We need a general tweet of the day thread

Smart people said you couldn’t vaxx your way out of a pandemic and it would create variants. But we were told to listen to a failed bureaucrat, Fauci.

huskyhooligan

GrundleStiltzkin

https://twitter.com/HashtagGriswold/status/1468698647143620608

WestlinnDuck

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 .

46XiJCAB

Pay your debt, B*tch.