‘Dark Brandon’ is Learning How Political Twitter Works, Meme By Meme By Meme

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Aug 29, 2022

The student loan debate continues, along with the meme warfare. Whichever side you take, I think it’s healthy for “Dark MAGA,” as Biden now calls Donald Trump’s domination of the Grand Old Party, to think twice before singling out loans to struggling families and individuals as a “moral hazard” while offering the same sort of help to employers.

Yet the apologists are not all wrong to say the Paycheck Protection Program loans aren’t exactly the same as student loans. The PPP is a central part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, which was created to help small businesses to retain their employees during the pandemic.

Federal student loans have a longer and more complicated history since the Cold War years and President Lyndon Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965 in a new push to expand college and technical education opportunities to working class baby boomers like me.

Since then, tuition at good state universities like mine have grown from a few hundred dollars a semester to thousands of dollars, especially after state governments in President Ronald Reagan’s era put new limits on how much they could tax or spend to subsidize higher education. Increasingly, students and their families have been left holding the bag on college costs that don’t go anywhere but up.

What to do about it?

Here is where I turned from Twitter to call Richard Vedder, economics professor emeritus at Ohio University, where I was one of his students. He since has gained fame and, in some academic circles, infamy as an author-crusader against rising college costs and a senior fellow at Oakland’s libertarian Independent Institute.

As I expected, Vedder roundly criticized Biden’s loan forgiveness as adding to the larger long-range problem of soaring college costs more than solving it.

“Universities have become wards of the state and reliable and dependable political allies of big government,” he said. Loan forgiveness, in Vedder’s view, “will enable schools to raise fees even more and solidify the administration’s relationship with an important ally.”

That won’t do much, he noted, to counter the troubled outlook of higher education. In the 1960s, when I was a student, the proportion of Americans in college doubled, he noted. In the last decade, it declined.

That’s not healthy for our nation’s future. Unfortunately election years tend to be the worst time to tackle serious challenges. But, somehow we need to do it — with more than memes.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)