The Stupid. It Hurts.

The White House's retort to Republicans critical of student loan "forgiveness" point to Paycheck Protection Program Loans. A non sequitur on steroids.

As a longtime political operative, I love the “art of the comeback” or the retort. They often occur during televised political debates. When I was coaching congressional candidates for debates, we often proposed retorts to accusations or statements our opponents were likely to raise. Conversely, we warned of ones they might use.

One of the best retorts in political history occurred in 1988 during the nationally televised vice presidential debate between two US Senators - Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX) and Dan Quayle (R-IN). Chris Lamb tells the story:

George H.W. Bush, having served two terms as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, ran for president in 1988. Bush selected a relatively obscure 41-year-old senator Dan Quayle as his running mate. Quayle tried to deflect questions about his age and inexperience by comparing himself to John K. Kennedy when he ran for president in 1960.

Quayle’s advisors told him not to bring up the comparison during his debate with the Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen.

Quayle ignored the advice.

“I have as much experience as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency,” Quayle said during the nationally televised debate.

Bentsen famously turned to Quayle and said, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Bush-Quayle won the Presidential Election, but Quayle was forever reduced to a punch line in US politics.

The moral of this story is that your opposition is watching and listening to your talking points.

As a fan and supporter of the former Vice President, this is painful but true.

So when the White House chose to use the temporary and highly successful Paycheck Protection Program from the $2.2 trillion bipartisan CARES Act in 2020 as their comeback to attacks over Biden’s illegal student loan “forgiveness” fiasco, I scratched my head. The PPP is the exact opposite of the college student loan program, which the federal government nationalized in 2010.

Partisan lefties in the media and Twitter unthinkingly praised the White House’s lame counterattack, including the irrepressible Congressman and failed former Democratic presidential candidate, Eric Swalwell (D-Fang Fang). “More of this, please,” came from the wife of putative Ukrainian Defense Minister, Trump impeachment testifier, and former White House national security aide, retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman.

To the uninformed, this appears like French Laundry-style hypocrisy. Forgiveness for me, not for thee. But it doesn’t take an IQ over 70 to figure out what a non sequitur this is. We’ll let US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), co-author of the Paycheck Protection Program and himself the beneficiary of college student loans he paid off about a decade ago, explain why:

With the government forcing companies to close their doors, tens of millions of Americans were headed to the unemployment line, and millions of small businesses were headed for bankruptcy. That was an unacceptable outcome, which is why I worked with Democrats and Republicans to create the Paycheck Protection Program.

My plan was as straightforward as it was novel: to create a federal grant for small businesses to keep their employees on payroll. This payroll grant, structured deliberately as a forgivable loan, had one key condition: that 80 percent of the funds go to payroll. While some lobbyists (and even Democratic lawmakers) in Washington begged for a blank check to small businesses, I refused. This temporary program was intended to keep employees on payroll during what we were told would be a two-week lockdown to "slow the spread."

 The coup de grace:

President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan could not be more different, despite his lame attempts to draw similarities between the two. 

Let’s start with the obvious: federal student loans were just that, loans. The whole idea was that students would take the loans to pay for an education that would lead to a job that repays them (along with the massive interest accumulated).

There are other practical differences as well. The president is now asking those same small business owners and employees, most of whom never went to college, to shoulder the burden of college debt for others. . .

Again, don’t just take my word for it. In the words of President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser and Harvard economist Jason Furman: "Student loan relief is not free. Part of it [will] be paid for by the 87% of Americans who do not benefit but lose out from inflation."

That is why it will do nothing for the people Democrats used to claim to protect: working families with minimal or nonexistent student debt. Unlike my payroll grants, forgiving student loan debt won’t create jobs, save small businesses, or reopen the American economy.

The Daily Wire features additional takes worth noting:

“So it is now the White House’s position that if the government forces you to shut down your business and provides you just compensation to keep people employed, that’s the same thing as you failing to pay the college loans you voluntarily undertook,” Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro tweeted. “Geniuses.”

“Obviously someone passed around a memo deciding to compare PPP to student loans when the programs have entirely different purposes…” NewsNation reporter Zaid Jilani wrote in a Twitter thread. “Politicians and nonprofits, most of whom supported PPP, are retroactively portraying PPP as a privilege or giveaway when it was really just a backstop to prevent mass worker layoffs after govt forced businesses to close.”

“This is the first time I can recall that an administration started attacking a program they themselves support in an improvised effort to defend another program they proposed,” he added.

“So you’re saying that the government forces my business to close, and I have to take a PPP loan to pay my employees during that time, and then later that same government will put me in a database and use it to attack me,” journalist Stephen L. Miller tweeted. “The WH Twitter account didn’t think this one through.”

Either the political geniuses at the White House think you're stupid, or they are stupid. My vote is clearly for the latter, but both things can be true. It’s so stupid, it hurts.