Amid all the Republican caterwauling and crocodile tearing over Biden’s decision forgive some student loan debts, one of their true concerns has just emerged: How we will get cannon fodder for our military if students can afford to go to college?
GOP Lawmaker Fears Reducing Student Debt Will Keep Poor Kids From Joining Military
Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) lamented Thursday on Twitter that relieving crushing debt for low-income Americans paying off student loans could reduce the number of people who join the military to fund their higher education.
“Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments,” he wrote.
Student debt as a military recruitment tool. What next: Bring back debtor’s prisons?
HuffPost collected some twitter responses. Here are just a few:
And some more that I found with the original tweet:
There are some tweets (or twits) who point out that the military was traditionally a way for the poor to get out of poverty, but that’s not the reason Banks is upset. And then there’s this one, which really appeals to me as a student of religious history:
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Back in the Civil War, the rich could pay someone to be drafted in their place, which led to riots in New York City. Banks’s inadvertent revelation won’t go that far, but it’s still good fodder for another Dem ad.