We need a general tweet of the day thread

PurpleThrobber said:

https://twitter.com/bretweinstein/status/1468323940200108033?s=21

How dare you quote that looney bastard!

Evergreen State College is soooooooo much better with him gone. Amiright?

AOC, former bartender needs her student loans forgiven like Tlaib. She claims to have a degree in economics.

https://fee.org/articles/aoc-says-taxpayers-should-have-to-pay-her-17k-student-loan-even-though-she-makes-174k-a-year/

This is nothing new, as student debt “cancellation” has been one of Ocasio-Cortez’s pet issues since the beginning of her political career. Yet an interesting twist in this speech is that Ocasio-Cortez uses herself as an example — and directly calls for taxpayers to pay off her financial obligations.

“I’m 32 years old now,” the congresswoman said. “I have over $17,000 in student loan debt, and I didn’t go to graduate school because I knew that getting another degree would drown me in debt that I would never be able to surpass. This is unacceptable.”

I’m sorry, what part of that is unacceptable, exactly?

Ocasio-Cortez’s $17,000 in student loan debt sounds like a lot, but it probably only involves a monthly student loan payment of $100-$200. It’s hard to know exactly what her payment is without being familiar with the specifics of her loans, but $100-$200/month is a reasonable estimate given that the average graduate owes $28,400 total, which equates to a $297 monthly payment.

And, as previously mentioned, the congresswoman earns almost $175,000 a year! Yet she bizarrely still thinks that working-class taxpayers should have to pay off her bills. What’s even more ironic and tone-deaf is that Ocasio-Cortez goes on in the speech to lament the (supposedly) “false narrative” that “student loan debt is for the privileged.”

She called this “narrative” a “ridiculous assertion” and asked, “Do we really think a billionaire’s child is taking out student loans?”

“Come on!” she exclaimed. “If you are taking on student loan debt, it’s because you are likely a middle or working-class person. Let’s get real, let’s cancel it.”

This part of Ocasio-Cortez’s speech is simply factually false and detached from reality. No, student loan debt isn’t held by the children of billionaires, a straw man claim no one ever made, but it is disproportionately held by a well-educated and thus higher-earning slice of the public.

This fact is not really in dispute among serious analysts.

One study found that “canceling” all student loan debt would give the top 20% of income earners six times more benefit than the bottom 20% of income earners. Even left-leaning think tanks such as the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution have reached similar conclusions.

“Debt forgiveness plans would be regressive — providing the largest monetary benefits to those with the highest incomes,” an Urban Institute analysis concluded .