I never much liked paying taxes, until I was told that I could help lazy, financially illiterate dilettantes go to India to study meditation.
I often feel a little bit peeved around this time of year. You know how it is: There you are enjoying the arrival of April, with the lovely weather and the flowering trees and the feeling that the year has finally got going, and then along comes the Internal Revenue Service and demands that you write it a large check. “Gosh,” you’re halfway through remarking, “look at that charming family of ducks waddling through the grass,” and then BANG! — all of a sudden, you’re out a whole bunch of cash that you’d really rather have spent on your family.
Yes, yes, I know that old saw about taxes being the price we pay for civilization, but I’ve often wondered a little about the definitions that are being used, and, if I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve started to suspect that I’d be okay if we had a touch less civilization if this is what the bill looks like. This year, though, I feel unusually great about paying my taxes, and for that I have to thank a 49-year-old American named Joel Lambdin, who, thanks to President Biden’s remarkable generosity with other people’s money, was recently given $250,000 from the Treasury as a reward for being a financially illiterate dilettante. As Business Insider reports, Lambdin left graduate school in 1998, but, since then, he has chosen to make almost no money. “The only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans,” Business Insider notes, “was by switching careers.” Lambdin “didn’t want to do that because he loved working in music.” So he didn’t.
This, naturally, caused Lambdin some problems. Indeed, for years, he wasn’t at all sure what he ought to do about his predicament. And then one glorious day, he discovered that, in an electrifying attempt to prevent him from having to deal with the consequences of his choices, the Biden administration was willing to transfer the liability for the $249,255 that Lambdin owed for his education to a bunch of people who had not received it. For this remarkable act, he was extremely . . . well, the only word to use is indifferent:
The feeling was much more like putting down a backpack that was really full of books that you got used to. And then you put it down, and you’re like, ‘Oh, man, that feels so much better.’ It’s more like that, rather than sort of a jump-for-joy kind of situation.
As a taxpayer, this thrills the cockles of my heart. I had never quite been able to put my finger on it, but, since I moved to the United States in 2011, I’d always felt a sense of ennui — as if there were something ineffably wrong with a world in which graduate students were obliged to work off their advanced degrees. Courtesy of President Biden, that feeling has now gone, and, in turn, it has been replaced by the unalloyed joy that can come only from knowing that a large percentage of the fruits of your hard work are being forcibly taken from you and handed to the most frivolous people in America. In particular, I am happy to know that, having been given a quarter of a million tax-free dollars, Joel Lambdin has learned his lesson. “Beyond financial goals,” Business Insider relates, “Lambdin said the relief was also allowing him the freedom to pursue some of his long-term dreams, including taking a sabbatical to study with his meditation teacher in India.”
Which is just terrific, isn’t it? Life is full of trade-offs, and, as Lambdin himself notes, had other people not been put on the hook for his life choices, that sabbatical would probably have never happened. “It’s something that I wouldn’t have been able to even consider doing if we had to pay off student loans,” he explained, “but without them, it’s something that I can really seriously consider doing.” Even better, this change in Joe Lambdin’s circumstances provides us with an example of exactly the sort of self-evidently worthwhile federal-debt spending that has been missing from our public debates. “Those,” Lambdin observes of his sabbatical plans, “are the kinds of things that I think get really lost in the monetary side of the conversation about debt relief.” Indeed so. But no longer will that be the case. I, for one, can’t wait until next year’s April 15.