If there’s one small upside to the coronavirus, maybe (dare we hope) it is that people will finally get a grip on their doomsday political rhetoric.
The spread of the coronavirus in the United States and our consequent societal shutdown is a real crisis. From the more than 2,500 lives lost to the virus to the hundreds of thousands infected and the millions economically ruined by restrictions, to say nothing of the hundreds of millions whose day-to-day lives have been disrupted by the shutdown, this is a disaster unprecedented in modern American life.
The coronavirus is truly a crisis by any definition. But many issues that political activists routinely call “crises” in alarmist efforts to push their agendas are not really crises at all. Student debt, for example, is not even close to being a true crisis despite the insistence of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and others.
The Vermont senator has repeatedly called student debt a “crisis” and said it “doom[s] an entire generation.” His socialist pal Ocasio-Cortez has called student debt a “crisis” that is “impacting the ENTIRE economy.” Warren, for her part, has echoed these doomsday clarion calls with a dash of wokeness thrown in: “The student debt crisis is real, and it’s crushing millions of people — especially people of color.”
This is not exactly level-headed rhetoric.
Democrats are indeed correct that the $1.6 trillion in total student debt is a large figure and a bad thing. But no matter your preferred policy solution, it’s nowhere close to a “crisis.”
The median monthly payment on student loans is just $222. If you can’t afford that as a college graduate, you’re probably doing something very wrong. If you chose to study feminist art therapy or something else useless and impractical, that’s your bad decision. You are not a victim, and your situation is not a “crisis.”
And there is an affordable path to obtaining an education that’s open to anyone. Just attend two years of community college and then transfer to a public university. Many states have special scholarships to help students do just that.
Yes, there are some students who have been taken advantage of or are bound with more debt than they can ever pay off. It’s an issue, and there are solutions to it discussed and advocated at all ends of the political spectrum. But student loan debt is not a “crisis.” It never has been.
And this is more obvious now, as the coronavirus shows us what a real crisis looks like. We can continue to debate the student debt issue when the virus subsides, but dare we hope that it’s possible to do so in less alarmist terms?
