'One size fits all' solutions generate so much hypocrisy

Jeff Maurer’s guest essay in the New York Times seemed perfectly timed, as the semester is ending and I see continuing calls for "forgiving" some or all student debt racked up over the past few years.

My thought was that this effort seems to favor the upper middle class or even wealthy, since they tend to be the ones paying high-priced universities and piling up debts. 

The Democrats have been choosing "let's be quick and get that money out there NOW" over more targeted programs that would support Americans who really need help.

I felt the same way about those Covid stipends last year. Kathleen and I received $4,000 total, I guess to help us pay bills and in turn stimulate the economy. We are not wealthy but we certainly did not need that cash infusion. Some of it went toward a college fund, and that account has lost about 20 percent this year so far... so hooray for investing!

That four grand would have been far more effective in the hands of a couple with three kids making less than $50,000 a year. Are we claiming that smart people in our government can't figure out how to add some fine tuning to support during a crisis? 

Honestly, is it simply impossible to get support to those who really need it, like middle class parents with young children? Republicans have the same kinds of "slap a label on everyone," BTW, as with the abortion bans... with many states banning even rape victims or endangered mothers from the procedure. 

Republicans, of course, positively revel in their cruelty and harshness, while Democrats perhaps bend a bit too far the other direction. Printing money has produced some level of inflation, though the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine may be even more important. But it all adds up.

Banning all abortions, for whatever reasons, guarantees hypocrisy as those "holier than thou" Republicans will carve out exceptions for their own daughters and wives. I have no firm evidence for that beyond common sense and decades of watching rich people break the rules. So many privileged people preach the sanctity of the heterosexual marriage until daughter Jenny comes out as a lesbian. Suddenly, the issue is much more gray. Who knew?

But shoveling money into accounts of people who really didn't need it is a symptom of what Maurer perceives to be the Democratic Party’s “image problem” focused on Democrats’ vulnerability to certain negative criticism about student loan forgiveness.

“Republicans,” he wrote, “will portray us as fancy little Fauntleroys ensconced in our twee nursery of upper-middle-class desires, deaf to the needs of the struggling masses.” He hypothesized: “The case study will be some tragic dweeb who took out $400,000 in loans to get a Ph.D. in intersectional puppet theory from Cosa Nostra Online College and who wrote his dissertation about how ‘Fraggle Rock’ is an allegory for the Franco-Prussian War.”

And he ended his lament with a plea to party leaders that they not “let the notion that Democrats are singularly focused on the needs of pampered, navel-gazing pipsqueaks who won’t drink coffee brewed using fewer than 26 steps be indelibly burned into people’s brains.” 

Was Maurer exaggerating for effect? Duh. But there is a truth at the heart of the jokes: The 87 percent of Americans who have NO student debt have serious -- and warranted -- doubts about whether their tax money should go to support people whose lives began on second base, if not third. 

Even an Iowa farmer with only a high school degree might think that helping a young person who could never have been able to afford further education without loans might fit the definition of charity and following the traditions of Christianity (which they all seem to claim). But giving tax money to society's "winners"? That just confirms their suspicion that the game is rigged.

Let's tamp down the hypocrisy from all sides, with everyone looking to score political points and few caring much about real people trying to live real lives.