Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Not the Onion: Hillary Clinton Proposes Welfare for Rich White Boys

She has now proposed that entitled rich kids who launch startups will get 3 years forbearance on their student loans:
Hillary Clinton has a bold plan to ensure the bright future of every hardworking American who has the considerable resources required to start his or her own company: three years of student debt deferrals, for every single startup founder. Wonderful news for our striving technocrat class—they need all the help they can get.

………

What else do we need? Less debt, obviously. And who are the people most in need of debt forgiveness? The sort of people—overwhelmingly highly educated, white, male people—who launch startups.

Enter Hillary’s plan:

Hillary is committed to breaking down barriers and leveling the playing field for entrepreneurs and innovators who are launching their own start-ups. Hillary will allow entrepreneurs to put their federal student loans into a special status while they get their new ventures off the ground. For millions of young Americans, this would mean deferment from having to make any payments on their student loans for up to three years—zero interest and zero principal—as they work through the critical start-up phase of new enterprises. Hillary will explore a similar deferment incentive not just to founders of enterprises, but to early joiners – such as the first 10 or 20 employees.
What’s more, the economic benefits will trickle down to those of us who don’t have the courage or inheritance (“more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family”) to start our own hovercraft-sharing services and toothpaste disruption ventures. Startups, with their famously long lifespans and reliable revenue models, will eventually provide jobs (well, independent contractor agreements) for all of us down the road, as long as they don’t shutter due to lack of users, like Washboard did, or succumb to an overwhelming tide of warranted criticism, like SketchFactor.
This is, of course, absurd, but it is a window into who Hillary Clinton's views on society and virtue, and as Lambert Strether pithily notes,  it ain't a pretty picture:
Exactly as with health care (“never, ever”), Clinton seeks to destroy education as a public good. Therefore, she seeks, like a Victorian, to sort the worthy creditors, from the unworthy (and to create another complex administrative apparatus filed with credentialed 10%-ers (her base (ka-ching)) to do the sorting for her.
Her statements on single payer mirror this, as does her comments on Sanders' tuition proposal, where she wanted to establish a whole new bureaucracy, and the attendant costs, and humiliation to the recipients.

Hillary Clinton in her teens supported Barry Goldwater.  She has described herself as a former "Goldwater Girl."

It looks like you can get the girl out of the Goldwater, but you can't get the Goldwater out of the girl.

I am so glad that I live in Maryland, where my vote does not count.

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