Biden Administration

From The Desk Of Ron Paul

President Biden announced last week, he would be “forgiving” student loan debt, something that he does not have the constitutional authority to do.

And as I explain in my latest column, what Biden is really trying to do is transfer the debt of higher-income Americans onto the backs of lower-income Americans.

Not only that, but if allowed by the courts, the 300 to 500 billion dollar (or more!) price tag is going to exacerbate the economic crisis that is already unraveling.

This “forgiveness” is no act of nobility; it’s a travesty, and people need to understand its true nature.

Please read my latest column below, and if you’re moved to do so, please pass it along to other patriots you know.

—Ron Paul

Biden’s Student Debt Forgiveness Scheme is Unforgivable

Last week, President Biden announced he is creating a new program forgiving 10,000 dollars of student loan debt for those with income under 125,000 dollars a year. The amount rises to 20,000 dollars for borrowers who are Pell Grant recipients. Biden flip-flopped on the issue as he previously denied that the president has the authority to create a new student loan debt forgiveness program. He now claims a 2003 law allowing the Education Department to waive or modify provisions of federal student financial assistance programs to help students affected by war, other military operations, or a national emergency gives him the authority. Biden says debt forgiveness is necessary because of a continuing covid national emergency.

It seems odd that Biden would claim covid is a national emergency when even the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has stopped recommending lockdowns, masks, and “social distancing.” A broad student loan forgiveness program also does not seem to fit the purpose of this statute, which was to provide student loan forgiveness for military personal, first responders, and others engaged in fighting the “war on terror.” Another basis offered for the president having the power to cancel the loans is a provision in the 1965 Higher Education Act that gives the Education Department limited authority to modify or forgive student loan debt. Given the Supreme Court’s recent decision narrowing the scope of a federal agency’s ability to unilaterally enact major new policies based on limited grants of authority, it is a definite possibility that the courts will overturn the student loan forgiveness program.

If the courts uphold the president’s action, then as many of 43 million Americans could have significant amounts, or even all, of their student debt forgiven. Of course, the debt does not go away; instead, the “forgiven” debt will simply be added to the national debt to be paid by the taxpayers either in the form of direct taxes or the hidden inflation tax. Thus, these loans will be paid off in part by taxpayers who did not go to college, paid their own way through school, or have already paid off their student loans. Since those with college degrees tend to earn more over time than those without them, this program redistributes wealth from lower to higher income Americans.

The student loan forgiveness will add between 300 and 500 billion dollars to the national debt. This is a greater increase in debt than the supposed “deficit reduction,” which consists of tax increase and expanding the IRS, contained in the phony Inflation Reduction Act.

President Biden also announced he is extending the student loans payment moratorium through the end of the year. “Temporary” federal benefits are rarely, if ever, truly temporary. When the time comes for the moratorium to expire, Congress will almost certainly extend it in response to pressure from constituents who benefit from the program, which includes colleges and universities in Congress members’ states and districts. The expectation that more student loan debt will be forgiven will also encourage more students to take out loans and will give colleges a new incentive to raise their tuition. This will raise the cost of the student loan and loan forgiveness programs.

Increasing debt caused by expanding student loans and loan forgiveness will increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, leading to continued price inflation and an eventual major economic crisis. A step in avoiding this and reversing course is convincing a critical mass of people to understand that the welfare-warfare state and the fiat money system that underlies it are impractical and immoral.

By Chuck Baldwin
August 25, 2022

I’ll begin with a quote from my good friend Thomas DiLorenzo who wrote an outstanding column that appears on LewRockwell.com:

The Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act” will increase inflation with hundreds of billions in additional government spending and money creation by the Fed while making supply chain problems even worse with onerous new corporate taxes, especially on energy, and myriad new “Green New Deal” environmental regulations. Increased government spending and reduced production will cause higher prices, not lower.

To collect all the new taxes for this latest election-year spending binge the administration is proposing to spend some $80 billion to more than double the number of IRS agents, hiring 87,000 new ones, 70,000 of which are reported to be armed. The Democrat party wants a standing army of armed tax collectors to enforce its will.

Americans once fought a revolution over such acts of tyranny.

Yes, indeed.

