A Billionaire Takes A Bullet

     Last week a lucky group of students dodged a bullet. They were saved from a bullet that was aimed at them because a generous, some would say heroic,  man stood in front of them and took the bullet for them.

     I’m talking of course about Robert F. Smith, the philanthropic billionaire who intercepted the killer college  debt , 10 to 40 million dollars worth, that would have hit hundreds of young African American graduates of Morehouse  College soon after their graduation ceremony.

       How very fortunate for those several hundred young men who by chance  attended a college that, their very year of graduation, happened to invite a commencement speaker who  decided to pay off the loans of every graduating student of that class.
         But only the loans of those students in that class.
       How very unfortunate for the million upon millions of college  graduates who happened not to have been members of that particular class in  that particular  school,  the past, present, and future young people who have been and will be crushed by student debt,  many of them too financially debilitated to move out of their parents’ houses for years, let alone get married, buy a house of their own, or start a family.
     However it’s not only student debt that’s economically crippling college graduates. It’s underemployment and low wages in the workplace. Forty-one percent of this year’s college graduates will enter the work force into jobs for which they are over-qualified and that pay hourly wages that may not cover the cost of independent living .let alone student loan payments. ​

       True, unemployment in this country is currently low, but so are wages. But at least one small class of 2019 graduates won't have the ball and chain of student debt to drag along with them. Unlike the others.

    Now, I am a believer of doing what one can, when one can,  for whomever one can, and I know that no one person can save every star fish of the millions struggling on the beach.

     Still, one good-hearted billionaire rescuing one class of college graduates by paying off their loans no more solves the student debt crisis in this country than one brave person saving a few people by stepping into the path of a gunman solves the problem of mass shootings in this country.
     Both problems need legislation, and - as has been pointed out in OpEd pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post (see references below) - far better than having a philanthropic billionaire occasionally giving a random gift of charity to some lucky few recipients would be for all the super rich members of our society, instead of  paying nothing to almost nothing in taxes because of our loopholes-for-the-super-rich-laden tax laws, pay an equitable share in taxes that could then be used for  government-subsidized tuition assistance to make an education affordable for all the young starfish from sea to shining sea.

References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/opinion/morehouse-college-debt.html

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/underemployment-for-recent-grads-worse-today-than-in-early-2000-s-180429491.html

https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/why-robert-f-smiths-pledge-to-pay-off-morehouse-loans-is-a-turning-point-for-colleges-and-the-billionaires-that-support-them-2019-05-22?link=MW_latest_news

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7058019/Morehouse-College-students-loans-paid-billionaire-Robert-F-Smith-speak-out.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490

https://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20190522/editorial-billionaires-gift-tackles-student-debt