What Do We Owe the Kids?

Forgive them, they know not what they do: Eleven red states—Kansas, Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah—are suing the Biden administration for its attempt to forgive student loans via its Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, following the Supreme Court's June decision to block President Joe Biden's prior, more sprawling attempt at amnesty.

"The Biden administration has pledged to lower student debt burdens and give borrowers breathing room with student loan repayment programs such as the income-driven SAVE plan," reports Axios.

"The plan, launched in October, provides lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers and a faster path to cancellation. It has already erased the balances of more than 150,000 enrollees, who originally borrowed less than $12,000 and have been paying for 10 years," reports The Washington Post. "The Biden administration has estimated the Save plan will cost $156 billion over the next decade, but the Congressional Budget Office says the figure is closer to $230 billion."

But do college-educated borrowers need more breathing room, at taxpayers' expense?

Breathing room at Vanderbilt: Not to be too cheap (pun intended), but it seems some of our most elite universities—which saddle students with the most massive bills—are leaving plenty of time for extracurriculars, rather than essentials.

Case in point: Vanderbilt (price tag: $89,590 per year), the site of the latest Israel/Palestine activist stunt, in which a group of students occupied Kirkland Hall, "calling for the administration to allow the student body to vote on a [student government] constitutional amendment to prevent…funds from being used on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement's targets" per The Vanderbilt Hustler. Of course, the newsworthy chunk is not that a small group of students occupied the chancellor's office for 21 hours; it's that they made themselves the least sympathetic group of all time by blowing their self-imposed hardships comically out of proportion.

"For 21 hours, we were deprived of medical attention, we were deprived of sleep, we were deprived of food, water, resources, and at 5:30 in the morning, I got a pat on my back, I was told to stand up, I was handcuffed, and I was escorted out of my university….It's disgusting that this is how they treat student protesters on this campus," said one activist, his voice breaking. "In jail, I experienced better conditions than at Vanderbilt University."

In jail, he says, "I had access to water, I had access to a bathroom, I had access to my friends, and the ability to rest. How dare this university deprive us of basic humanity? How dare a top 15, 20, university in this country have more inhumane conditions than that of a jail?" he adds, following up that the protesters demand charges be dropped as well as an apology.

I am glad he got to socialize while in jail, but enduring a three-hour stint with a dozen of your closest pals does not make you Nelson Mandela. Hunger strikes, for example, only persuade others if you bear your cross humbly and solemnly; if you can give your beliefs some heft, proving your commitment to your cause via abstention; if you can endure some legitimate hardship in solidarity with those who are forced to live that way every day.

Otherwise, you simply look like a petulant child in need of a good shower.

Of course, this is one campus saga. But it's a pattern that's played out at elite campuses since Hamas' October 7 massacre: 30 Harvard students endured a whole 12-hour hunger strike last month (in solidarity with a group of 17 Brown students who actually logged a whole eight days, though two caved mid-strike). Other students have engaged in campus shout-downs, and counter-demonstrators at the University of California, Berkeley, broke down doors trying to end an event organized by Jewish students.

These are some of the same students who want amnesty for their loans. But it's past time for students to get back to work and for colleges to bring prices down. What's currently happening on elite campuses is not something this taxpayer wants to subsidize.

Scenes from New York: Mayor Eric Adams announced two new initiatives yesterday designed to help deter subway-system criminals: Metal detectors will be placed in some subway stations, designed to detect guns, and $20 million will be doled out to hire more clinicians to bolster "the Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams (SCOUT), a pilot program launched in partnership with the state and the [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] to connect people with untreated severe mental illness in the subways to mental health treatment and care."

This is seemingly in response to this week's news, that four people were killed by subway trains over just 24 hours. On Tuesday morning, a No. 7 train struck a man at the 42nd Street–Bryant Park/Fifth Avenue station. Another train struck a man in Flatbush. Yet another struck a man at Grand Central-42nd Street. At least one of these three was a suicide; it's unclear whether the others were intentional or accidental. And on Tuesday night, a 16-year-old girl who was walking on the tracks with her friends was killed by an oncoming G train, near Park Slope's Fourth Ave/9th St. station.

This adds to the current struck-by-train total for 2024, bringing it up to 30. Monday night saw a disturbing subway-system death, in which a man with a long rap sheet named Carlton McPherson pushed another man to his death, via oncoming train, in East Harlem.

Adams' plan seems ill-targeted, expensive, and unlikely to work. Many of these deaths are not gun-related (though there was a shooting on the train last week, which I covered in this newsletter), and most criminals appear to be fare-evaders who don't use the turnstile. Plus, the company Adams wants to contract with has a high rate of false positives.

QUICK HITS

• Origins of COVID-19 debate, plus text summary, from Astral Codex Ten, worth watching/reading.

• "People in Toronto could end up paying for the rain that falls on their property," reads a National Post article that will leave you scratching your head, wondering if the Canadians are OK (were they ever?).

• Former FTX head honcho Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison yesterday for stealing many billions of dollars from unsuspecting customers. The judge also ordered Bankman-Fried to forfeit $11 billion. "While prosecutors compared Bankman-Fried to Bernie Madoff who was sentenced to 150 years for a massive Ponzi scheme, his sentence is more in line with the prison term that former Enron Corp. CEO Jeffrey Skilling received for accounting fraud," reports Bloomberg. "He was sentenced to 24 years, though it was reduced on appeal."

• How to build a city, from Pirate Wires.

• Seattle landlord struggles to evict a squatter, from National Review. How is it that so many cities totally fail to protect property rights? Disturbing.

• Parenting trends of yore. Happy to live in the era when we've gotten rid of goat wet nurses, high in morals though they might be:

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