More Panicked Rabbits Trying To Free Up Resources

Like a magic trick, Obama pulls 7.7 billion, right out of his ass:

The Department of Education will send letters to 387,000 people they’ve identified as being eligible for a total and permanent disability discharge, a designation that allows federal student loan borrowers who can’t work because of a disability to have their loans forgiven. The borrowers identified by the Department won’t have to go through the typical application process for receiving a disability discharge, which requires sending in documented proof of their disability. Instead, the borrower will simply have to sign and return the completed application enclosed in the letter.

If every borrower identified by the Department decides to have his or her debt forgiven, the government will end up discharging more than $7.7 billion in debt, according to the Department.

“Americans with disabilities have a right to student loan relief,” Ted Mitchell, the undersecretary of education, said in a statement. “And we need to make it easier, not harder, for them to receive the benefits they are due.” About 179,000 of the borrowers identified by the Department are in default on their student loans, and of that group more than 100,000 are at risk of having their tax refunds or Social Security checks garnished to pay off the debt. Often borrowers losing out on these benefits aren’t even aware that they’re eligible for a disability discharge, said Persis Yu, the director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the National Consumer Law Center.

So to recap, many of these people are presently paying back their loans, and others will have the payments taken from money which the government is about to give them. But now they can just sign a letter, and all of that debt evaporates. To the rabbit, this is the normal state in nature, restored by their wisdom.

If you view resources as limited and understand that they can run out, this seems insane. Compounded with all the other wastes of resources that are speeding us toward a governmental collapse, it seems outright suicidal.

But rabbits don’t want the collapse. To the rabbits, a collapse of the government is akin to death, and they aren’t suicidal. They merely can’t wrap their heads around the idea that resources could run out, or that some sort of bad could come from that. Their amygdala has never had a neural pathway laid in it by an overspending of resources leading to a bad outcome. Until the bad outcome is experienced, they just can’t feel the bad outcome this type of wastefulness will produce.

That pathway will be laid, and after that I suspect it will be some time before the nation repeats this mistake.