Class Warfare

The Democrats today are dividing Americans into two classes, but they aren't the classes you think. Not strictly so, anyway.

It's not Democrat and Republican, left and right, blue and red, liberal and conservative, progressive and MAGA. It's not really the haves and the have-nots, the elites and the commoners, the one percent and the lower class, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the degreed and the non-degreed, white collar and blue collar, the rich and the poor.

No, the classes the Democrats are dividing us all into cross some of those lines, drawing into each of these two classes some folks from either side of those more traditional divides.

The classes the Democrats are dividing us into today are the Sharks and the Remora.

The Sharks may be those people on Shark Tank, successful, rich entrepreneurs ruthlessly striking deals to get even richer. But they also include teachers, handymen, consultants, veterinarians, physical therapists, bank tellers, hairdressers, firefighters, policemen, auto mechanics, landscapers, fry cooks, painters, and plumbers. A good many of them are immigrants, many of whom may have originally come here illegally, believe it or not.

By Sharks, I don't mean ruthless, greedy, Type-A people, though many of them are Sharks. I mean people who understand that you eat what you kill. That you and you alone are responsible for providing for yourself. That, like a shark, you hunt for your own food, provide for your own sustenance, don't expect anyone to give you anything. And that expect the government to get the hell out of their way and let them do it, and let them keep what they kill.

Remora, in case you're not familiar with them, are bottom-feeding suckers. Now, they serve a purpose in the whole oceanic eco-system, as cleaners. They suck onto the sharks and get a free ride, and clean up after them, eating what the sharks discard. The sharks, for the most part, leave them alone, because, for the most part, the remora are fairly unobtrusive.

Enter the Democrats, who would seek to upset the entire eco-system. They're doing everything in their power to create a larger, and permanent, Remora class. When the government shut down the economy due to covid - which will forever rank in history as the single most stupid decision humankind ever collectively made - Democrats and Republicans alike made all kinds of aid available as accommodation for those adversely affected economically by the shutdown. PPP loans, extended unemployment benefits, student loan payment pauses, etc.

Once the economy rebounded, though, the Democrats sought to extend those benefits. They kept the unemployment benefits going far longer than was necessary, in order to keep unemployment high, businesses suffering, and the economy sputtering, in order to hurt Donald Trump's chances at re-election in 2020. In Republican-run states, the jobless benefits were terminated early, and job growth in those states took off much faster than in Democrat-run states, where the benefits were extended. The Democrats didn't care if their states' economies suffered; there was a Bad Orange Man to defeat!

The Democrats also extended the pause on repayment of student loans, long after unemployment returned to pre-pandemic levels. Why? To buy the youth vote in the 2022 mid-terms. See, the Dems are taking a beating in the polls, what with a porous southern border, soaring crime (especially in Dem-run cities), skyrocketing inflation, horrendous foreign policy, and a President who can't think straight. So, even though everyone who wants a job now has a job (and there are still more job openings than there are available people to fill them), people who owe money on student debt aren't being required to pay it back until (drum roll, please) after the mid-term elections.

Now, Joe Biden, in utter defiance of the Constitution that he has used so often to wipe his diarrhetic arse, has, without the requisite Congressional approval, authorized the "forgiveness" of $10,000 of student loan debt for anybody who makes, or whose parents make, $125,000 a year individual or $250,000 combined. (FYI, a combined income of $250,000 is pretty darn near the top 5% of income earners in the U.S.) If that person qualified for a Pell Grant when they went to college, they can double down and get $20,000.

Get this: the current maximum amount for a Pell Grant is $6,895. So, if you qualified for the maximum amount (note that this is this year's maximum; if you were in school one to four years ago, the maximum was lower), you can parlay that $6,895 into $10,000 of additional student loan forgiveness. That's not a bad arbitrage, and proof positive that Joe Biden flunked every math class he ever took. But it gets better. The minimum Pell Grant amount is $650. In its sheer and utter brilliance, Biden's plan stipulates that if you got any Pell Grant, in any amount, you get the full extra $10,000 in student loan forgiveness. So, you can go full-on arbitrageur and turn $650 into a cool $10k.

Brilliant, Joe.

Now, the Democrats would argue that the dollar amount of the Pell Grant doesn't matter; if you were poor enough to qualify for one, you ought to get the additional student loan forgiveness. The problem with that argument is this: your parents might have been relatively poor, such that you got a small Pell Grant, sure. Now, you've finished your degree, and you're making a cool $120k a year. Your spouse is making the same coin, putting the two of you near the top 5% of the income scale. If you had college-age kids today, they wouldn't come anywhere close to qualifying for grant money. Yet you still get that extra $10k. And who pays for it? The Sharks - the plumbers, painters, landscapers, and fry cooks. People who make a hell of a lot less than $120,000 a year.

Some Remora are not to blame for being what they are. They simply believe they're taking advantage of something the government is legitimately offering them - just like a Shark will deduct his mortgage interest from his income taxes, assuming he itemizes deductions. (I'm using male pronouns here. If you don't like it - well, my pronouns are she/it. Meaning, if you can't figure out my gender without asking my pronouns, you don't know she/it.) And it's the government's fault, really, for offering all of these handouts, for creating and expanding the Remora class to begin with.

