Tag: occ

If there’s been one policy idea that President Brick Tamland has been trying to get off the ground, it’s student loan debt forgiveness. Even after the Supreme Court smacked it down, our boy Brick has continued to push for it. Recently, he rolled out new initiatives to help those with student loan debt to the tune of a measly $7.7 billion. In spite of the fact the Supreme Court said he doesn’t have the power to do it, as Nancy Pelosi noted.

But that’s not what this piece is about.

When announcing these new initiatives, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said the following:

We must continue to protect borrowers from predatory institutions—and work toward a higher education system that is affordable to students and taxpayers.

Hmmm…now, where have I heard the term “predatory” used before…oh, yeah, the mortgage bank crisis!

Without going into the gory details, I was in the mortgage industry when the shit hit the fan. Through government fuck-ups disguised as helping people, lenders skirting the law to make sales, house-flippers whose only motivation was to make a quick buck, and borrowers being dumber than a bag of hammers about Economics 101 for Dummies, the mortgage industry was in a world of hurt. Naturally, people started looking for any kind of help.

Enter Big Daddy Government! They would fix the problem by going after the easiest of targets: the lenders themselves. Now, I’m not saying all of the lenders were working above board and even some of the more reputable ones had hinky loan terms that you would need to be careful to read and understand before signing on the dotted line. But speaking from what I saw more often than not, the problems blamed solely on the banks were (or at least should have been) a shared responsibility.

That’s one of the reasons I didn’t like “The Big Short” as much as everyone else did. In an attempt to create an entertaining movie-going experience, it left out a LOT of shady shit and utter incompetence. And that’s just within the federal government!

Anyway, the point is people looked to the government to help bring those predatory lenders to heel, and the government responded by…expanding itself. Up until the mortgage crisis, mortgage complaints fell under the umbrella of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. But those DC galaxy-brain thinkers didn’t think it was enough to make every mortgage bank jump through the OCC’s hoops, so they created a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, thanks in part to Chief Running Mouth, Elizabeth Warren.

And having dealt with them on numerous occasions, we were better off with just the OCC. Of course, we would be even better off with monkeys and typewriters, but that’s neither here nor there.

At this point, you might be wondering what in the Wide World of Fuck this has to do with student loan debt. It’s all in the approach. Since Leftists had success in convincing people the mortgage loans they signed their names to were all a part of the evil cabal of Big Banking, they’re trying the same thing with student loan debt. They’re even using the same language. On the plus side, it’s one of the rare times Leftists actually recycle, so yay, I guess.

If the Social Media Platform Known As Twitter is any indication, this tactic is working again. Young adults who know there are 90 gajillion genders but think 2 + 2 equals potato (hat tip to Simon Miller for that turn of a phrase, by the way) are being allowed to straddle the line between being competence and incompetence simultaneously. You know, just like Kamala Harris. And invariably, they’re going to get what they want because Leftists are never ones to let a crisis (especially one of their own creation) go to waste.

Others have astutely pointed out President Tamland’s student loan forgiveness is a big gift to the banks who lent the money in the first place, which it most certainly is. And others have also pointed out the loan isn’t forgiven so much as being pushed onto other people. This is also correct. But what I don’t see too many people talking about is what the next step could be.

And having seen this shit play out before, I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s next.

I see this playing out in one of two ways. First, some DC douchebag with more vices than brains may try to put student loan debt under the umbrella of the CFPB. In a demented kind of way, this makes sense. After all, the CFPB is charged with holding big banks accountable for predatory loan practices (even if they don’t understand regular loan practices), so it’s not that much of a leap to suggest they devote a portion of their efforts on student loans.

Second, and the one I think is more likely, some DC douchebag is going to suggest the creation of a brand new federal agency like the CFPB, but with a focus on student loan practices. Remember, one of my Immutable Laws of Life is a bureaucracy’s sole purpose is to find ways to make itself more expansive and incapable of being removed. So, what’s to say a CFPB II: Electric Boogaloo is out of the question?

I mean, aside from me, of course.

In either case, expect the federal government to get more involved with fucking up student loans in the near future. Just try to act surprised when it happens.