Tucker Carlson explains how student debt is shaping basic life decisions for Americans and says we need to make colleges responsible for loans that default.
Transcript
Tucker Carlson: The student loan bubble has grown to more than 1.6 trillion. And that’s not just an economic burden for young people, the ones who have to pay the loans off, those loans are shaping the basic life decisions they make and changing our society. According to a new study from Lend Key Technologies, about a third of adults between the ages of 18 and 34 said they would consider postponing marriage until they’d paid off their student loans.
One third also said that student debt would influence their choice of spouses. The survey didn’t ask young adults about having children, but you know exactly what it would have found. For young people debts mean dreams delayed or destroyed. It means families aren’t formed. That’s the kind of thing conservatives care about. That’s why they exist, to fix problems like that.
This is the party of family values, keep in mind. And yet, at this very moment, families are disappearing. Why? Well, we know why. It’s not an unfixable problem. It’s not a natural disaster. It’s not a matter of culture or values. It’s an economic problem that people caused.
Congress is pumping tens of billions of dollars every year into student loans. Those loans, in the end, don’t help the students. They enrich wealthy colleges, and they’re overpaid administrators who hate you, and then who hike tuition by 6% every year. This is hurting the country badly, and we don’t have to tolerate it.
We could change the law in all kinds of ways. We can make colleges responsible for loans that default, like every other beneficiary of loans, they could cosign. We could restrict student loans to schools that let tuition rise too quickly.
If you’re ripping off kids, we’re not going to give you a federally backed loans. You can build another climbing wall, or pay the Minister of Diversity 400 grand a year. We could borrow useless programs only impoverish kids.
So far, we haven’t done any of that. And one of the main reasons is the Republican Party hasn’t tried to do any of that. And that’s one of the main reasons the Democratic Party, which is insane and getting crazier, still has a shot to win. They’re not doing anything about student loans, but they’re talking about them. Conservatives should talk about them, too. They’re preventing families from forming. We should care.
