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Aug. 25, 2022 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:31
Lawless! Biden Side-steps Constitution In Promise To Write Off Student Loans

In a blatantly unconstitutional move, President Biden yesterday announced that his Administration would be obligating upwards of half a trillion dollars - or more - to "forgive" student loans in households making $125K per year or less. Good thing the Inflation Reduction Act was passed or we might be in real trouble! Also today: Did you know the US was still occupying and bombing Syria?

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Time Text
Debating Student Debt Solutions 00:11:40
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
I'm doing fine.
Good, good.
The books don't look good in Washington.
They're overspending.
And, you know, and I gave them my two cents worth, and that's what they thought it was worth.
You know, they didn't listen to my two cents worth.
They deal in much bigger numbers.
But anyway, you know, the gimmick of student loans, that was a pretty good gimmick, you know, for getting votes and all the students bought into it.
Naively, they buy into it and go, oh, oh, this is almost like free stuff.
It probably someone said, they'll never actually collect it.
That's exactly what happened.
They're not collecting it.
But people describe it correctly, that they don't like it because it's unfair.
Of course, they're talking about the bailout, but nobody complained a whole lot when they were introducing the program.
Nobody remembers that precise moment that the student loan was set up.
That's way back because everybody liked that.
The parents liked it.
The students can borrow money and all this.
But now, they're complaining because it looks like they're going to have to pay.
The bill has come due.
And some people think you can get away with it, but no, the money is churned out there and it's created.
And it's astounding how much it's they've already, you know, I think it's $1.7 trillion that they've written off on this.
But now they're going into millions more, even another trillion here.
They don't even know how to work out.
But the people who are most unhappy, and so it isn't they're unhappy they violated the Constitution and somebody got some benefits, but it is unfair on the surface.
The people who feel most abused are the ones who did take the loan and they did have a sense of responsibility and they've been paying and working hard and paid the thing off and now they're going to have to suffer from the burden of the debt on the people that didn't do it.
But that's not an exception to the rule.
That's the way it always works.
It's just that it's become apparent this time and you can see the people who have suffered.
And I've always argued over the years about any type of help to school.
Why should somebody who didn't get to go to college?
And I mentioned this when I was in medical school, I thought, why?
Because they said, you know that your cost is really not, you're not paying for your whole cost of your medical education.
That's just a token, but you have to have to pay some of it.
But who pays for it?
People who don't become doctors and they don't have a degree.
And then there's the others who borrowed the money.
And it was a program set up where they talk about the government debt, but they're not talking a whole lot about the bank benefits because the banks were the ones that operated.
They got the cash and they'll be the ones that get bailed out.
They claim there was no bailouts.
But that was probably protection for the banks because the individual wasn't allowed to declare bankruptcy.
But the government could declare bankruptcy.
And of course, for me, it's simple.
We shouldn't be doing that kind of stuff.
Jonathan Turley has a good article trying to explain how and why this is a bad idea.
We can actually put that up.
He was actually on Fox News talking about it earlier.
And he makes the point that Democrats are praising Biden for circumventing Congress.
And this is this massive student loan, quote-unquote, forgiveness that Biden is doing.
And this is, I thought, maybe I was not reading the Constitution right, Dr. Paul, but I thought that Congress is the one that appropriates money.
Well, I guess there's some loophole that he found.
It has to do with COVID that enables him to grab the money to pay for it.
Now, there was a study done by the Wharton School, pretty well-respected school at Penn.
Let's take a look at that.
It was completed just a couple days ago, August 23rd.
Forgiving student loans, budgetary costs, and distributional impact.
And here is the essential part of it.
If we can go to that next one, here's the summary.
We estimate that forgiving federal college student loan debt will cost between $300 billion and $980 billion over the 10-year budget window, depending on details.
About 70% of debt relief accrues to borrowers in the top 60% of income distribution.
Translated into English, a massive, massive increase in inflation because of this another trillion dollars being spent.
And the benefit to that will go disproportionately to those that have a higher income, i.e., it's welfare for the rich.
Yes, and the tragedy is not too many people are going to learn any lessons from this.
You know, it was interesting to see that the financial advisor to Obama, it must have been, it must be extreme because he says, hey, what are we doing here?