And at the same time that the would-be tyrants in Washington, D.C., are preparing to go door-to-door with an army of federal agents assigned with the task of taking the last cow or chicken from the peasants for Caesar’s taxes, they have also sent billions of our hard-earned tax dollars to another would-be tyrant: the little neo-nazi Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine.

My friend Ron Paul writes:

There is a video clip making the rounds showing President Biden speaking at a recent NATO summit about the seven billion dollars the US government had – at that time – provided to Ukraine. Attached to that is another clip showing the horrific state of several US major cities, including in Pennsylvania, California, and Ohio. The video of American cities is shocking: endless landscapes of filth, trash, homelessness, open fires on the street, drug-addicted zombies. It doesn’t look like the America most of us remember.

Watching Biden bragging about sending billions of dollars to corrupt leaders overseas with American cities looking like bombed-out Iraq or Libya is US foreign policy in a nutshell. The Washington elites tell the rest of America that they must “promote democracy” in some far-off land. Anyone who objects is considered in league with the appointed enemy of the day. Once it was Saddam, then Assad and Gaddafi. Now it’s Putin. The game is the same, only the names are changed.

What is seldom asked, is what is in this deal for those Americans who suffer to pay for our interventionist foreign policy. Do they really think a working American in Ohio or Pennsylvania is better off or safer because we are supposedly protecting Ukraine’s borders? I think most Americans would wonder why they aren’t bothering to protect our own borders.

A reported 200,000 illegals crossed the border into the US in July alone. You can believe they are learning quickly about the free money provided by the US government to illegals. They’ll probably get a voting card as well.

Last Friday the Pentagon announced that yet another $775 million would be sent to Ukraine. As Antiwar.com reported, it was the eighteenth weapons package to Ukraine in six months. Has there ever been a more idiotic US intervention in history?

Supporters of this proxy war may celebrate more aid to Ukraine, but the reality is that it is in no way aid to Ukraine. That’s not how the system works. It is money created out of thin air by the Fed and appropriated by Congress to be spent propping up the politically-connected military-industrial complex. It is a big check written by middle America to rich people who run Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Americans watch their budget being stretched to the limit while the Beltway fat-cats loosen their belts to continue enjoying the gravy train.

Bloomberg reported earlier this summer that inflation is costing the average American household more than $5,200 this year. Inflation is a tax on middle class and poor Americans. The wealthy – like those who run Raytheon and Lockheed Martin – always get the new money first, before prices go up. The rest of us watch as the dollar buys less and less.

As Washington salivates over fighting Russia in Ukraine, the rest of America feels like we’re becoming Zimbabwe. How long until it takes a trillion dollars for a loaf of bread? Will there be a run on wheelbarrows?

There is a way out. It’s called “non-interventionism.” The war in Ukraine was caused by the US regime change in 2014 and the neocon insistence that Ukraine join NATO. The State Department and CIA thought it was a great victory to overthrow the elected government, but meanwhile the rest of us get the bill. No NATO and not one more penny for Ukraine!

Not only is Washington spending billions overseas in another attempt at regime change and in support of some of the most evil thugs on the planet, the money—as usual—is being totally wasted.

Paul Craig Roberts has an excellent analysis of exactly the way the war is going in Ukraine—a truthful analysis that the propaganda media in the West will NEVER tell you. Several people have repeated it, but it seems to be the ancient Greek writer and poet Aeschylus who famously said, “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

The U.S. media would have you believe that all of these billions of dollars of weapons and munitions that our tax dollars have sent to Ukraine are really helping to “restore democracy” in Europe and are helping to defeat the Big Bad Bear.

Friends, we are being duped again!

Here is Dr. Roberts’ report (I urge you to read the report in its entirety) of what is really happening to all of our military support for the gangster Zelensky and his band of neo-nazis, criminals and mercenaries:

Unlike the Whore Western Media William Schryver Provides the Accurate Picture of Russia’s Destruction of the Western-trained Ukraine Military:

The “Demilitarization” of Ukraine has been precisely the Russian mentality in Ukraine. Their foremost objective, from the very beginning, as explicitly articulated by President Vladimir Putin in his historic speech of February 24, 2022, was to “demilitarize” Ukraine – to destroy its army.

When the war began, the most capable, experienced, well-armed, and well-positioned Ukrainian forces were NOT in Kiev, but in the Donbass and Mariupol. They had been positioning there for months, with the ultimate objective of retaking the Donbass and Crimea – a goal never far from the minds of Ukraine’s ideological and political leaders.

