddy Biden to wipe out their student loans. blacks and browns will vote Democrat anyway but they needed to throw a bone to those White liberals to entice them to show up, with the promise of wiping the whole balance away in the future.

    1. They really do want to create those programs. Wonder how they’d like “disparate impact” used against them?

  5. Well, I’ll confess it looks like this will kill the last $10K of my wife’s loans. I certainly won’t suddenly start voting lefty – more like point and laugh and maybe buy a gun.

  6. Didn’t know that many Canadians would have information leading to the arrest of Hillary Clinton which is the leading cause of Assisted Suicide.

  7. Once again this is NOT Pedo Joe’s idea. All the Groper is interested in is a fresh pair of Depends, a pudding pop and a ten year old to sniff. This insanity is being pushed by the same unelected, unaccountable and anonymous criminals behind all the evil spewing from the White House. Find those people hiding behind the curtains, string them up and life for the rest of us will improve immeasurably.

      1. That list is a start. But the true movers and shakers behind the throne aren’t going to be listed as staff. They will be people like Valerie Jarrett….unlisted and unacknowledged but busy doing the bidding of the truly evil power brokers….like Soros and Schwab etc.

          1. Yes. The WH staff are just go-fers. The power is off-stage, with demons like Obama, Jarrett, Nuland and such . . . and certainly not with Tater Joe. He decides nothing.

  8. “Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

    Needed to be added: “Santa Claus gladly gives away the bounty God helps provide to mankind, not because Santa Claus is generous, but because he expects loyalty from the recipients of his looted largess.”

  9. Heard on Bloomberg radio this morning, that 1/6 of US households are behind on their utility bills. And I found a notice in last week’s electric bill that the “supply” charge is going up 52% in October. And who knows how high the natural gas bill will go, when the long-term contracts get re-negotiated? The Dem’s won’t be able to stop with covering student loan debts. They’ll have to start covering overdue utility bills, too, to Keep Children Warm.

    I gained a little more respect for the Bloomberg crew when they explained that there are two main theories of inflation: supply shocks, and increased money supply. I’m sure we’ve all heard the details of each theory; the nice part was hearing both of them described in the same program! (One subtly of the “money supply” argument is that it’s not just governments that “create” money. Banks do it, too, when they make loans. But only governments can do it without expecting repayment.)

  10. Please forgive the wall of text. I believe it’s relevant and important.
    With regards to Joe the Usurper canceling some student debts: You have to understand how modern banking works, especially at the federal (“We own the printers!”) level. It costs them nothing in the short term to cancel debt. That doesn’t mean they won’t still raise your taxes, though.

    Debt is money created out of nothing. It’s an entry in a spreadsheet. When you pay it off, the money returns to being nothing, a ‘0’ in the spreadsheet. Only while the debt is active does the money exist. The trick is that you have to pay real money as the interest. When debt is canceled, the bank loses nothing but the income stream of interest payments.

    Paying off debts is deflationary. The money is returned to sender and destroyed. Canceling debts is inflationary, because the money isn’t destroyed. It’s still out there, being traded around. It’s exactly the same as printing money and handing it out. Okay, well, to be honest, it’s the issuance of the debt in the first place that is inflationary. But if the money isn’t zeroed out again through repayment, it is a permanent net increase in the money supply, making the rest of the currency worth just that bit much less.

    Ah, the joys of modern banking. What, you thought that the banks could only lend out money they actually had on deposit? Silly citizen, that hasn’t been the case for decades.

    In traditional fractional reserve banking, if a bank maintained a 5% reserve, they could lend out 95% of total deposits. In modern fractional reserve banking, they can lend out 19 times their total deposits. And if you put the loaned money back into a bank account, it counts as a deposit.

    As an item of curiosity, the current mandatory reserve rate is: zero. Banks can create all the debt money they like, with no limit. They’re just numbers on spreadsheets, after all. Until the Fed monkeys around with the reserve percentage, forcing small banks to call in their loans, bankrupting small businesses. (Anybody else remember 2008? This is what really happened then to collapse the economy. And when small banks couldn’t meet the new, higher standard, the Fed forced them to sell out to the big banks.) (Never forget that the 2008 recession was a choice the government made. It didn’t happen by accident.)

    1. Exactly. Cancelling a debt owed to a bank is deflationary. This just puts more money into circulation in the form of payments not made.

  11. The vast Army constructed over the past forty years of Total PC and Feminism in the universities? . . . their student debt is being cleared by the Woke-Fem Politburo. All those courses in diversity, inclusion, race-grievance, equality and feminism were always freebies. You and I paid for them. Not the neo-fascist Army and not their dildo mommies and daddies, proud as punch of their ‘successful’ Empowered Ones.

    Now the Army can proceed with its stated intention of hating/destroying The Evil People (white males, double points for Christians).

    This move provides an election boosts via patronage, and simultaneously frees-up the Army to continue making war on The Evil People.

  12. Off topic, I tried to search for one of your old posts by keyword today, using the format site:https://wilderwealthywise.com search-term, a method that always worked before.

    Well, duckduckgo returned absolutely nothing. I tried several keywords from recent posts – still nothing.

    I switched to startpage, which I understand is just a privacy protecting front end to google. The post I wanted came right up.

    This means your blog is more heavily censored by duckduckgo than it is by google.

    1. Oh, no. Google hits are fewer than duckduckgo by a big margin. And both of them are a third of what they were three years ago.

  13. I cannot undertake to lay my finger on the section of the Constitution that enables any sitting president to decide where and how much of the federal budget will be available to hand out like an endless Santa Claus slush fund to their voter base of lackwits, grifters, deadbeats, and ne’er-do-wells.” – Calvin Coolidge, probably

    So, when can we expect the impeachment hearing for this despotic unconstitutional outrage to start?
    When we get snow cones from Satan’s underpants, or perhaps even later than that??

    It’s nearly time to start shooting people, and to continue until we get all republic, and no bananas.

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