Joe Biden’s Heresy

At Bloomberg Noah Smith outlines the student college loan mess in three charts illustrating the growth in student loans, the socialization of student loans, and the increasing role of debt service in student loans in total federal revenues. In other words, young people are behaving exactly as you expect when they’ve been told over the period of their entire lives that a college education is necessary if you want to be a full participant in our society.

The problems are obvious. What solutions are being proposed?

One way to bring that unlucky generation some relief would be to permit student debt to be expunged in bankruptcy. Democrats in the Senate are trying to allow that. But with Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, this probably won’t happen.

Instead, what we’ve gotten is President Barack Obama’s “Student Aid Bill of Rights.” The list of “rights” emphasizes students’ right to go to college, to take out loans and to pay those loans back quickly and easily. In other words, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a government interested in maximizing the revenue it collects from indebted college graduates.

Vice President Joe Biden has proposed a more radical solution:

Vice President Biden on Saturday said free community college was vital for a healthy American economy.

“It’s simple, folks — two years of community college should become as free and universal as high school is today if we’re to make this economic resurgence permanent and well into the 21st Century,” he said in the White House’s weekly address.

Biden argued that Americans insisting on free high school had produced a competitive U.S. workforce in years past. With other countries catching up, he added, the time was ripe for reaching new heights on educational access.

That’s not merely radical but heretical. Whether he realizes it or not he’s proposing the socialization of higher education.

Higher education is presently a public-private hybrid. Like every other public-private hybrid it is foundering on the rocky shoals of human nature. Given the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy, proposing that be changed, however logical, is not just a major change but preaching a heresy.

This isn’t the first time that Joe Biden has preached heresy. A decade ago he proposed that Iraq be divided into three countries: Kurdistan, a Sunni country, and a Shi’ite country. It was widely criticized then. With the exception of the Kurds, Iraqi public opinion favored a unified Iraq and dividing Iraq would have been the act of a conqueror. The orthodoxy at the time was that we had removed Iraq’s government but had not conquered the country and our actions after removing Saddam attempted to further that impossible goal.

Those were the grounds on which I, for example, opposed dividing Iraq. To do so we would have needed to conquer Iraq, that wasn’t our objective, and there was insufficient popular support in the United States to take the steps that would have been necessary for Iraq’s subjugation.

Back in August of 2007 Joe Biden suggested that the way that our healthcare system should be reform was through a system of catastrophic care insurance for adults and insuring all kids, more heresy.

When did Joe Biden become the Democratic Party’s “crazy uncle”? I don’t recall his always filling that role. It does serve the useful function of being able to dismiss what he says however logical it may be as the maunderings of a nutty old man.

9 comments… add one
  • Andy Link

    If there’s going to be an education arms race, we might as well just go for the throat and declare that PhD’s will be free for anyone who can complete the program.

  • Yep. That’s the logical conclusion of the policy. For the last decade I’ve thought we ought to cut to the chase as quickly as possible so we could abandon a failed theory and try something that actually worked.

  • ... Link

    re: dividing Iraq: Biden proposed that without mentioning that it would have required a massive amount of ethnic cleansing, with peoples being forcibly being removed, with ‘extreme prejudice’ if necessary.

    Re: student loans: Biden was one of the key movers of making student loans non-dischargable in bankruptcy.

    He loves proposing solutions without bothering to mention the necessary actions required to make them work.

    As for the crazy: what do you expect from a guy that would plagiarize someone else’s BIOGRAPHY when running for President & not expect anyone to notice?

  • I wonder whether his brain surgery might not have something to do with it. Sometimes it just looks like his governor is off and he just says things that others might think but not say out loud.

  • ... Link

    When was the brain surgery? Because he’s been like this for decades.

  • PD Shaw Link

    I’m less concerned about the public/private funding than the issues of cost control. Also, with all of this focus on community college, I think people should address what role they see community colleges playing. When I was in school, community colleges largely catered to people who couldn’t afford to go to a four-year college, were more academically challenged, or pursuing some career path that mixed academic and vocational training. I now run into more adults going to community college to get course credits that will give them “step up” in their pay.

    If, for example, the goal is to make a four-year degree more affordable, a free associate’s degree may encourage students to go to a school where their likelihood of getting a four-year degree is lessened, and/or they don’t receive the same salary as people with a four-year degree that did not get an associate’s degree first.

  • Andy Link

    PD,

    IMO public/private funding and cost control are inextricably linked. It’s a case where people spend someone else’s money and the middlemen reap the biggest rewards.

  • 1988. Keep in mind that Joe Biden began serving his first term in the Senate in 1973 and continued until 2009. He had been in the public eye for 15 years before 1988.

  • ... Link

    I remember that he was big into the drug war circa 1980.

    Incidentally, looking back on it, I’ve come to realize all the talk about the Feds starting the drug wars is a bunch of crap. The Cubans & Colombians had started that war in the 1970s, and by about 1981 it was so bad in South Florida that the only way to stop it was to bring in the Feds to drop the hammer.

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