Crime is rampant. Inflation is raging. Energy shortages are looming. The border is a porous, dangerous and tragic mess. 

This is the sorry legacy of fewer than two years under President Joe Biden, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, Gov. Jared Polis and total Democratic control of Congress and of Colorado state government.

But the issue that truly defines the choice for voters in November is the fiscally bankrupt and morally irresponsible Biden-Bennet bailout of those who think others are responsible for paying off their student loans, namely America’s middle-class taxpayers.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the Biden proposal to saddle taxpayers with student debt will cost $400 billion, which is dramatically higher than Biden’s much more modest estimates. Rather than expressing concern about such an astronomical number, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and the Democratic Socialist senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, heralded the $400 billion CBO number as proof it is a wonderful public policy.

Biden, Schumer, Warren and other Democratic Socialists such as New York U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talk about “canceling student debt” which is a patent lie. Student debt is not “canceled.” It is passed along to every taxpaying citizen in America, most of whom never took out a student loan and, if they did, most of them either dutifully paid it off or are attempting to pay off their debts. 

What a bunch of chumps!

Even $400 billion is less than the estimate by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model, which predicts between $440 and $600 billion in costs.

As reprehensible as the fiscal and economic costs are for the Biden-Democratic bailout, the long-term moral costs are even more insidious.

Why should future student loan recipients think they will be held responsible for paying off their loans? Why shouldn’t any person who receives other federal loans such as from the Small Business Administration think they won’t be bailed out as well? Why should anyone pay back loans from private financial institutions? Just wait for the Democratic Socialists to attempt to buy more votes with federal bailouts of delinquent borrowers.

Predictably, Colorado’s Democratic senators and members of Congress, along with Gov. Jared Polis, have fallen in line with this fiasco including U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, whose patrician and elitist upbringing in his hometown of Washington, D.C. is so foreign to the vast majority of Coloradans. No surprise that imposing this debt burden on middle-class Coloradans is something he cannot comprehend as deeply unfair and insidious.

Bail-out proponents contend many students did not know what they were getting into by committing themselves to long-term debt to pay for degrees that failed to secure more lucrative jobs. Perhaps so, but such a contention wreaks of condescension that young adults are just not capable of thinking for themselves and must be coddled and bailed out. Maybe that is the intention of Biden and Bennet.

Rather than heaping this burden on hardworking taxpayers who never went to college or who paid off their student loans, institutions of higher learning should be required to be honest with students about the consequences of student loans for economically questionable degrees.

Just like millions of other people, I worked my way through college without going into debt. Others took out student loans and paid them back or are paying them back. Millions of others never went to college.

Biden and Bennet really do think we’re all a bunch of chumps.

Dick Wadhams is a Republican political consultant and a former Colorado Republican state chairman.