United States President Joe Biden announced a $300 billion dollar college debt relief plan last week. Responses from certain sectors of the American right to the program were expectedly critical.
Conservative commentator Matt Walsh had this to say on Twitter:
“There is no such thing as student loan forgiveness. There is only student loan transferral, where the debt is transferred from the person who took out the loan to someone else who did not take out the loan.”
The Daily Wire podcast host followed up the statement on Instagram:
“Yes, you were scammed out when you took out your student loans. You got suckered. You bought a worthless thing for way too much money. That’s true. But making someone else pay for your mistakes is a greater injustice. It sucks that you have the debt but it is your debt. Not mine.”
With the US midterm elections just over three months away, Biden’s college debt relief plan is poised to be a key, polarizing issue between Republican and Democrat congressional candidates.
In the State of Israel, however, subsidization of tuition for public universities has always been the standard, uncontroversial policy. Tuition at Israel’s nine public universities is kept at 10,000 shekels (roughly $3,000) a year with students who have completed their compulsory military service getting a further 90% public discount on their first year. Israel’s private universities are forced to compete with these subsidized tuitions, charging an average tuition of 35,000 shekels a year.
This difference in cultural attitudes towards college tuition forgiveness or subsidization runs beyond just college and through nearly all social programs. Healthcare is one of the major issues of US politics, with the backlash against “Obamacare” credited as a major reason for the Republican resurgence between 2010 and 2016. Universal healthcare is considered a fringe position in the United States. But in Israel, however, universal healthcare has been public policy since the 1994 National Health Insurance Law – a law that passed uncontroversially and remains widely popular and politically unchallenged.
Why is it that these kinds of social programs, from college tuition to health insurance, are so controversial, divisive, and often dysfunctionally executed in the United States while nearly identical programs are anything but in Israel?
The answer has more to do with social factors than economic concerns. Despite what commentators like Walsh would insinuate, these programs would not necessarily create a greater taxpayer burden. The money from these programs does not have to be, and perhaps should not be, new spending but rather reallocated spending from less important public expenditures.
Conservatives like Walsh are not truly worried about the economic burden but rather the social implications of these programs. This is the core of the difference, the two things that Israel has that the United States does not; social and moral fabric.
In Israel, there is a public will to collectively guarantee one another’s education and health, among other things, because of the high degree of social and moral fabric. There is a feeling of camaraderie between Israeli citizens and common trust that the decisions made by each individual will be right and good. In the United States, a nation of rampant individualism and materialism, of Bowling Alone, of 47.70 per 100,000 crime rates and 36.2% obesity rates, there is no such camaraderie or trust. Americans do not want to collectively guarantee one another’s education or health because they do not exist as a collective in any way and do not trust one another to make good or moral decisions.
When Rav Zvi Yehuda HaKohen Kook would reference the United States, he made it a point to split the word “America” in two, to the effect of “Am Reka” (“hollow nation”). The United States truly is a nationless state. There exists no definition of an “American” beyond that of someone who holds the right pieces of paper. The individuals under its rule have no commonality and no social fabric, creating a moral vacuum for crime and degeneracy. Of course, there is little public will to guarantee the general welfare in these conditions.
Israel must relish and seek to bolster its condition in comparison. The State of Israel is not merely a government but the political arm of the people of Israel. Our comradery and moral virtue, which both stem from our national identity and collective narrative, are our greatest assets. Especially in comparison to the United States, these things must be recognized, appreciated, and continually strengthened.
