What?  You thought I was gone after that incident at Wal-Mart?

Fuck em, I say!  Here’s one that’s been chapping my hide for a while:

Embarrassing admission: I have been watching the TV show “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” I’m not, in general, a fan of the superhero genre; but after “Orphan Black” I’ll watch anything starring Tatiana Maslany.

Given your propensity to eat shit out off a faded linoleum floor, ironically this is the least embarrassing thing you have ever said.

Anyway, one of the show’s plot points is that the title character is reluctant to reveal her superpowers. Why? Among other things, she’s worried (correctly, it turns out) that once people know what she can do she’ll have a hard time paying off her student loans.

I don’t think the writers were trying to make a political statement. They were just acknowledging the pervasiveness of student debt — and anxiety about student debt — in modern America. And that pervasiveness is why Republicans’ attacks on President Joe Biden’s debt-relief policy — which they generally portray as a giveaway either to privileged elites or to lazy spendthrifts — are likely to fall flat.

Let’s talk about the numbers. The Biden administration says that its plan will provide relief to as many as 43 million Americans. That’s a lot of people, not a small, cosseted elite. In particular, data from the New York Fed say that more than 12 million Americans in their 30s — more than a quarter of that age group — still have unpaid student debt.

I’m old enough to remember when admitting to having personal debts was shameful.  That might account for why so many are burdened by debts now than previous generations.

What this means is that even if you subscribe to the Trump diner theory of politics — according to which the only voters who matter are blue-collar guys wearing baseball caps — you should be aware that some of those guys probably took out loans to attend trade schools or community colleges, all too often getting nothing but debt in return. Even among those who didn’t take out student loans, many probably have children, siblings, cousins or friends who did. So the Biden plan will touch many people.

But MAGA, where’s my penis? Moral equivalency, trade skoolz, hurr durr

They also get jobs and paid them back you dumb shit.  You also conveniently left out the part where trade schools cost significantly less, and advertise as such in their marketing materials, while also providing the entry-level expertise for in-demand jobs, some of which pay close to six figures.

In short, student debt relief isn’t some kind of niche elite concern; it’s a broad, one might even say populist, issue. Initial polling on the Biden plan is somewhat mixed, with an Emerson College survey showing much stronger support than a CBS/YouGov survey. Even the latter survey, however, finds a majority of Americans approving of the plan; it even finds much less opposition among noncollege whites than you might have expected given that group’s general disapproval of all things Biden.

Well yeah, those retards work at Target.

The other prong of the right-wing response involves invoking personal responsibility — in effect, portraying the recipients of debt relief as welfare queens. Republican efforts on that front have, however, been extraordinarily tone-deaf.

Just on general political principles, telling tens of millions of Americans that they’re lazy and irresponsible — that they’re all, as Sen. Ted Cruz put it, like a “slacker barista” who wasted years “studying completely useless things” — seems … not smart.

Well as the saying goes, fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.

To be brutally honest, that sort of caricature may have worked for Republicans when the insults were directed at urban Black people. But it’s likely to backfire when we’re talking about a broad spectrum of Americans who were just trying to move up in the world.

Furthermore, many of the most prominent critics of debt relief are almost comically out of touch, hypocritical, or both. Actually, scratch the “almost.”

For example, Sen. Marco Rubio has proudly declared that he paid off all his student debt — after being elected to the Senate and getting a book contract. Why can’t everyone do that?

On the hypocrisy front, the White House is having a field day mocking Republican members of Congress whose businesses received debt forgiveness under the Paycheck Protection Program. It’s true that debt relief for employers who maintained their workforces in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic was built into that program; it’s also true that later research suggests that only about a quarter of PPP funds supported jobs that would otherwise have disappeared. The rest was, in effect, a giveaway to business owners.

Hey shithead…There were people against that, and against nearly every other measure implemented in response to the goddamn COVID hysteria.  Why were we not consulted before that cash grab?

More generally, it’s hard to take lectures on personal responsibility seriously when they come from a movement full of people — from Donald Trump, famous for stiffing his contractors, on down — who have long refused to pay money they owe. It’s hard to beat the spectacle of Stephen Moore, whom Donald Trump tried to appoint to the Federal Reserve, calling people who don’t pay their debts “deadbeats”; after all, Moore’s nomination failed in part because it turned out that he had refused to pay his ex-wife $300,000 in child support and alimony.

Alimony is form of robbery and he’s right to not pay that thieving cunt.

Now, none of this means that the Biden plan should be exempt from criticism, although the vehemence with which some centrists have attacked it remains puzzling. Above all, the plan offers some one-time relief, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem that led to all that student debt — which isn’t a proliferation of slacker baristas; it’s a society that demands educational credentials for many jobs without making education affordable.

The thing is, Biden tried to address this underlying problem; free community college was part of his original Build Back Better proposal. But he couldn’t get it through Congress. He is, however, offering some real help to millions of Americans — and Republicans clearly have no idea how to respond.

Because making something “free” somehow makes it less expensive.  Maybe the problem is the system incentives students to continue accruing more debt.  Student loans are deferable while the debtor is actively a student.  So that means you sign up for a couple classes and you can continue not paying them—legally.  Meanwhile the student is either making no income or just enough to keep them living in their parent’s house so in order to enroll they take on more debt.  From their standpoint its a self lubricating buttplug.

This doesn’t even begin to get into the other side of the issue of guaranteeing the loans, so the colleges themselves have no incentive to decrease their costs nor do they assume any risk whatsoever for enrolling a student that can’t string two coherent thoughts together to save their life.