It is difficult to convey a brilliant insight in less than 2,000 words, but Victor David Hanson has done it. In a brief essay published last week, Hanson said it is inaccurate to compare our declining American civilization to the fall of the Roman Empire. In truth, Hanson argued, our nations is becoming like medieval Europe.
Like today's America, Hanson points out, medieval Europe could boast some fine universities where the sum of human knowledge increased. But the universities of that day, like our modern American universities, had strict speech codes. The sun revolved around the earth, and woe to any medieval scholar who argued otherwise. And today of course professors are permitted to express only one point of view on important global issues like climate change.
Humanist scholars of medieval times "wrote esoteric treatises than no one read," Hanson writes. "These works were sort of like the incomprehensible 'theory' articles of university humanities professors who are up for tenure."
Hanson definitely got that right. Not to mention the 10,000 law review articles that law professors and their students publish every year even as the core principles of our legal system disintegrate.
In my view, Hanson's most trenchant comparison between contemporary America and medieval Europe relates to the economy. Today, as Hanson notes, one fifth of Americans own absolutely nothing or have negative worth, much like medieval serfs. In fact, 18 percent of adult Americans have student-loan debt, which they are permitted to work off by donating a percentage of their income to the government over 20 or 25 years--just like peasants.
Indeed, America becomes more like medieval society with each passing day. The middle class--once the glory of liberal democracy--gets smaller every year. The nation's elites fly in private jets, work in fortress-like offices, and are protected by private security agencies; they are truly lords and barons surrounded by modern-day moats. Their kids go to the best private schools. And the elites do a good job of protecting their income from taxes.
Meanwhile the rest of us ride the subway or commute to work on crumbling freeways. We pay taxes at a higher rate than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and we send our kids to mediocre schools. Defined-benefit retirement plans are fast disappearing, and we put our puny savings into the stock market because the elite have declared that we can earn nothing on our savings if we invest anywhere else.
Everywhere, the non-elites are getting poorer, but the slide into serfdom is most evident in rural America. In my own hometown of Anadarko, Oklahoma, the little family shops and stores of my childhood are all empty and boarded up. If you want to buy something--almost anything at all--you must go to Walmart. Hundreds of houses have been abandoned, including the one I lived in as a kindergarten child. Drug addiction and suicide are up; decent jobs have disappeared.
Americans know in their hearts that our slide into medievalism will accelerate after the national election unless our economy is radically restructured. Let us hope President Trump can do what he promised he would do to restore jobs to middle-class and working-class Americans.
References
Victor David Hanson. Medieval America, Town Hall, October 13, 2016. Available at http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2016/10/13/medieval-america-n2231213http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2016/10/13/medieval-america-n2231213
Showing posts with label serfs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label serfs. Show all posts
Sunday, October 16, 2016
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
The New American Serfs: Student-Loan Debtors in the Federal Income Contingent Repayment Plan
Slavery in the United States ended
with the Civil War, but slavery in another form lived on. Slavery was replaced by a new kind of bondage,
whereby tenant farmers and share croppers basically became serfs to their
landlords and were as bound to them as if they were still human chattel. The age of the share cropper and the tenant
farmer did not end until the Great Depression, when the rural poor fled the
land and migrated to the cities or to California.
But those days are over, right? No
one in the United States is a slave or an indentured servant in the 21st
century.
Sadly, our national government has
created a new form of bondage, which it imposes on college students who
participated in the federal student loan program but can’t pay back their
loans. Some of these former students are
burdened with student-loan obligations for decades--hounded by the loans they
cannot repay and the accumulating interest on their debt. Some of them have
become true indentured servants--bound to pay a portion of their income to
their federal student-loan creditors for a majority of their working lives.
The Disturbing Case
of In re Stevenson
If you think I have overstated my
case, you should read In re Stevenson
(2011), a recent decision by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Massachusetts. Janice
Stevens took out two student loans in 1983 to obtain additional education beyond
her bachelor’s degree. She took out a third loan in 1987 and another in 1992. By
2008, when she filed for bankruptcy, Ms. Stevenson was in her mid-50s, and her
total indebtedness was approximately $112,000, including accrued interests and
costs.
Ms. Stevens filed an adversary
proceeding in bankruptcy court, seeking to have her student loans discharged on
the grounds of undue hardship. Most
people would think she had a pretty good case. Although she had held good jobs over
the years, she had suffered periods of joblessness and homelessness and had sometimes
lived in homeless shelters. In addition, Ms. Stevenson had health issues--back
problems, high blood pressure and an autoimmune disease that required her to
take medicine.
During the bankruptcy proceedings,
Ms. Stevenson held a part-time job at Walgreens, earning less than $500 a
month. She supplemented her meager income with unemployment checks, which were
scheduled to terminate in a matter of months.
She also received a monthly subsidy from the State of Massachusetts to
help her pay her rent.
In spite of Ms. Stevenson’s bleak
economic circumstances, Judge Joan Feeney ruled that her student loans were not
dischargeable in bankruptcy. Judge Feeney concluded that Ms. Stevenson should
continue paying her loans through the federal government’s Income Contingency
Repayment Plan (ICRP), whereby she would pay a percentage of her income toward paying
down her loans for a period of 25 years.
At the end of the 25 year period, any remaining balance would be forgiven.
Did Judge Feeney Make
Ms. Stevenson an Indentured Servant?
When she came into bankruptcy
court, Ms. Stevens had unpaid student loans stretching back to 1983. Instead of
discharging her debt based on undue hardship, Judge Feeney concluded that Ms.
Stevenson should participate in a federal repayment program that would obligate
her to pay a percentage of her income toward her debt for 25 years.
If Ms. Stevenson goes on the ICRP, she will be nearly 80 years old when her payment obligations cease. By that time she will have been burdened with
student-loan debt for well over half a century.
Solutions?
It seems to me that the Income
Contingent Repayment Plan, which Judge Feeney endorsed for Janice Stevenson, is
nothing more than a modern version of indentured servitude, whereby student-loan
debtors like Ms. Stevenson pay a portion of her income to student-loan creditors
for the balance of her working lives.
The federal student loan program is
out of control, and the Income Contingency Repayment Plan is making life harder
for overburdened student-loan debtors, not easier.
Congress needs to do two things. First,
it should amend the bankruptcy laws to allow insolvent student-loan debtors to
discharge their debts in bankruptcy just like any other overburdened debtor.
Second, Congress should pass
legislation abolishing the ICRP option for stressed out student-loan debtors.
People who are insolvent deserve the fresh start that bankruptcy is designed to
give them. They don’t deserve to be saddled with a 25-year repayment plan that
will cripple them financially for the rest of their working lives.
References
In re Stevenson,
463 B.R. 586 (Bkrtcy. D. Mass. 2011).
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