“Giving a little to those in need engenders a sense of gratitude and loyalty; giving too much, however, creates a sense of entitlement.

And after that attitude has been placed, you have a spoiled child who throws a fit whenever he’s not given every last thing he wants. He’s no longer devoted to his benefactors, but he’ll quickly follow whoever promises to give him more.”

Ironically, I recorded this chapter the day the White House announced their plan to erase $10k of student loan debt for each “poor” person. (If they can actually do that remains to be seen.)

I will uncomfortably confess that complete erasure of student loan debt would be an enormous gift to me, personally.

For more than 20 years we’ve been paying pittance on a student loan, money going only to interest. What we started with in 1997 has now quadrupled. We owe hundreds of thousands because the US Govt. has charged us 8.25% interest, compounding every second.

And although we’re in Income Based Repayment, the fine print of it means we’re not going to see “forgiveness” for many, many years still. For a school teacher and her husband who is a manager of a small store, earning a combined income of barely $100k (for about twenty years we earned only $55,000), that spells continued financial disaster.

I wish could just pay the original debt; that, we’d have a chance at conquering.

Not the nearly $200,000 in interest that’s been tacked on to it. There’s definitely room to rethink and readjust a very damning system.

HOWEVER, I see a much more massive disaster for the entire country if all student loan debt was “wiped away,” meaning shoved off on to everyone else.

The insatiability of many citizens to be handed more and more “freebies” is astonishing. And this unconscionable overreach of unearned handouts will turn us all into immature children, and just as incapable of doing anything of good.

It’s going to lead to the downfall of this country.

(For interest, read Isaiah 19 and when he writes “Egypt” replace it with “America.”)