Traps And Swindles

     Chessplayers are familiar with the above terms. Success at laying a trap for one’s opponent, when said opponent has a superior, nominally winning position, accounts for many a famous victory. A swindle is a form of trap, less well known and less frequently celebrated, in which one lures one’s opponent into an attractive course, seemingly a straightforward march toward victory, in which he must settle for a draw.

     Politics has the equivalents, of course.

     Our favorite Graybeard recently wrote about a significant trap. On the surface it looks like one of the Left’s pseudo-“compassionate” initiatives:

     Since the first rumblings of the potential Biden administration, the idea of "forgiving" student loans has gotten talked about a lot; whether from Elizabeth Warren or AOC, we keep hearing "progressives" clamoring for the handout. Clearly the loans can't be forgiven; money is owed to some bank, (which is to say some one) and the Feds can't wave their hands and make the banks take that loss, so that will mean taking money from some taxpayers to pay other taxpayers. It takes a study from someone relatively neutral to show just how fair that is.

     The top 20% of income earners will get $192 billion in tax money; the bottom 20% will get $29 billion. The richest income earners will get over 6-1/2 times the money as the bottom 20%. Since the lowest quintile of income earners pays almost no tax and gets more in benefits than they pay, they are essentially getting a bigger tax break. The middle class and higher will pay for this program. Our tax system is highly progressive, meaning the more one earns the more tax they pay. The last numbers I can find having blogged about (using 2016 data) is that:

• The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (39.5 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.1 percent).
• The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 27.1 percent individual income tax rate, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.5 percent).

     This idea is a highly regressive tax policy in that the richer they are, the more tax payout they get.

     Please read the whole column. Graybeard’s analysis of the deception involved is eminently worth your time, and definitely worth remembering for the off chance that you’ll someday confront a dimbulb “progressive” and feel the need to box his ears – rhetorically, of course.

     By and large the people promoting this lunacy aren’t stupid. They know what they’re doing. Some hope to profit monetarily by it, though in this particular case of a proposed policy it would be hard to pull off. So we must ask, “Apart from bribing millions of college-educated Americans, what do they hope to accomplish this way?”

     Mind you, bribing millions of college-educated Americans with Treasury funds is a substantial political goal by itself. But I sense another agenda, one that hasn’t yet been widely discussed. It goes to the heart of the Left’s “long march through the institutions,” which has succeeded most visibly in its conquest of America’s educational institutions.

     The rise in the cost of government-controlled schools – and don’t kid yourself; the “public” schools in your district are as much an arm of government as any state or federal bureaucracy – has had several effects. The most obvious one is to increase the cost of living sharply, forcing many American families to send the wife to work. The next most obvious has been a continuous struggle over how all that “funding” will be used: for the “disadvantaged,” or for the “gifted,” or for “activities,” or for “social involvement,” or what have you. Before the public schools started to bloat their agendas beyond literacy, numeracy, and historical and civic awareness, the budgets were too small to attract the really big predators. Today, when even small districts’ have millions of dollars to be allocated, the struggles have become vicious and the contestants utterly ruthless.

     Just beyond those two effects lies a third one that goes unnoticed by all but the most concerned parents: the cost of the “public” schools has made it impossible for 99% of Americans to afford a private alternative.

     Significant? Think about it. The Left has achieved near-perfect control of the “public” schools. That control has allowed them to replace education with indoctrination. The sole challenge to its hegemony has always been private education, whether religious or secular. However, if parents, by reason of the enormous property tax burdens they suffer, cannot afford to send their kids to private or religious schools, the Left need not fear them. What remains is homeschooling, which most parents feel unready to attempt.

     At this time, the operating costs of institutions of higher learning are paid by a combination of student tuitions and fees and state and federal subsidies. The portion that’s defrayed by student payments is largely funded by student loans. All such loans are now administered by the federal government’s Department of Education. Simply fill out a “Free Application for Federal Student Aid” (FAFSA) form, and you’re likely to receive a substantial part of the cost of your college education as a federal or federally-brokered loan.

     It’s all very simple...and it’s the quickest route to post-college financial hell ever contrived.

     The federal government’s involvement in the financing of higher education has been the means whereby Washington has imposed massive amounts of regulation on colleges and universities. The attitude of the DoE is that if a college or any student that attends it receives even one dollar from a federal source, it thereby becomes subject to any and all regulations the DoE may choose to impose on it. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way for a college to escape that web except by refusing to accept federal money, whether as a subsidy or as part payment of a student’s tuition.

     One institution of higher education, Hillsdale College in Michigan, has chosen to forgo federal money altogether, and so has remained out of the regulatory web. There may be others, but I don’t know of them. But what would become of such colleges were it to become common practice for student borrowers to default on their loans and for the federal government to accept the obligations in their place? For such students, college would become essentially free of cost. Would colleges that put up any form of resistance to such amorality be able to attract students?

     “Student debt forgiveness” thus reveals another consequence that the Left probably slavers over: “No college shall escape our clutches!” Any alternative to federally controlled higher education would be pressed to the point of elimination, using taxpayer monies. The indoctrination of young Americans would become universal and uniform.

     Add the above to Graybeard’s thoughts. Do you see the traps? What can we do to avert them?