The Democrats’ self-immolating fetish for means-testing
How to lose an election…and a nation.
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Biden campaigned on universal student debt reduction, but now wants to add a means-test; a layer of bureaucratic formalities to identify the “deserving poor.” The neoliberal fetish for red-tape is on the march, and the consequences will be the 2022 mid-terms, and maybe the future of the nation.
Means-testing is the kind of technocratic make-work beloved of the McKinsey set, thus it was no surprise that Buttigieg campaigned against universal free college because it would be “free even for the kids of millionaires.”
https://twitter.com/AlexThomp/status/1200227721923760130
This talking point has been oft-repeated in the debate over debt erasure, even though it’s empirically untrue. If college was free in America, only 1.4% of the benefit would accrue to rich children:
As David Sirota writes for The Lever, the scare talk about the wealthy getting something for nothing is the primary means by which corporate Dems talk down universal programs (think of Mayor Pete’s “Medicare for all who want it”). Means-testing is how the right will dismantle Social Security, Medicare and the GI Bill.
https://www.levernews.com/the-means-test-con/
College debt relief is hugely popular, especially among the voter base that Dems will have to turn out to avoid catastrophic losses in the 2022 mid-terms — it’s a policy that “would provide more benefits to those with fewer economic resources and could play a critical role in addressing the racial wealth gap and building the Black middle class.”
How would that work? Well, by and large, rich people don’t pay for college by taking out student loans. As Andrew Perez says, “If forgiving student debt was a massive giveaway to the rich, politicians would have done it already.”
https://twitter.com/andrewperezdc/status/1519341319210127362
