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Schumer flips reality on its head to blast ‘fat cats’ who oppose canceling student loans

July 1, 2022 | | Print Article

Democrats have grown so accustomed to having their way when it comes to the creative distortion of language that they no longer bother with facts.

A recent example of this is seen from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who took a shot at “fat cats” who oppose the cancelation of student loans, a cause Schumer suddenly embraced with gusto amid rumblings that U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was considering a primary challenge — student loan forgiveness is a central issue for AOC and her radical left “squad.”

“Let’s dispel one awful myth right here: This is not a problem that concerns the wealthy or the Ivy League,” Schumer said. “All of these fat cats, and people who never want to see help for working people and poor people come up with these myths.”

“It’s affecting working-class people,” he added.

The remarks on an alleged false narrative about who student debt cancellation would benefit came during a roundtable with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and other union leaders, CNBC reported.

The network also noted that Schumer “appeared to be speaking directly to Biden, who has repeatedly framed canceling student debt as a handout to the well-off.”

Biden told New York Times columnist David Brooks in a 2021 interview, “The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? I don’t agree.”

The president also said during a CNN town hall that it didn’t make sense to cancel the loans “for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn.”

Cato Institute policy scholar Neal McCluskey told the Daily Wire that debt cancellation would be “regressive,” meaning it would benefit wealthy borrowers more than others.

“Wealthier people are more likely to go to college and in particular, more likely to go to graduate school than lower-income families,” McCluskey said in the interview.

He stressed that roughly half of student debt was incurred by the 25% of borrowers seeking graduate degrees, and said many debt cancellation policies fail to consider the human capital investment behind student loans.

“If you estimate the amount that people will end up earning as a result of the degrees, you can see that people who take on student debt are really going to end up well off on average,” McCluskey said. “The average person with a bachelor’s degree makes about $1.2 million more over their lifetime than someone with just a high school diploma. If you go to somebody with a professional degree — like a medical degree or a law degree — they end up making about $3 million more over their lifetime than somebody with just a high school diploma.”

Citing the Brookings Institution, McCluskey said one-third of student debt is owed by the wealthiest 20% of households, while 8% is owned by the bottom 20%.

“Wealthy people do take on debt, and a lot of that debt is for graduate school,” he said.

McCluskey also suggested debt cancellation would further impact inflation without meaningful reforms.

“It would clearly have negative, unintended consequences going forward of encouraging even more rampant price inflation than we’ve seen in college over the last several decades,” he said.

While some on social media suggested Schumer does not have a solid grasp on the issue, others point to the apparent fear of an AOC primary challenge. Here’s a quick sampling of the responses from Twitter:

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