Speaker 1: So predictably, Republicans, right wing media, extremists on the right authoritarians.
The usual suspects are furious about the student loan debt forgiveness that Joe Biden is doing now.
This is another great accomplishment for Joe Biden. And in the next story,
I'm actually going to go through the incredible two month one A.D.. Arguably one of the greatest
turnarounds in a presidency, certainly that I've covered and I would argue in decades in the United
States. But before we get to that. One of the real reasons that Republicans are melting down
and panicking over Joe Biden, the student loan debt forgiveness that was announced yesterday,
is that on some level they realize 43 million people directly benefit
and then their families, their spouses, their parents, who might be helping with the payment,
whoever the children, everybody benefits indirectly as well. And Republicans realize that
this could be really bad for them in the November midterms, but they have nothing else to do then
to make outrageous claims about why this is bad. Well, this is unfair to people who have paid their
student loans. We talked about that in the last segment. This is a handout. This teaches people
they don't have to be financially responsible or whatever else the case may be. And part of
what's happening is they know this is very bad for them. Let's look at a couple of examples of this.
Here's Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson, whose lawyers have argued in court that he's not really
doing news, he's doing entertainment, and nothing he says should really be taken seriously. That's
a legal defense to Tucker Carlson's program. Tucker Carlson says that the student debt
relief is a form of reparations being paid to drug addicted robots who have no job prospects. Wow.
Speaker 4: So when Joe Biden announced today that he plans to cancel some of their debt,
the obvious response would be to celebrate the announcement. But we didn't right away.
Oh. Instead, we pause to learn the details about what he was proposing. That's a habit
we've picked up from watching people like Joe Biden in action over the past several years.
It's always worth reading the fine print. These are the very same people, after all, who decided
it was a good idea somehow to defund the police. Speaker 1: They're the one. Okay, now, remember,
they haven't defunded the police. And as far as Joe Biden is concerned,
he has nothing to do with police funding. I mean, just it's just neither here nor
there. It's a complete non-sequitur. Speaker 4: To force the entire American
population to take an experimental COVID vaccine. Even when it became obvious that it
didn't work. These are the people who said, okay. Speaker 1: And again, there's so much to that. The
initial vaccine against the initial variant was extremely effective at preventing infection. Over
time, its ability to prevent infection diminish, but its ability to prevent serious COVID death and
hospitalization was still good. All of these one line lies require some time to unpack. But really,
this is about the student loan debt forgiveness. Speaker 4: Crack pipes to crack addicts, the ones
who think 16 year old should vote in presidential elections. The ones who screamed at you about how
Ukraine's borders are sacrosanct but yours are racist, etc., etc., etc. These are people, in
other words, with a long and public track record of very bad ideas, extraordinarily bad ideas.
Ideas so stupid you couldn't make them up. So the question is, is this idea different? We want
it to be, but unfortunately it's not. And here's how you know it's not. Colleges aren't refunding
any of the loan money. You are. You are. But wait, you say I didn't defraud anyone. I didn't
claim that a degree in postcolonial liberation studies from Wesleyan would be worth anything.
I didn't take 80 grand a year from middle class families to turn their children into
Xanax addicted robots with no job prospects. Well. Speaker 1: Listen, these are just Xanax addicted
robots with no job prospects. They don't deserve the student loan forgiveness. Now, there's so many
different ways to respond to this. And as we've talked about earlier, it's good for the economy,
for money to be going back into real businesses rather than just interest on student loans
paid to mega financial corporations, which people like Tucker Carlson often criticize. But there's a
bigger picture here, which is Tucker correctly points out we have a broken higher education
system. The other day, I was calculating what was it? I was calculating based on how much?
Based on how much my my girlfriend's alma maters tuition went up from when she graduated to now
we were calculating that when our daughter would be 18, it would be 203,000. Billion a year if just
it kept growing at the same rate. Like, obviously, something has to break. It's a completely broken
system. Tucker's correctly identifying that. And you know what I have even said before,
there should be some consideration based on your major, whether the cost of the education is
is worthwhile. Right. I mean, when I think about any expense, I think about what's the
value. And if you're going into a field where you are unlikely to really make money, then it's
perfectly fair to consider whether the cost of the education makes sense there. There's a whole
bunch of things that go into that. But again, this idea of the recipients aren't deserving
is just an it's the same way they talk about any welfare program. And it's a it's a very broken and
disturbing way to talk about it now. A couple other examples of this here is
Dan Bongino talking to Jesse WATTERS on Fox News. He says that the student loan debt forgiveness
is evidence of the collapse of America. Speaker 3: Still trying to get over this whole
thing because, listen, Jesse, if you were doing a tutorial on what the collapse of great empires
look like. Yeah, just pick up your phone, start the video camera, because this is exactly what
it looks like and just leave it running. This is the movie. This is the autobiography of the
autobiography of the American Empire. Collapsing before our very eyes. Yep.
Speaker 1: Ten K of student loan forgiveness for those making under $125,000
and 20 K for Pell Grant recipients. That's the end of American civilization. Now, of course,
the counterpoints are just about every country in western and northern Europe
where they are flourishing. There are good business environments.
People have health care. The health care is good, education is good, quality of life is good,
life expectancy is good. And in many cases, they have college education paid through taxation. Now,
here. Government money for the forgiveness means it's taxpayer money. That's absolutely true.
And it's really no different than the taxpayer money directly paying for the education. In this
case, it didn't directly pay for it. Now it's going to be part of the forgiveness.
It's not the indication of a collapsing empire. Many of the best countries in the
world to live in have education paid for through taxation. Now, one more Bongino clip. Here he is.
It's more kind of like lazy, like these people that everybody's lazy, according to Bongiorno.
Speaker 3: It's happening here. Really has me a little annoyed because there's this thing I didn't
come repayment program. You know what it's called? It's called the freakin job. And here's how this
works. A job. Here's this thing. Let me just do a demo for you all at home. There's this thing you
have. It's called the ass right here. The ass. Okay. And when the ass gets up out of the sea
and goes to work and you remove the ass from the sea, you get this thing. It's
a four letter word called the job. Some of you know Joe Biden will get the job. You get the job
and then you pay back the loan. Speaker 1: Okay. So,
first of all, right wingers think that that's like a finger they see. They believe Bongino
is a thinker. Now, aside from the lazy narrative, just being it's a lazy narrative, quite frankly,
it's lazy to just do the lazy narrative. A lot of the people I don't know how old he is, but
a lot of the people who say just work and pay for school, that's all when they were in school
relative to income. College was exponentially cheaper. It was orders of magnitude cheaper.
The relationship fact. Thom Hartmann has talked about on his program how his wife Louise, if I
recall correctly, basically waitressed to pay for college. The idea now that you could work like in
food service to pay for college is absurd because the relationship between the cost of college
and the minimum wage and the median wage has gotten completely out of whack. So these people
don't know what they're talking about, but they're certainly trying to make you think that they do.