Paul Begala Mocks Warren’s Student Loan Crusade, Tells Bill Maher Democrats Expert at ‘Pissing Off The Working Class’

Paul Begala told comic and pundit Bill Maher that the student debt forgiveness crusade — being led by Sen. Elizbeth Warren — is designed in a lab with the goal of “pissing off the working class.”

On Friday night’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher observed that the push to forgive large amounts of student debt is a “loser issue” for President Joe Biden, and Begala agreed in colorful fashion:

PAUL BEGALA: You think? Yeah, well, and this is revealing a big secret. Don’t tell anybody that we Democrats have a lab. Two labs, actually, secret labs, one in Berkeley and one in Brooklyn, where we come up with ideas to completely piss off the working class. And it’s working wonderfully.

BILL MAHER: Labs, you say, actual labs…

PAUL BEGALA: And they all have PhDs right in pissing off the working class. Somehow, in my lifetime, the Democrats have gone from being the party of the factory floor to being the party faculty lounge. I went last week. I spent Wednesday last week in Chicago with the machinists union. Hung out with the machinists all day. Great guys. Not a one of them came up to me and said, Gee, I really hope you take my tax dollars to pay off the debt of somebody went to Stanford. Right. But I have.

So Biden’s under enormous pressure. He’s not for it, he didn’t campaign for it. He says he’ll relieve maybe $10,000, which I suppose is good.

But what I’d much rather see Democrats do is go back to their roots, which is earn it. We’re the party that carried the G.I. Bill, and nobody called that free college because it wasn’t. The guys who got the G.I. Bill earned it. Why don’t we have a system where we say: You want to get out of your college debt, serve your country, Marine Corps, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps. Not everybody can carry a rifle, but you can mentor a kid and you should give two years of service. Then you will have earned that and expand it. So we have community college job training. We need more mechanics, not MBAs.

MICHELLE TAFOYA: Yes.

PAUL BEGALA: And that’s where the Democrats focus ought to be.

BILL MAHER: That to me seems to be the underlying issue. I’ve said it on this show before. It’s dead. Democrats have this idea that you’re a better person if you sit in class more and more and get more and more degrees. And really, the answer is to make, is not to make college cheaper. It’s to make it more unnecessary because most of it is bullshit anyway.

Watch above via HBO.