🧵
MAGA wants SCOTUS to block $10K student loan forgiveness for low income people b/c its "unfair."
Okay, let's play that game and see where it takes us.
Black people paid taxes for pools schools & libraries they couldn’t use during Jim Crow (1865-1965)—$0 reparations
Native people had 270M acres of their land stolen via Homestead Act (1862-1987)—$0 reparations
"But that's ancient history!"—MAGA
It’s really not, but there are plenty of other examples MAGA pretends to not notice.
/1
In 2023—Undoc immigrants pay taxes for welfare benefits they can’t use.
Documented immigrants pay taxes for welfare benefits they can’t use.
"But they're not citizens."—MAGA
So? The Constitution doesn’t discriminate in rights. Meanwhile, in 2023, returning US citizens pay taxes for welfare benefits, federal education grants, section 8 housing, and federal and state job benefits they can’t use.
ZERO MAGA outrage at any of the above. But it gets even worse. For example…
/2
155 billionaire corps paid $0 tax for public benefits they DID use—no MAGA outrage
700 billionaires paid lowest tax rate of ANY group for public benefits they DID use—no MAGA outrage
Trump paid $0 taxes for public benefits he DID use—no MAGA outrage
But—total MAGA approval
Moreover—Though ~90% of student loan cancellation go to people earning under $75K—MAGA unanimously opposes
But while only 15% billionaire tax cancellation went to people making under $75K—MAGA unanimously supported it
/3
In closing…MAGA opposes student loan forgiveness b/c it helps Black & brown students. 20 years after college, 95% of white students have paid off their debt & 95% of Black students still owe b/c Jim Crow still undermines Black students.
I elaborate here: https://www.tiktok.com/@qasim.rashid/video/7172933155958181166
4/4
@CatDragon @QasimRashid
Although federal and state aid to students has plummeted since I went to school, there's an even bigger factor driving the cost of education, and it's not even the fault of Republicans. It's a side effect of prosperity known as the Baumol effect.
It's also a reason that the nursing care part of medical costs has risen.
And in Baumol's original example, it's the reason live music tickets cost more. (Of course Ticketmaster's monopoly is the reason total live music costs are higher.)
@aebicalho @CatDragon @QasimRashid
The Baumol effect generally suggests that the cost of goods and services that are difficult to automate will rise relative to the cost of goods and services that are easy to automate. It deals with relative costs, not nominal wages.
Education is difficult to automate. Some parts of education can be automated, such as scanned multiple choice tests. But the expensive part -- lots of teachers, underpaid though they may be -- are expensive.
By contrast, food is heavily automated. One farmer feeds many times more people than a farmer a century ago, due to automation. The result is that it takes more hours of farmer labor to pay for one hour of teacher labor.
@aebicalho @CatDragon @QasimRashid
In the case of the Baumol effect, the cost of education and nursing increases because fewer hours of factory or farm or other automation-assisted labor are paying for the same number of teacher or nurse hours, independent of nominal wages or salaries. There's no difference being pocketed.
For example, the average 2017 farmer produced 2.75 times as much food as a 1948 farmer. But a school teacher could teach the same number of kids, unless quality of education was sacrificed. (Digression: during World War II, class sizes approached 60 due to wartime labor shortages, so quality must have suffered.)
If farmers grew 2.75 times more food per year of work but teachers taught the same number of kids, the farmer's relative purchasing power would be 2.75 times higher, so to keep purchasing power parity, teachers' salaries would have to increase 2.75 times faster.
@CatDragon @aebicalho @QasimRashid
Regardless of whether the typical farm worker is the stereotypical farmer working for a multigenerational family farm or an exploited migrant laborer working for a corporate farm, the amount of food produced by a year of farm labor is much higher today than in the past.
And the number of students educated by a year of teacher labor is very little changed.
@QasimRashid Years ago a town in NY used undocumented immigrants to remodel their town square and under paid them. A judge then ordered them to make good.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/video-westchester-new-york-migrants-night-contractors
Exactly. Do as they fantasize, not what historical #truth says!
Unless.... (channeling Mucker)
...What if the fish were here first, but then along comes a woke mob who say the water belongs to us. Well it *could be* that there's a whale, and it just happens to swallow Hunter Biden's lap top, and 1000 whale-oil candles later, someone finds out that the fish held the key to fish sticks. But no, said the fish, no Moby Stick is going to replace us!! And that's how the libs think...."
Wasn't there a sketch - "opposite talk" vs truth?
@QasimRashid do you honestly think any MAGAts care about these stats?
And if you listened to them you'd know that MAGAts oppose student loan relief because they believe that "elites" are benefiting from it. They don't understand that those supposed elites are their class comrades.
Student loan relief is part of class struggle and assuming someone who opposes it does so out of malice for other races ignores the arguments that are swaying them against their own self interests.
@QasimRashid you know, that whole emancipation thing was unfair to generations who slaved away.
Also, if the GOP is suddenly concerned with «fairness» there are oh so many unfair things they can address - but which they are fine with, like excessive CEO salaries, or companies doing stock buybacks while claiming they cannot afford to give raises.
@QasimRashid I have to say that the best way to move more Americans to the Democrat Party is to block Pres. Biden's EO to help them with predatory college loans.
BLAST GOP with this, forced birth, book banning, and ending SS and HC in 2024. We'll finally get the numbers for US Congress to get something done for working classes of America.
Qasim Rashid, Esq.
Voron
@herbiekerby
Catherine is not complacent
Steve
Alex Bicalho
Marist
OkazuYuri
Michael Fenichel
gotklss2 / annette
Traveling Piano Man
Jeff
CaptainSmartass
Tor Iver Wilhelmsen
Jeff
Travis Newton 👨💻
EarthOne