The recent student debt forgiveness announcement has trickled through the news cycle down to the masses. It irks losers or those who do not benefit while pleasing the millions of Americans with current student debt balances. It also helps the entire university system by reducing debt loads to layer on more debt, set a precedent for this debt to be written off again later, and set up some quirky payment plans for the future. It is a beautiful example of rewarding one’s base of voters.

This is not the type of move to shift the middle or the undecided. It is a pure cash gift to the college educated, who are a Democrat voter bloc and growing in size. Only suckers have been paying during the lockdown deferment period, so this will not boost consumer spending, but the principal knockdown should make future monthly payments more palatable whenever they restart. This is just another example of smart rewards to the myriad of Democrat voter blocs. We saw the boost to EBT to reward the welfare underclass, the massive expansion of IRS hires to reward the government worker types, and now this to reward the economically suffering but educated and status anxious left wing crowd (teachers receive special loan forgiveness too). Reports were that Biden’s team looked at only forgiving black student debt, which would have rewarded the most woke and loyal of Democrats but it must have been a bridge too far.

This is smart for riling up the base, and it spotlights how difficult it is for the GOP to reward its base. There is no direct payoff except for the corporate interests that fund campaigns, which are also shifting leftward with donations but that’s outside the scope of this essay. The GOP does not have a government service voter base with the possible exception of elderly Medicare recipients. Even then, those programs do not translate into major rewards. Does Bush’s Medicare expansion matter anymore after the Obamacare overhaul? The GOP sits in a position where the vote-payoff-vote feedback loop has no direct mechanism. A major infrastructure bill would potentially benefit workers, but when one pulls from the private sector, that infrastructure money gets siphoned off by a variety of government bureaucrats and environmental consultants who do not vote GOP.

The GOP ends up creating circumstances where they have to set the economy revving, which indirectly helps their voters and in the experience of the last forty years in the Rust Belt often bypass their stronger areas. Trump, and Bush before him, would tout lower black or Latino unemployment, but once again, this is not exclusively or overly concentrated in their core voter bloc. The Democrats running our institutions and sitting in the driver seat for the central government have an easier time quickly linking the central power to the periphery, which they can identify, categorize and shift resources to per the university-bureaucracy loop.

If one were to approach a rewards system, it would have to look away from the economic patronage and think in another center-periphery or high-low method. The left discusses the oppression system and the hurdles their clients face, but anyone with knowledge of how hiring, firing, funding and acceptance games knows that the system is set to reward those higher up on the progressive stack. The true low within this system is the straight white male. They do not get any bonus points when they apply for anything. It is not just them, and white women and even gay men are seeing this in action as the Current Year system moves deeper into the ’20s.

A policy system that sought to create a High-Low reward policy suite or judicial approach would be one that loosened government regulations, discarded the destructive disparate impact legal excuse to any merit type of measurement for employees and candidates, and put an end to the lawsuit lottery that forces every employer to operate under the shadow of Civil Rights lawsuits. An end to affirmative action would force universities and employers to come up with more ridiculous intangibles for hitting their diversity numbers, but without the fear of Civil Rights based lawsuits, they would not have numbers to hit. Currently, banks use lending to Indian Americans to count towards non-white lending targets, and this is noticed by black politicians. Yes, the richest ethnic group in America receives preferential lending standards due to regulations meant to help blacks for historical wrongs of slavery and Jim Crow. It’s disgusting, insulting and all must go. If Stephen Miller’s America First style legal team brings forth the right suits, these legal challenges could become SCOTUS issues with a favorable court. It truly would be the best man or woman for anything. Combine this with the Trump message of ending illegal immigration and reducing legal immigration, and suddenly native workers win. Not just native workers, but their children would win.

There is no way to directly reward the GOP voter bloc like the Democrats can. They left can layer any bill with funding to any of their voter blocs. It is an eighty year structure that is well oiled. The GOP cannot do this. Not when one thinks purely in hand-outs. Even expanding government jobs would not work due to the right’s conditioned reluctance to work for the government. That will take time to change as the right’s foot soldiers must realize that participating in governance and ruling matters a lot more than cashing out quickly and collecting a fat private sector check. The task is to lean into the judicial structure that creates legal and financial rewards for adhering to the progressive stack. There is a high-low game to play. It’s just not the high-low game that everyone looks at today.