But the difference between the mortgage interest deduction and student loan forgiveness (well, one difference, anyway) is that student loan forgiveness isn't actually forgiveness at all. See, the debt isn't being forgiven, it's being PAID. Who's paying? The Federal government. Who funds the Federal government? The taxpayer. In other words, it's a massive transfer of wealth, from the Remora class to the Sharks. Those of us who eat what we kill - from the fry cook who didn't go to college; to me, the guy who was a CEO and also went to college on student loans, but paid his off like he was obligated to - are stuck paying for this criminally stupid scheme.

Welcome to Joe Biden's America.

Maybe some of these hapless, unwitting Remora never do figure out that they're bottom-feeding suckers. Maybe they never do realize that they're living off the Sharks, that their smack-on-the-forehead, well-golly-will-ya-look-at-what-I-found-in-my-pocket good fortune came at the expense of someone else's initiative, pluck, and labor.

In other words, maybe they're just that stupid.

Others do figure it out, however. They may start out not realizing it, but pretty soon they do. And you know what? They don't care. Because they have no incentive to be a Shark. They've been conditioned to be bottom-feeding suckers, living off the efforts of others. They've been conditioned to be a Remora.

But it's the rest of the Remora class that are the most insidious. These are the ones that know exactly what they're doing from the get. It's their goal to be a Remora. It's their intent to never be Sharks. Oh, they're smart enough - most anyone is. They're capable of the work - most everyone is. No, for them, the Remora life is a grift.

An excellent example of this type of Remora is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You know her as AOC. You probably think she's dumb, because she says really dumb things. She's not dumb. She doesn't know much; that's true. Her grasp of things like education, economics, energy, foreign policy, is as weak as a Joe Biden air-handshake. But she's smart. Smart enough to play the system.

Smart enough to play you.

She got a degree from a pretty prestigious private college; never mind that she didn't learn much, except how to tend bar and how to dance. She then got herself elected to Congress by promising free stuff to poor people - in other words, by offering to make Remora out of them. Her current income is definitely Shark-worthy. But she's no Shark.

See, she doesn't work for it. Never sponsored a bill. Hell, she showed up at a protest, pretended to be arrested, and had to fake getting handcuffed. She's got the best benefits going. She gets enough in donations to buy fancy designer dresses, plaster them with Socialist slogans, and wear them to tony society balls that you and I couldn't get an invitation to no matter who we bribed.

Think she's not smart? On her website, she sells kitsch with anti-capitalism slogans. SELLS it, for money. And people buy that shit. Let that sink in.

And guess what? Remember that prestigious college she went to? How did she fund it? That's right, student loans. And guess what?

The Sharks are gonna pay off $10,000 of those loans for our favorite professional Remora.

The problem with all three types of Remora - the unwitting buffoon Remora; the reluctant-at-first Remora who eventually figure it out, but remain Remora; and the professional grifter Remora - is that they have zero incentive to stop being Remora, and become Sharks. The Democrats give them every reason to permanently remain in the Remora class, and to forego the opportunity to move into the Shark class.

For it is an opportunity: to break the chains of dependency, become your own person, enjoy the pride and satisfaction of knowing you made your own way in the world; and, more than anything, to have unlimited upside, being able to go as far as your brains, your drive, your willingness to work hard will take you. And to do it all honestly, with integrity.

But at the same time the Democrats are creating more and more incentives for people to become and remain Remora, they are discouraging people from becoming and remaining Sharks. By increasingly burdening the Sharks with these inequitable wealth transfers, disincentivizing hard work, increasing taxes on individual initiative, they are discouraging expansion of the Shark class.

So the Democrats are upsetting the balance of nature, by increasing the number of Remora in the eco-system relative to the number of Sharks. What's the outcome when that happens in nature?

Well, scientists (the real ones, not the guys like Tony Fauci) are already concerned about how well the Remora are gonna fare long-term, because in the world's oceans, sharks are becoming endangered.

So, too, in the U.S. (and in Canada, and Australia), Sharks are becoming endangered. And that endangers the Remora. Because when there aren't enough Sharks for the Remora to suck off of - or, when the Sharks don't collectively have enough left to feed all the Remora what they think (or have been led to believe) they're entitled to, the Remora will begin to die off.

Or - and this will work in my analogy; it wouldn't work in the ocean - they'll figure out that they'll have to become Sharks to survive. They'll figure out that it's time to say a big, hearty FU to the Democrats, and vote in leaders who will stop creating incentives to become Remora, and start creating incentives to become Sharks. Leaders who will stop taking from the Sharks and giving to the Remora.

Now, there's another, quicker path to this equilibrium, and I offer it for consideration by all my fellow Sharks.

We don't have to wait for the Remora class to get hungry, and decide they've had enough, that it's high time they become Sharks.

See, we're the effing apex predators here, am I right? We can do what some species of sharks do in the ocean. Namely ...

We can eat the Remora.

Think about it.