Aaaaaand … she’s not doing a great job of it. On Wednesday, Warren tried defending the student-loan payoff by endorsing trickle-down economics — and a particularly dumb version of it.

Yesterday, Warren demonstrated her grasp of economics by comparing current dollars to 1964 dollars in this profoundly dumb argument (via Twitchy):

Senator McConnell graduated from a school that cost $330 a year. Today it costs over $12,000. McConnell has done nothing to fix it — and is irate that the President is stepping up to help millions of working Americans drowning in debt. He can spare us the lectures on fairness.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) August 25, 2022

This argument fails in at least two ways. First off, you don’t compare costs between points 58 years apart without accounting for inflation. That which cost $330 in 1964 — when McConnell graduated with a BA from the University of Louisville — would now cost $3,154 in 2022 dollars. That’s how one compares cost growth, as people should understand now more than ever in this inflationary environment.

But that still leaves a pretty stark comparison. College is four times more expensive than it was 58 years ago even accounting for inflation. But why? In some cases, it’s because colleges and universities spend a lot of money pandering to politicians who grease their wheels. Remember how much Warren got paid for delivering two lectures at Harvard, for instance?

You made $430,000 lecturing at Harvard & have the nerve to question why college costs $12,000 today? pic.twitter.com/Y7mmt7nF5z

— TheRightWingM 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@TheRightWingM) August 25, 2022

PolitiFact admitted that point while attempting to defend this wheel-greasing by painting Warren as also being paid to be a “campus leader.” The truth, though, is that she only gave two lectures in those two semesters for more than the POTUS makes in a year:

Harvard Law School declined to comment, but the university pays professors more than most research universities, with the average salary for full-time professors being $226,394 in 2017, $203,699 in 2011 and $194,136 in 2010, per the Chronicle of Higher Education. Recent tax filings show that Warren’s husband, also a Harvard law professor, earned $402,897 in 2018.

According to an archived version of Harvard Law School’s course catalog, Warren taught one class on empirical analysis during the 2010 spring semester, and local and university news reports indicate that she also taught another class on contracts during the 2011 fall semester.

That’s a lot of money that could have covered several student’s entire three-year law-school tuition bill,  even at Harvard. Instead, Warren’s sinecure stuffed money in her pocket as she ascended the political ranks, first as an advisor to Barack Obama and then as a politician in her own right. Harvard wasn’t paying her to be a “campus leader”; they were investing in Warren as a way to protect the student-loan gravy train.

That brings us to the question of how college tuitions got so much higher from the 1964 level Warren cites. It’s not all from massive spending on politicians, and not even all because of the other millions Academia spends on lobbying efforts. In fact, we can trace it to the year after Mitch McConnell’s BA. Warren lands her argument rather foolishly at almost the exact fulcrum of real problem — the Federal Family Education Loan program, passed by Congress in 1965. At first a program targeted only at the disadvantaged, it didn’t take long for it to be broadened to practically everyone and anyone:

The Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program, also known as the guaranteed loan program, was created in the Higher Education Act of 1965. The 1965 legislation also created the Federal Insured Student Loan (FISL) Program, which provided federal insurance for loans. The FISL was eventually phased out. The Higher Education Act Amendments of 1992 created a new generic name, Federal Family Education Loans, for the major forms of federal student loans.¹⁴ Although the FFEL student loan program was a federal program, it was mostly administered through state or private nonprofit agencies called guaranty agencies.

Banks were initially reluctant to participate in the guaranteed loan program. Congress encouraged participation by covering a large percentage of any losses through loan guarantees. When banks were still reluctant to join the program, Congress created a government-sponsored enterprise—the Student Loan Marketing Association (known as SLMA or Sallie Mae)—as a secondary market for guaranteed student loans.¹⁵

Over time, the focus in the federal loan program shifted toward providing more benefits for middle-income students. In the 1992 Higher Education Act, among other changes Congress created the unsubsidized loan program. This allowed students of any income level to get federally guaranteed student loans.¹⁶

The Student Loan Reform Act of 1993 significantly changed the student loan landscape by creating a new Federal Direct Loan Program.¹⁷ In the Direct Loan Program, the government through the Department of Education (the Department) directly originates student loans.

Starting in 1965 but really accelerating in the late 1970s, Congress dumped tons of cash as incentives into the higher-education markets. That greatly increased demand, which then led colleges and universities to escalate tuitions and other costs. Further government interventions in the higher-education market tied to those subsidies created mandates that required those schools to expand administrators, raising indirect costs substantially for students. By the early 1990s, the federal government abandoned all of the pretense of the original equity-orientation of the FFEL program and made the student-loan program into a massive subsidy of Academia.

The problem now, however, is that the model doesn’t work. The college education received by the students doesn’t boost earning potential high enough to justify its costs, thanks to decades of market distortion by now-monopolized federal student loan programs. When “thousands” of Laurence Tribe’s Harvard graduates are trapped by their student debt, it’s evidence of failure — and worse than that, of exploitation of both students and taxpayers by these same colleges and universities. If a for-profit university routinely left students in this position, Warren and her ilk would demand that the government shut them down and prosecute the operators for fraud. So why isn’t Warren doing that with today’s colleges and universities??

Warren wants Biden to bail out these students not out of a sense of justice, but to postpone that reckoning. She recognizes that the rational argument for this situation isn’t debt forgiveness but the ending of all federal student loan programs and an end to Academia’s gravy train. Warren’s fighting on behalf of the fraud, not against it. And because she is, the only arguments she can make are stupid and economically incompetent arguments … not to mention grotesquely hypocritical arguments to boot.