Indeed, they spoke of it openly and without qualification. They strongly believed the strength of their armed forces, after eight years of preparation, had reached a point where it was capable of actually achieving that objective.

Their benefactors in NATO encouraged them to believe this – for it was also NATO’s fondest dream to raise its banners over the naval base at Sevastopol, and thereby wield dominance over the entire Black Sea and the Bosporus.

Pursuant to this and many other geostrategic objectives – arresting Russian resurgence foremost among them – NATO had been providing arms to Ukraine for years, and those arms shipments were expanded and accelerated dramatically in late 2021.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops had been trained in the use of these NATO armaments. And, as was known to anybody paying even casual attention, thousands of western intelligence operatives, special forces, and mercenary contractors (predominantly American, British, and French – and lots of them) were embedded with front-line Ukrainian forces, where several have since been killed or captured, and a substantial contingent still remains.

Many of these western troops are there primarily to coordinate the reception, interpretation, and “actionable” use of highly prized and even more highly classified US/NATO “ISR” (Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance) data.

The army the US/NATO built in Ukraine, by the beginning of 2022, had swelled to become the largest and best-armed land force in Europe. By almost every metric, it was more potent than the combined armies of Germany, France, and Italy.

The Ukrainian military was purpose-built to serve the interests of the American Empire in its long-established goal to cripple Russia and prevent it from ever again being able to wield global influence; to effect its ultimate dismemberment and reduce it to a faint fragment of its former status and glory – to realize the geopolitical objective expressed in the popular cold-war-era board game RISK, which erased Russia from the world map.

The Russian decision to invade Ukraine in late February 2022 was motivated by and predicated upon all of these factors in aggregate, and was hastened by the widespread Ukrainian artillery strikes on the Donbass region that had commenced weeks previously.

The result of this . . . operation was that, over the course of several weeks, the Russians effectively “fixed” over 100,000 Ukrainian troops and their equipment in the vicinity of Kiev, took control of key transportation nodes and corridors between Kiev and the Donbass, and simultaneously conducted a major offensive to encircle and annihilate the 20,000-strong Ukrainian army group in Mariupol, a highly strategic port city on the coast of the Sea of Azov.

The forces in Mariupol included the notorious neo-Nazi “Azov Battalion”, whose arming and training had long been a US/NATO priority, and they were considered to be one of the most formidable components of the Ukrainian army.

The forces in Mariupol also included many dozens of NATO “advisors” (CIA, special forces, and so-called “contractors”). Also present were ~2500 foreign mercenaries, most of them NATO veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While potential reinforcements remained idle and immobile in and around Kiev, the powerful force in Mariupol was methodically surrounded and systematically annihilated in an operation I am confident will be studied in war colleges for generations as one of the most impressive prosecutions of urban warfare ever executed.

As matters stand here in early July, it is now incontrovertible that the Russian operation in the Donbass has been an overwhelming victory. It is, in my estimation, the most impressive management of a quasi-urban battlefield in modern history. The original force, consisting of over 60,000 of the best-trained and best-equipped soldiers in the Ukrainian army, has been effectively destroyed. It has suffered catastrophic losses of its experienced, NATO-trained professional cadres. Its massive losses of personnel have been partially replenished by poorly trained territorial militia troops, but its even more massive losses of heavy weaponry cannot be replenished.

Also read Scott Ritter’s excellent analysis that augments Dr. Roberts’ report.

In other words, the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars invested in the U.S.-backed government of Ukraine were as wasted as the billions of taxpayer dollars invested in the U.S.-backed government of Afghanistan.

Every military conflict in which the U.S. engages only serves to enrich the war profiteers mentioned by Dr. Paul and further enslave the citizens of this country with punishing monetary inflation, recession, business closures, job losses, etc., as well as further construct a quasi-military Police State here in what was free America, as noted by Dr. DiLorenzo.

If the IRS was truly interested in finding lost tax dollars—which it’s NOT—it should look in Ukraine, AND in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Kosovo, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Uganda, Yemen, ad infinitum.

But that’s not the goal. The goal of the Maoists in Washington, D.C., is to use the IRS to manipulate, intimidate, demoralize and terrorize THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.

The only real question is: How long will the American people put up with it?