There’s a stench of desperation to this argument, as if the White House has nothing more convincing to say in defense of its indefensible bribe to college grads.
Which may have to do with the fact that the White House has nothing more convincing to say in defense of its indefensible bribe to college grads.
Yesterday Karine Jean-Pierre was asked how they’re planning to pay for a program that’ll cost in excess of $300 billion and was left stammering. And no wonder: What could she have plausibly said in reply?
“You can’t say how much it’s going to cost. You can’t say exactly how it’s going to be paid for and you can’t say exactly who is paying for the costs…How is it fiscally responsible?
Jean-Pierre: *word salad* pic.twitter.com/b3jcJO1KVz
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 25, 2022
The full exchange with the reporter is even more painful.
Biden is facing an avalanche of criticism over his policy and not just from Republicans. It’s unfair to taxpayers who didn’t go to college; it’s unfair to taxpayers who did go but who paid off their loans; it’s unfair to future college students who haven’t taken out loans yet; it risks goosing inflation; it runs up the deficit; it incentivizes universities to keep raising tuition and future presidents to keep ordering more bailouts; it’s entirely arbitrary. What do you do when you’re holding a hand of cards that feeble?
You pound the table, damn it, and call your critics hypocrites:
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven.https://t.co/4FoCymt8TB
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 25, 2022
That was the first tweet in a series calling out Republicans in Congress who’ve criticized Biden’s student loan plan for having accepted PPP loans during the pandemic that were later forgiven. Rank-and-file lefties also got in on the act, attacking conservative commentators who complained about the program by publicizing the PPP loans they accepted — except that, in more than one case, they misidentified the recipient. Ben Shapiro was accused of hypocrisy by someone who mistook him for a different Ben Shapiro who’d received PPP money. (Go figure that there’s more than one “Ben Shapiro” in America.) Charles Cooke of NRO was accused by someone who mistook the name of his podcast on NRO for the name of a restaurant in Tampa that had taken out a PPP loan.
Lefties are very invested in this tu quoque, in other words, and you can see why. It muddies the waters of the debate over the justness of Biden’s new program, hoping to confuse casual voters who don’t follow politics closely, who might not be able to tell you what “PPP” stands for, and who therefore might be convinced that this debt forgiveness plan is no different from that debt forgiveness plan.
But they’re worlds apart, as even a passing acquaintance with the details reveals. Dan Foster sums it up:
The government made it illegal for y