This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast,” hosted by P and Q. In this episode, Q is joined by Jimmy Song, author of several Bitcoin books, to discuss the problems with President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
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Q: Given the recent news and the announcement of the federal student loan program and Biden’s plans [to forgive student loans], I wanna unpack it a little bit with you…
You have these student loans that in certain situations where it’s far too much, students can’t even declare bankruptcy on them. Like the loans themselves weren’t designed well enough to allow for the market to correct itself. I don’t think this is a solution. This isn’t even a bandaid. In my opinion, the root issue is not solved…
I’m just curious, in your opinion, where do we go from here?
Jimmy Song: It’s no different than the $600 stimmy checks that we got. It’s just targeted at different people. And quite frankly, at people that made poor economic decisions in attending college, a lot of the people that have these student loans, they didn’t even finish. Like, those are not necessarily people you’re gonna wanna bail out. They made pretty bad decisions, that’s his way of buying votes.
I have lots of qualms from, like, a constitutional standpoint. How is it that the president can do this unilaterally without Congress? And how is it that he’s able to forgive loans that he didn’t make?
…He wasn’t even in office or whatever, and wasn’t done by him. It was a federal student loan program that was issue by banks. There are all sorts of weird stuff around this, but it really isn’t anything more than a stimulus. It’s just, you know, printing more money and removing it from the balance sheet of individuals who have student loan debt and putting it on the federal balance sheet…
This is straight vote buying to me and, call me cynical, but this is what my last article was about: fiat politics suck. And this is part of the consequences of that. If you’re not part of this group, then you’re getting screwed. And it’s not going to be obvious, but you’re going to be paying more money somewhere, at the grocery store.
And if you paid back your loans you’re even more screwed because you could have had free money but you don’t qualify now.