And at least he suggests that this is overkill and shouldn't be done, although he probably was there when they were selling these loans to the students.
Yeah, well, and here's interesting.
I saw this on Zero Hedge and you saw it as well.
You mentioned as you were walking into the studio.
But President Obama's head of his own economic advisors and he was president, even he thinks this is a crazy idea.
Let's put up this tweet that he had on the issue, this next one, this next clip.
Jason Fuhrman was the head of the Council of Economic Advisors for President Obama.
Pouring roughly half a trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless.
Doing it while going well beyond one campaign promise, $10,000 of student loan relief, and breaking another, all proposals paid for, is even worse.
That's got to hurt, Dr. Paul, coming from someone squarely in the Dem camp.
It's got to hurt pretty bad.
So, you know, there was a joke going around a while ago.
I think encapsulates it well.
And I should have put the clip up, but I'll just read it.
It's a kind of a meme.
It shows a plumber with a smile on his face, and it says, hardworking plumber looking forward to paying for his neighbor's gender studies degree.
That's basically what this is all about.
You know, people like this Fuhrman, they're interesting to think about because it's easy for us to understand Austrian economics and the Constitution because you don't do this kind of thing.
You know, there were no programs when I went to school, but it wasn't that expensive.
You know, I could have a part-time job and earn enough to pay the tuition.
But then, when the government gets involved with the inflation and all, the prices go up, then you have to have more government.
But our position is very simple.
But then, the position of so many, not Furman.
Furman is somewhere floating back and forth.
The others say, deficits don't matter.
Don't sweat it.
You know, if the Congress won't pass it, I'll sign an executive order.
And I was just thinking, just think of how many executive orders were issued over coronavirus.
They didn't go to the Congress for this.
But here's a person that sort of is in the middle of this because we didn't, I don't think he has a, I don't want to make this a personal at all, but when it was happening, if he was in the Obama administration, they weren't trying to explain why this is risky business.
You know, this could go to spending too much and contribute to the deficit.
But I guess there's a benefit to people like this because if they're over and they're Marxists and you point out this is chaotic, oh, good.
This guy obviously probably is not a Marxist.
He's starting to talk like common sense.
And I think it fascinates me on how they come to this because it's so easy to understand a dedicated Marxist and it's so easy for me to understand somebody dedicated to freedom.
And those are goals.
But the Furmans of the world are out there and that allows things to get started.
Why I think this we have to be cautious is they're credible and they say, well, this is just a little loan for the people who really need it.
This is just a little income tax for the people who have a lot of money.
And I think people don't see this, but it's 100% of the principle of the thing that the government can do this.
And that principle led to this tragedy right now.
We, of course, welcome a statement like this.
Maybe it'll wake up a few other people, and he's moving in the right direction.
So that is okay with me.
It always reminds me of the saying that you always say: if you subsidize something, you'll get more of it.
And I think we can look at the fact that we've subsidized student loans.
You know, we talked about this last week, I think it was, that there is a, in the Inflation Reduction Act, there's a $7,500 subsidy for people who buy electric trucks.
And then the news came out a day later that the price of trucks went up $8,500.
So you're going to see the subsidize the cost of an education.
Well, the university is just going to raise its fees by that much more because it's essentially viewed as free money.
And that's why you have all of these people in higher education, not the professors, but the administrators making two, three, four, $500,000.
But I had something, I didn't make a clip of it, but I saw it after I sent the clips in.
But a great editorial from the Wall Street Journal, I'm going to read a little part of it because I think it really does a great job.
He says, worse than the cost is the moral hazard and awful precedent this sets.
Those who will pay for this write-off are the tens of millions of Americans who didn't go to college or repaid their debt or skimped and saved to pay for college or chose lower-cost schools to avoid a debt trap.
This is a college graduate bailout paid for by plumbers and FedEx drivers.
He also said colleges will capitalize by raising tuition to capture the write-off windfall.
A White House fact sheet hilariously says that colleges, quote, will have an obligation to keep prices reasonable and ensure borrows get value for their investment, not debt they cannot afford, end quote.
And the Wall Street Journal concludes, only a fool could believe colleges will do this.
That's pretty good.
The Wall Street Journal.
