Ben Kamens’ Very Bad Day
Thursday was a very bad day for Ben Kamens.
Pity, because Wednesday started out so well for the communications director for Ohio Democrat Rep. Marcy Kaptur. He’d received great news in the mail and wanted to share it with the world.
So he posted this on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter:
By Thursday morning 18.7 million people had seen his chirpy message.
They did not share in his joy.
In fact, overnight Kamens became the viral poster boy for all that’s wrong with student loan “forgiveness.”
He’s a college grad with an $80,000 a year salary, who works for a congresswoman who represents Ohio’s 9th District where the median income is $62,077. Yet he needs taxpayers to repay his $8,250 loans.
He’s also a communications guy who didn’t anticipate the blowback he’d receive? How is that possible?
By Thursday afternoon he’d deleted his celebratory Tweet and made his account private.
Too late, Ben. Screenshots live forever.
News outlets did a little digging: Seems this congressional staffer took out these two modest loans in 2010. One for $2,750 and the other for $5,500. The monthly payments - estimated to be about $77 - were apparently too much. Fourteen years after he took out the loans he still hadn’t repaid them.
You and I paid them.
And did Mr. Kamens thank us for our largesse? Did he thank the clerk at his local dry cleaner for paying off his loans? Did he thank the Starbucks barista, his barber, his plumber?
Nope. He thanked Joe Biden.
News flash: Joe didn’t “forgive” any of these loans, American taxpayers did.
Some of us are not happy about it.
Internet sleuths began going through Mr. Kamens’ posts looking for hints of his lifestyle. They found them. Last July, for instance, Kamens bragged that he was now a season ticket holder for the Philadelphia Eagles. Those tickets cost about $2,692 each.
He occasionally posted photos of extravagant dinners he enjoyed, too.
As Kamens learned this week, there’s a price for making your life available on social media.
Joe Biden wants the public to believe that the beneficiaries of his student loan “forgiveness” are suffocating under their crippling student debt.
Mr. Kamens is proof that isn’t the case.
The fact that we’re being asked to repay loans for folks earning good salaries wasn't lost on X. Thousands of people weighed in, from the famous to angry mobs of ordinary folks.
The first reply I saw was from the always incisive observer, actor James Woods.
Country music star John Rich expressed his disapproval.
Virginia’s former congressman from the Second District, Scott Taylor chimed in too.
Perhaps the best commentary came from the National Review’s Dominic Pino who fired off a devastating piece, headlined “Ben Kamens Is A Perfect Spokesman For The Democratic Party.”
Ouch!
“As the text of his message demonstrates, he’s not the least bit ashamed about the fact that he, a grown man and college graduate with a full-time job, was apparently unable to repay debt with a principal of $8,250 over a span of 14 years…”
Pino pointed out the ironic timing of Kamens braggadocio:
“Kamens’s post comes the day after the Congressional Budget Office added $400 billion to its deficit projection for this year. That includes a $145 billion increase in outlays due to the Biden administration’s student-loan programs.”
What is Kamens’s takeaway? “This is why elections matter.” Ah, yes, the sacred trust of democracy: Where voters cast a secret ballot to make their voice heard in the political process — so that the candidate wins who will give them money that the IRS took from other people. That’s what elections are about, according to Kamens.
Rarely is the Democratic political vision so clearly on display.
Biden believes he’s buying votes with these student loan handouts. (Of course he already had Democrat Kamens’ vote.) Now the negative publicity swirling around the student loan scam, courtesy of Ben Kamens, may help the scheme backfire.
That would be a storybook ending to Ben Kamens’ very bad day.
