Very interesting, the claim that student loan forgiveness somehow exacerbated the inflation crisis -- despite never actually having been implemented.
And this from the same group of pundits who will look you in the eye and tell you that the modern college degree is useless and unnecessary...
Is this just magical thinking, or what?
Magical thinking? Nope. It's part of the same concerted effort to devalue education in the US, starting with pre-K. We hear all the time about how 'broken' public education is in the US. Broken, btw, is just a lazy and simultaneously hyperbolic way to claim that we should just abandon the notion altogether. Because public education is 'broken,' we no longer need to invest money into public education. We'll syphon funds away from public education through charter schools, and by expecting public schools to fund expensive special education (I am NOT arguing against special education or its place in public education--I'm mostly riffing off of what I see in my community and extrapolating as I see variations of this theme elsewhere, We NEED excellent education, including special education!!!!). Homeschooling is encouraged, especially among certain fundamentalist religious groups. BTW, public schools are funded almost entirely on a per pupil spending formula so fewer students means less funding--but not necessarily fewer expenses. If a school district loses 50 students from its K-12 population to home schooling, and they are not all from the same one or two grade levels, they cannot really decrease the number of staff since the 50 are spread across 13 grade levels.
Higher education is now also being attacked, although somewhat less for community colleges and trade schools, which remain less expensive and for which faculty are less well compensated. State funding for higher education has dramatically decreased as a portion of the cost of tuition. English, as a major, is being dropped. Liberal arts have been attacked and devalued since Reagan. Instead, increasingly, the only majors that many people value are basically jobs training programs. In fact, when I returned to college the last time, I pursued courses I was interested in but I knew for reasons of geography and the fact that my husband was not willing to relocate, I would not be able to attend grad school and so, I became a lab tech, a job I specifically did NOT want but one which would pay well enough that we could afford to send our kids to college without the need for them to take out expensive loans. So, yeah, I bought into it as well. But if you read the subtext, you will see that we could not afford to send our kids to college on the wages of a tenured full professor, who often taught summer courses and received overload pay when he taught more than his usual already high load of coursework. Sure that would have been different if we had lived in a larger metropolitan area where I had more choices for jobs, but we don't. We DO live in a town with a relatively modest cost of living--just not many job opportunities.
I see this as a concerted effort to destroy the US confidence in education, in tandem with efforts to destroy faith in government. We're attacking it now, piece by piece: confidence in the US Supreme court is lower and falling. Both liberals and conservatives have fallen, hook line and sinker for the canard that if one disagrees with the decisions the Supreme Court hands down, it is evidence of corruption. If we disagree with the justices confirmed to our court system, it is because of corruption.
I'm not saying that there isn't corruption in politics or in policy making or even in our justice system (Hello Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh).