Yeah, pretty good stuff.
Iran's Role in Syria 00:08:14
Right.
So anyway, we have another subject, unless you have another point to make.
No, I think we'll keep watching this.
It's in the news.
Everyone's talking about it today, and it's going to be, you're not going to see a lot of Republicans because they also want to be Santa Claus, right?
Of course, we've done some programs, and I've done some with Chris on this, trying to call attention to this.
But I guess this announcement by the president and the numbers coming out finally got the attention of even professors at Harvard University to come out and say, hey, hey, maybe this is an important subject.
So it's all part of the announcement that this country is bankrupt.
That's part of the financial bankruptcy.
But we still have the moral bankruptcy, which is probably a bigger challenge than the financial bankruptcy.
And yet they're the same because money is a moral issue, too.
It's the immorality of the fraud and the counterfeiting of money.
So it's all about the same.
But I have something to say.
We've been looking at Syria, actually.
We can put on that next clip because we've been watching it.
Yesterday we were wondering if we should talk about it.
We said, let's wait a little bit and see what happens.
Well, it's heating up more.
Three U.S. service members suffer minor injuries in Syria rocket attacks.
What happened is a few days ago, the U.S. bombed some militias in Syria that the U.S. claims are, quote, Iran-backed.
And there was a retaliation by some of those militias against some U.S. troops who are occupying Syria illegally, of course.
Not that we wish harm on any service member, but their commanders who send them there.
It's a different story.
But so now we're looking at tit for tat in the U.S. will retaliate again.
While everyone is focusing on Ukraine and things at home, the situation in Syria is heating up.
And it's just a reminder for people who have probably forgotten that the U.S. military is still occupying a good chunk of Syria, a country that never attacked us, never threatened us, couldn't threaten or attack us even if it wanted to.
We just decided that we're going to go ahead and grab some of that country and stick around.
I wonder why they wanted the eastern part.
I think that's where the oil is.
That's where the oil is.
You know, it's interesting that this is happening too because some people say, well, this is good because they're all trained.
It's the Iranians that we have to deal with because they're very much involved in Syria too.
At the same time, Syria, I mean, Iran is denying all this.
And you wonder, and there may be a reason for that because they might be more cautious right now and not looking for total elimination, once again, of the negotiations going on with the treaties and opening up where they can sell oil again.
So I think that's a possibility, but we have to have an excuse for going in there and bombing.
But I was looking at all the reports today, and I didn't see one report of the mention of oil.
Yeah.
You know, and there's a lot of oil.
We just have declared that we own it.
It's ours.
And that wasn't Biden that that happened under.
Yeah, that was, yeah.
Well, one of the things that was bombed by this group was the Carneco oil fields, which are working there.
But you know, the funny thing is the U.S. likes to talk about the international rules-based order.
Whenever it's talking about a country that's in the crosshairs of Washington, but what part of the international rules-based order allows the U.S. to go into Syria, occupy part of the country, steal its oil, steal its grain, and kill its people with bombs.
You know, there were some civilians killed in these bombings.
It's just the hypocrisy is not missed by the rest of the world.
It's only that Americans unfortunately shrink from criticizing their government even when it's doing the wrong thing.
Well, here's a good little clip from Dave DeCamp, I think, in anti-war.com, and he makes a point that you just made, and I think it's an important one.
He said, the airstrikes against an alleged Iran-linked group came as the U.S. and Iran appear close to a deal to revive the nuclear deal known as the JCPOA.
Colin Cole, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, said Wednesday that the strikes show how the U.S. will launch attacks against such groups regardless of the status of the JCPOA.
And I think this goes with the pattern of things that we've been seeing.
The supposed threats against Bolton, the use of the attack against Salman Rushdie, terrible attack, but the use of that to blame Iran.
And now we're seeing this.
I think still, I said I was a little bit conspiratorial, but I think there is certainly a group that does not want the Iran deal to be back on the table.
And so a lot of these things are happening to scuttle that.
Before this recent bombing, we were visiting you and I.
And I made the point that what we have to do, though, is talk about Syria.
And yet Syria wasn't up on the list.
It's getting higher on that because I wrote a little note to myself, lest we forget that there's a war going on over there.
And, you know, it becomes quiescent.
