CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey began his Dec. 9 column in a weird way that still conforms to his right-wing politics:
Jim and Jill were born a little more than a year apart to the same unmarried mother in Southern California.
Jim was adopted by a working-class family in the San Fernando Valley, where the father made his living as an auto mechanic and the mother as a maid.
Jill was adopted by an upper-middle-class family in Pasadena, where the father was a lawyer and the mother stayed home.
Yes, the “unmarried mother” gave her children up for adoption. This is the last we hear of the birth mother from Jeffrey, so we don’t know if he has any other humiliation or punishment for her for giving birth to children outside of marriage.
To briefly summarize where he’s going with this: Jim grew up and followed his adoptive father as an auto mechanic, while Jill was a good enough student to get admitted to Harvard but not good enough to earn a scholarship, but went anyway even though she could have saved money by going to a state school. She took out student loans for that and law school, while Jim was just scraping by.
We’re now to the point of the story where Jeffrey intones, “Then Joe Biden was elected president.” And this turns into a rant against reducing student loan debt. And here’s where Jeffrey’s tortured analogy goes south:
So, federal student loans caused money to flow as follows: Jim worked as an auto mechanic and, along with millions of other hardworking non-college-educated Americans, paid federal taxes. The federal government took some of that money and sent it to Harvard and other colleges in the form of student loans. The government attributed these loans to people like Jill — the sister Jim did not know — as payment for their tuition.
The first winner in this exchange: Harvard.
The second winner: Jill, who got a Harvard degree — albeit while running up $24,000 in debt.
[…]Can a college graduate — whose median household income is $51,456 more than a high school graduate’s — afford to pay off $24,000 (or even $50,000) in student loans?
Or should an auto mechanic pay taxes — and interest on an increased federal debt — so Joe Biden can forgive a Harvard graduate’s student loans?
But Jeffrey offers no evidence that forgiving student debt would increase the taxes of his hypothetical auto mechanic. In fact, it has no immediate effect on the national debt, and would merely add on to the debt down the road.
This also shows us where CNS’ coverage of federal deficit issues will be going for the next four years. After four years of refusing to blame Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate for running up the deficit (or, when they were blamed, putting equal blame on Democrats even though that’s not how that works), Jeffrey and CNS will resume blaming Democrats by name, the way they did when Barack Obama was president.