Charles Bastille
1 min readAug 27, 2022

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I'll disagree with you on this one. Nice change of pace since we always agree.

I'm not interested in perfection. A president who is trying to push out debt relief is a welcome relief to what we were previously dealing with.

This is a pretty targeted program. $125,000 per year targets people squarely in the middle class. And $125,000 is the upper limit. The vast majority of people fall well below that line.

Most of those people were, essentially, scammed into taking their loans. They didn't read or, more accurately, understand the fine print that told them $10,000 would quickly become $100,000. That inability to comprehend the nature of loans is itself a failure of modern education.

Biden struggled with the arguments you've raised. That's been pretty well documented. Better to do something than nothing.

The debt relief is too incremental to affect inflation. Read Krugman on this.

Besides, the best part of the program isn't the direct relief, it's the restructuring of payments. That's bound to have a stimulus type effect on the economy long term.

If the government needs more money to pay for it, they can slash a couple fighter jets from the budget. Oh wait, everyone is afraid of China suddenly.

The cost is a drop in the bucket budget-wise. Most of the pain will be felt by those who deserve to feel the pain: debt service companies.

The people who stand to benefit the most from this are the working poor. Can we just help them out without gnashing our teeth?

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Charles Bastille

Author of MagicLand & Psalm of Vampires. Join me on my Substack at https://www.ruminato.com/. All stories © 2020-24 by Charles Bastille