So now, and they haven't given up.
I mean, we're looking to send more and more weapons into Ukraine.
Nobody's given up.
So we have to keep that going.
So we more or less have too many wars going right now.
Both of them could explode at any moment.
But it's really a shame because people don't look at it other than it's a power struggle.
That's probably the most important thing.
And that is oil and the profit.
But they never look at what we're doing.
And you mentioned why are we over there?
What are we doing in there?
And it's a moral issue.
Do we have the moral authority to go in when Americans aren't being attacked?
They're not a threat to us.
And of course, we know exactly why we're there.
And also, they don't deal with the issue, that old-fashioned issue.
There's something, a document, we have an original document in Washington.
It's called a Constitution.
That makes you a little bit weird.
That's anachronistic.
I've been told that.
I learned that when I was in Congress.
Exactly.
But then there's the pragmatic thing.
You know, some of this stuff just doesn't work.
And that's usually when they wake up more people.
Like, you know, they finally had to recognize that it wasn't working in Afghanistan.
20 years we've done that.
Yeah, but we don't want any of those people we killed or the people that died on our side.
We don't want them to have died in vain.
You know, this is an honorable thing that we're doing.
So all these arguments seem so clear-cut.
And the first one is, you know, authority, moral authority to do this.
Who's to correct the infractions in Iran or Syria or any place?
And one point that on a few occasions when I was in Washington, I'd make that point.
I says, you do know that we have a few problems here.
Don't you think our responsibility is here?
And they usually acknowledge it politely, but it was also one they don't have an answer for because they know it's bad.
And sometimes when we're spending money overseas, and the other argument is we spend our money worrying about the borders in Ukraine at the same time, the borders are a bit chaotic in this country.
People know that.
Well, people say, well, hang on, those are Iran-linked groups.
Well, so what?
They were invited in there by Syria.
Syria has the authority as a sovereign state to ally itself with anyone.
It invited the Russians in to fight against ISIS, and the Russians did.
Lemonade Stand Law 00:05:26
It's really none of our business as long as they don't start bothering us.
But Dr. Paul, our last piece, our next to last piece of the day, should reassure us that our law enforcement officers have the right priorities.
Let's put on this next clip.
This is from Matt Agaris via the Free Thought Project, which we saw on Zero Hedge.
Cops shut down eight-year-old girls' lemonade stand to protect society from unlicensed lemonade.
You know, this is a win for strong law and order enforcement.
And, of course, I'd like to see more of it, but I'd like to see more law and order against the national police forces, which are several, IRS and FBI and CIA, and stand up against their illegalities.
But now we have the local police going on because Ohio has a law that says you can't do it.
You know, even if you have just a lemonade stand, you have to have a ticket.
You have to have your permit for five days, and it'll cost you $40.
Well, this eight-year-old, you know, I don't think she was going to make $40 in that length of time.
So they've canceled that out.
And, you know, traditionally, I bet you can look back throughout our whole history when we didn't even have this attitude where children had jobs.
Even before there were laws now, it's, oh, that's child labor, you know, child labor.
The kids are out there needing to work.
But in the majority of the years of my lifetime, that was always permissible, and we did everything.
You know, how are we going to make a couple dollars?
And we didn't think for a minute that, oh, maybe the government is going to give us a bonus or something like that.
But that is rather sad.
The ending turned out not so bad.
The policemen were very sad that they had to do this.
And the parents, you know, were reasonable too.
A lot of those parents would have been angrier.
They said, well, that is the law and that is the position.
And it's what they have to do.
But the police felt so guilty that when they left, they gave her $20.
But that won't correct the infractions of the system.
That's it.
So they gave her $20, and she opened up her stand again.
And the police decided there was so much public pressure.
So the public did this.
Attitudes did this.
The sentiment did this.
And they didn't dare go back there and lock that kid up and say, oh, you've disobeyed our orders.
We're going to put you in jail tonight.
What a shame.
Yeah, that is a good news story.
I was going to say, sorry.
It really worked out.
But we've had stories like this over the years.
You've seen people get locked down because they have a stand, you know, and trying to be.
And it's such a good learning experience.
Sure.
