Promise, made and kept
EDITOR: President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan is a promise made and a promise kept. One suggestion would be to make loan forgiveness contingent on a student’s grade performance.
I worked two jobs and paid my way through graduate school without ever taking a loan. Not everyone can do that.
As a student of economics, let no one tell you that this plan is inflationary; that is complete nonsense. The reason is quite simple. Since the pandemic, all student loan payments are suspended until 2023. The $10,000 up to $20,000 of loan forgiveness is during the existing repayment holiday.
In 2023, once the forgiveness moneys are tabulated, repayment will begin on all balances, for all remaining student loans. This is deflationary. As borrowers pay off their balances in 2023, that will be less income available for discretionary spending in the economy. The borrowers’ loan repayments go to balancing the budget and reducing the federal deficit. This is deflationary.
Right now, there is $1.75 trillion in student debt. The president’s plan only forgives about $300 billion. The remaining $1.45 trillion over time continues paying down the federal deficit, not including future interest. That is deflationary.
STEVEN J. GARCIA
Sebastopol
No one like Trump
EDITOR: Bob Proctor asks “why no other similarly situated billionaires have been subjected to the same scrutiny” as Donald Trump (“Weaponizing the law,” Letters, Aug. 27). The answer is simple: there is no “similarly situated” billionaire.
No other billionaire has taken an oath to “protect, preserve, and defend the U.S. Constitution” and proceeded to refuse to acknowledge a duly elected successor and strive to disrupt the formal acceptance of the vote by Congress. No other recent president (billionaire or not) has refused to separate himself from financial decisions regarding his personal wealth upon election and refused to make his tax returns available to the American public. No other president (billionaire or not) has taken with him valuable and top-secret documents when he left office and then repeatedly refused to return them.
The list goes on. Trump is not a victim. The evidence is clearly showing that Trump, a former president of our country, may have seriously violated his oath of office and the Constitution.
ANNE N. THOMAS
Fort Bragg
More and more guns
EDITOR: There will be more AR-15 rifles on the streets next year than this year. There will be more bullets fired next year, and there will be more year after year. This is basic business logic. As long as we have a successful, for-profit arms industry, there will be more sales each year, and guns do not wear out in a year. They can be destroyed in war, so that is another possible avenue for business success. Perhaps, the profit motive (greed by another name) is not a good basis for decisions in all cases. And the idea of continuous growth in a finite world is not a survival strategy.
BERNIE HOVDEN
Sebastopol
Developer-friendly plan
EDITOR: Almost without exception, the Sonoma Developmental Center plan is opposed by individuals and organizations. This should be a sign that something is wrong.
The county keeps pointing to the state as controlling the direction of the planning. Our state legislators chose not to do anything to improve the situation. This will have a massive impact on our valley, and it is wasting a great opportunity to make things better if it were not solely driven by what a developer would want.
Look at this as a wonderful opportunity to do something great rather than sticking to the general formula of developing a plan that would be appealing to a developer. Perhaps set up a nonprofit that would handle the project similar to what was done at the San Francisco Presidio.
All new housing should be affordable, as there is such a huge need for this, not only in the valley but in the entire state. The number of units should be dictated by what the area can broadly, comfortably absorb (water capacity, sewer capacity, road capacity, fire safety and so on).
JOE LIEBER
Sonoma
Graham’s riot worries
EDITOR: Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, believes there will be riots in the streets if Donald Trump is indicted for possession of classified documents. Graham indicates he believes that it was a biased decision to not prosecute Hillary Clinton for her email servers, as compared to Trump and his collection of classified documents.
I would remind Graham that James Comey, the former head of the FBI, did a thorough investigation of Clinton and found there was no intent on her part to create the mess that she did. Now we have Trump who purposely withheld around 300 classified documents and apparently misled the government, telling the government that he didn’t have them while he had them apparently strewn all over the place at his home in Florida.
But I wish to assure Graham that he needn’t worry. We are a nation of laws, and people believe in the right to a fair trial. This also means that once the facts come out, we won’t allow some mob to lynch Trump, although there may be a lot of chanting of “Lock him up!”
CARL MERNER
Holualoa, Hawaii
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