Victimhood: Modern America's most valuable commodity

Student Loans are the dumbest battleground in the Victim Wars

Have you heard? The Squad wants Joe Biden to use Obama’s “phone and pen” strategy to cancel something like a trillion dollars in college loans held by Americans. And in order to convince The Mushroom in Chief that this is a good idea, they’ve decided to employ a strategy that, until very recently would have been considered embarrasing and pathetic by most Americans, but which nowadays has the power to make one an unimpeachable witness for the Prosecution.

They’ve run to the hallowed halls of Social Media to delcare that they are victims.

Rashida Tlaib won the race to the microphones and passionately declared that she cannot find any way to pay off $70,000 in school loans despite making $174,000 a year. Not to be outdone, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whined that even though she receives the same $174,000 salary, for which sum she seems to spend most of her time tweeting, she too has been unable to pay off a mere $17,000 in outstanding college debt.

One wonders if standing up in front of the Nation you purport to lead, and over which you hold the “power of the purse”, and boldy declaring “I am terrible at managing my own personal finances” is a winning strategy for… well for anything. But then no one ever accused these women of being too smart for The Congress.

But as with most things The Squad does, the reality is even dumber than it at first appears. What they’re arguing is so much worse than the simple fact it reveals… that neither woman can figure out a way to fix a personal problem that they themselves have created. What’s worse is the naked condescension that is part and parcel of their argument… that if the self-evidently brilliant members of The Squad can’t do it, then the silly rubes over whom they rule cannot possibly figure out a way to succeed where the Squad cannot, and therefore need the Federal Government to step in on their behalf.

The problem for Tlaib and AOC is that there is at least one American who goes out and proves them wrong for three hours a day, five days a week. You’ve probably heard of Dave Ramsey, a folksy financial guru who has been teaching his radio listeners how to get out of debt and build generational wealth for 30 years.

The crux of Dave’s process is to pay off your debts fast, to avoid future debt of any kind, including credit cards and student loans, and to pay cash for everything. And while AOC and Tlaib spend their time assuring you that this is impossible, Dave’s listeners have been busy proving them wrong, literally every day, for decades.

As a regular feature of the show, Dave has listeners appear on the “debt free stage” once every hour to tell his nationwide audience how much they paid off, how fast, and at what income level. That’s three official “debt free” stories every day, and that’s not including the dozens of others who call in during the week to tell their own stoies about how they got debt-free. I’ll do the math for AOC and Tlaib, because I don’t trust them to do it themselves… that’s literally thousands of people unplugged from the debt Matrix every single year.

The Squad are correct that debt is a profound drag on people’s personal lives and on the economy as a whole… the question at hand is, what to do about it? Well, Dave Ramsey is doing something about it, improving America’s overall economic situation one U.S. debtor at a time… that’s a hell of a lot more than AOC or Tlaib have ever done.

Here’s a brief sample I wrote down listening to one week of shows…

Oregon Couple - paid off $250,000 in 5 years making $50K-$150K

Texas Couple (both teachers by the way) - paid off $186,000 in 4 years making $76K-$190K

Kentucky Couple (with 6 kids!) - paid off $157,000 in 3 years making $36K-$55k

AOC and Tliab should read those statistics and be embarrassed at their own inabaility to do what other Americans with nothing like the resources of a United States Congresscritter have been able to accomplish all on their own, even without being members of Congress or even Ivy League graduates.

Take particular note of that last couple. They paid off almost ten times the amount of debt AOC is whining about while making less than a third of her income and raising six kids. What’s AOC raising? I mean besides the National Debt, her own social media profile and a Beta boyfriend.

In this world there are two kinds of people… people who get things done and people who blame their failure to get things done on others. AOC should be embarrassed by the idea that she can’t pay off $17,000 making $174K. But she’s not, because she has decided that paying off her debts is an incovenience she should not have to suffer. Paying off her debt might force her to do things she doesn’t want to do, like defer her own personal gratification… maybe she’d have to get a cheaper car, or order avocado toast less often, or… gasp!… drink more affordable wine. But she doesn’t want to do any of that, she prefers to shirk her responsibilities while she lives high on the hog in D.C. and she’s decided that Government ought to step in and make that possible for her. And if they won’t, she’s going to blame her inability to live up to her responsibilities by claiming, in the style of our time, that she’s the victim of some nefarious system that has made it impossible for her to solve her own problems.

Which raises an important question… why is it that a Congressperson making six figures and with all the power of the Federal Government at her command can’t figure out how to pay her debts, but a couple in Kentucky with six kids and an income just barely above the median U.S. income can?

It’s not that she can’t, as the Kentucky couple has proven… it’s that she doesn’t want to. She’d much rather we did it for her.

It’s really as simple as that.

And rather than take responsibility for herself, she’s going to stand up in front of a camera and not only call herself a victim, but admit publicly that she can’t figure out her own personal finances, while she simultaneously holds a job that requires her to figure out the finances of an entire nation…