There's a little kid over in Cluth that has a little lemonade stand and I drive by there occasionally and I always wish I would have had some money, some cash to buy a lemonade from this kid.
He probably has a swipe, right?
So we have one more little one.
Yeah, here's another outrage of the week.
This one doesn't have a pleasant ending to this one, like the eight-year-old.
California DA admits 70% of suspects released in a particular county that they studied, released on zero bail, committed new crimes.
The law says you can't charge bail.
And did you know it didn't work out so well?
I mean, the statistics are horrible when over 70% of the people released under mandated a zero bail purchase policy go on to commit additional crimes.
Violent offenses such as robbery, murder.
I mean, that is so sick.
And the people, you know, go along with this.
And I keep thinking, you know, if the opposition, and generally, you know, I, you know, really believe on big issues like foreign policy and Federal Reserve, the parties work together because the deep state has total control of them.
But in this kind of stuff, I think you can point to where are the most people living on the street and using the streets as a bathroom in the cities that are progressive, they're cultural Marxist, and you're not allowed to punish anybody.
If they're destroying your property and they break in, oh, you can't, you arrest them and you don't have to charge them bail.
But what if you use violence and you stop one?
You're liable to be in big trouble.
I don't know.
That's the whole thing.
So this is a bad story.
And I think that the only way that's going to be solved is the people who disapprove.
And there are more and more.
That's the good part of the story.
This probably will wake up more and more people, just as the lockdown did with coronavirus.
The Good Part Woke Up People 00:03:51
And that wasn't the only reason it shifted, but that sure helped shift the attitude.
And now people, what is good is they spilled over that parents are looking even at the curriculum.
And all of a sudden, and boy, now the proponents of all this say, oh, they're book burners.
They're evil people.
They're not letting us put all our trash in there and all our propaganda.
So they're the book burners.
Well, parents happen to be the taxpayers.
And of course, that's the argument for separation of school and state, because I don't think it was ever meant by the Constitution that you would have the Department of Education dictating curricula.
So anyway, that's not good.
The good part is wake up people.
Maybe they'll decide, and they've already had a few decisions where the people who like all this stuff have lost their seat in the Congress and different places.
But the people have to wake up.
The sentiment is very important.
And the sentiment helped our eight-year-old.
So let's have more sentiment for the positive things and let the people take care of themselves.
Absolutely.
Well, let's skip over that and just put on that last clip a reminder as we move toward the deadline.
If you can put up that last one, the conference September 3rd, Weston Washington Dulles Airport, Weaponizing the Woke Armed Forces for Use at Home and Abroad.
That's the title of Colonel Doug McGregor's talk that he's going to give there.
I just got the title from him yesterday.
There's a lot of stuff about the woke military and what the danger is.
I can't think of anyone better to talk about it than Colonel McGregor.
You've seen him on Fox News.
You've seen him on Tucker Carlson.
You've seen him around.
This is going to be a great speech.
There's going to be a lot of great speeches there.
You won't want to miss them.
I will include a link in the description here to get your tickets and join us in Washington, D.C., just over a week from now for our sixth Washington conference.
Very good.
And I'm looking forward to it.
But you know, this whole issue of sort of undermining the principles of a military, I have my strong opinion about the military for defense, but not for what we do, not for defending an empire and having troops spread around the world and getting involved in no-win wars.
That's just plain evil.
And it's going to be probably one of the major reasons why we're facing this financial crisis by spending all this money because we hear about all this spending and all the waste just in this recent year.
Not even a year.
What have we done in Ukraine?
Billions of dollars.
And oh, only 30% of it even ended up getting in the area where it's supposed to be.
But it certainly didn't do anything to bring about peace, you know, this sort of thing.
So this woke stuff in there is going to even weaken it more.
So under the circumstances, you know, it's a mixed deal.
But they're not doing the right thing anyway.
Why do we have to have a really efficient army?
But what if the only principle and the purpose of a military is to defend us?
Then you want people, smaller numbers can do it.
Private individuals can do it.
Home defense can do it.
All kinds of things you can do under these circumstances.
But wokeism and the military, you know, about the easiest way for me to describe it.
It's just plain stupid.
And hopefully it will change.
And I hope we can participate in the changing of this.
That's why we're having this conference in the very near future.
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