Herschel Walker Admits Student Loan Forgiveness Already Stimulating Economy

People are already buying things he disapproves of and they haven't even gotten it yet!

During a rally on Sunday, Herschel Walker said a lot of ridiculous things. He promised to protect all the Martians in Georgia, for one. He suggested that women were literally made from men's ribs for another.

But he did make one good point — though not on purpose.

“Herschel said he read that people who received student loan forgiveness took the money and “were out there buying video games, they were going on vacation, they was gambling, they were drinking booze.””

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦) 1667772648 

We're still a couple months away from student loan forgiveness happening, but Walker claims people are already out there, taking their student loan forgiveness money, and “were out there buying video games, they were going on vacation, they was gambling, they were drinking booze.”

To be clear, that's not even sort of how student loan forgiveness is going to work. No one is handing out any checks, just a portion of the debt is being forgiven.

This was clearly meant to provoke outrage. "Oh no! These people are going to take this money they are saving and spend it on things we think are bad!" — as if somehow having student loans hanging over their head was somehow forcing people to only ever spend their money on things Herschel Walker and other Republicans think are good and moral.

This is a very common meme on the Right. Louie Gohmert famously accused SNAP recipients of eating all of the king crab legs on the dime of taxpayers who themselves were unable to afford to eat king crab legs. Ronald Reagan loved to talk about "' strapping young buck[s] ' using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store." Chuck Grassley justified the estate tax by saying it rewarded people who invest their money “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

Yes, and nothing says rich people are responsible with their money like the existence of $1,200 Hermés dog toy boxes. 

As much as I may make fun of people spending their money on absurdly expensive things (I worked in luxury retail for a long time — it's an outlet!), as horrified as I am by the income inequality in this country, I can't actually fathom what people choose to spend their money on determining for me the worthiness of any policy or program.

Even if someone was like "I'm gonna take all of this money I'm saving by not having to pay my student loans and buy guns and Vera Bradley purses and Anne Geddes prints of babies dressed up as fruit and SO MUCH cottage cheese," that would not make me oppose student loan forgiveness. I would certainly be worried about however many guns they were able to buy at once as well as their level of taste, but those are separate issues.

The thing is, if true, this is actually really good news! Part of the reason for student loan forgiveness is that it is meant to be an economic stimulus. We want people to buy things, we want them to go on vacation, because that pumps that money back into the economy. The economy stalls when people are afraid to spend money. Duh.

By going out and spending money, they are giving that money to other people, who then can go and spend that money themselves elsewhere and so on and so on. If people held onto all of their money and only spent it on things Herschel Walker would personally approve of, the economy would come to a grinding halt.

Despite all of the doom and gloom talk about the economy, there have been a number of indicators that our economy is actually headed in a healthy direction, such as the fact that Black and Latino homeownership spiked dramatically after the pandemic stimulus programs. That puts us closer to closing the racial wealth gap. Homeownership is also very much linked to economic stability. 

Things may not be perfect now, but we're setting ourselves up for success in the long run. Republicans aren't actually going to be able to do anything to curb inflation, but they will put into motion policies that will set us up for long-term failure. Especially if any of them is half as confused about how the economy works as Herschel Walker and his 12 personalities are. 

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