Past Imperfect: Thanksgiving Edition
To commemorate this holiday weekend, we take a trip down memory lane—plus a dive into the Internet Archive—in revisiting my first piece of journalistic writing. First though, student loan debt.
Welcome to Terminally Chill—a newsletter that discusses politics, sports, and other issues from a left perspective—by Aaron Mayorga, an award-winning photojournalist.
At long last, we’re back, and a Happy War on Thanksgiving to you, reader.
It’s been a few weeks since Joe Biden was declared the winner of the latest in the series known as, ‘the most important election of our lifetime.’
Despite foundering lawfare attempts by the esteemed legal mind Rudolph Giuliani (Manhattan College, ‘65) et al challenging Biden’s wins in states like Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennslyvania, on Tuesday the General Services Administration recognized the latter as president-elect.
That officially began the two-month transition to the Biden-Harris era—and with the Bad Orange Man soon bounced from office, that means we’re on the brink of a neo-Era of Good Feelings, right? Based on Biden’s decidedly, albeit unsurprising, non-progressive cabinet picks, if you’re an Obama-era technocrat or a deficit-obsessive policy wonk, then the answer seems to be a resounding yes.
Otherwise, the next four years are shaping up to be, to put it mildly, frustrating. Enter, for instance, the ongoing debate regarding student loan debt cancellation.
For the uninitiated, a brief crash course: as Marcia Brown excellently detailed last year in The American Prospect, the president can cancel nearly all of the $1.6 billion student loan debt held by Americans, and they can do it via executive order—no approval by Congress necessary, divided government be damned.
In other words, a presidentially-decreed student debt jubilee.
That power has its origins in the Higher Education Act of 1965, a piece of Great Society-era legislation which gave the Secretary of Education “broad discretionary authority to ‘modify’ or ‘compromise, waive, or release’ DOE claims against student debtors,” according to Luke Herrine, a Ph.D. student at Yale Law and author of a recent article on the subject in the Buffalo Law Review. Put simply, so the argument goes, that the Department of Education can choose to not collect student loan debt, in the same vain that prosecutors have the discretion whether to pursue a criminal case.
Of course, Democrats could never be so bold as to actually commit to canceling all student loan debt, as Herrine and others have argued the president can and should do, but the idea of a partial—if not complete—student debt jubilee has found some supporters within establishment circles of the Democratic Party. Following Biden’s victory, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer reiterated a call for the next president to cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt per borrower using the obscure Higher Education Act provision referenced by Herrine. Biden’s camp, meanwhile, responded with their plan to forgive only up to $10,000 in federal student debt.
Critics of debt forgiveness, of course, chimed in to wax poetic about how mass student debt cancellation—whether passed by Congress or administered unilaterally via presidential executive order—is inherently regressive, akin to a massive handout to the wealthiest Americans, and running counter to the goal of addressing income inequality in this country. It’s a pervasive argument amongst the Very Serious People™ in D.C., but it’s fantasy.
This line—pushed by those opposed to canceling student loan debt—is rather simple: the holders of the greatest amount of federal loan debt tend to be the most well-educated and will eventually find themselves among society’s highest earners. Student loan debt in the long-run, by this logic, finances itself. But again, it’s just not true.
As the Jain Family Institute has found, since the Great Recession, federal borrowers are not only burdened by rising loan balances—with the highest increases amongst low-income and minority groups—but also increasingly set along a path toward eventual non-repayment. If the premise undergirding the arguments of opponents of loan forgiveness were true, then neither of these things should be happening, yet…
To the first point, here’s Laura Beamer, Jain’s project lead on Higher Education Finance, on how student debt has exploded, particularly amongst BIPOC, since 2009:
“In the past decade, the growth in total student debt balances outpaced the growth in the real price of college, as well as the growth in tuition and fees. […] Among young adults with at least one student loan in 2019, the median total loan balance owed was $18,727, a 17.93% increase from 2009 in 2019 dollars; the average total balance for this group increased by 23.09% to reach $34,839.
Certain states like South Carolina exhibited a concerning combination of extremely low median incomes and high median debt balances, which are increasing rapidly. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio saw median student debt grow by over 26% between 2009 and 2019. These four states also had median debt among majority-Black zip codes rise by over 68% between 2009 and 2019, whereas the nation as a whole saw majority-Black zip codes’ median debt increase by 54%.
And, to the second point, as Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah, highlights while income-driven repayment (IDR) schemes—which cap monthly payments to a portion of one’s income—have kept a fair chunk of borrowers from delinquency, they’ve also forced those same borrowers into making decades of hamster-wheel payments towards a balance that’ll never be repaid. (Note: Federal student loan debt is forgiven after 25 years of payments, regardless of the outstanding balance; however, the forgiven balance is then considered taxable income.)
“[M]any borrowers enter into IDR with no intention or prospect of ever leaving it. In fact, the program itself contains an incentive not to exit it: the cancellation at the end, the balance of which the borrower would otherwise be responsible for. That is why a great deal of student debt cancellation has already been committed to and a rising share of new student loans will never be repaid. The policy question is essentially whether to continue to insist on futile interest payments in the meantime, or to recognize that the underlying debts are un-repayable now.
In support of this trend, Steinbaum draws attention to the change in student loans, by loan age, or vintage, since 2009 and through last year. As you can see, back in 2009, less than six percent of federal student loans had origination dates older than 10 years—the standard timeframe in which federal loans are paid back. A decade later, almost 23 percent fell into this same category, and a majority of them older than seven years; these loans are getting older, not younger, indicating that borrowers are increasingly unable to pay them off, even as newer borrowers stream in. Steinbaum likens the situation to a bathtub overflowing with a combination of ‘old’ and ‘new’ water.
So, to recap: next time you see someone claim, very definitively and confidently, that the idea of a student loan debt jubilee is regressive, remember they’re wrong.
Not only do low-income and minority households have the most debt-relative-to-income, but in the last decade, those same households have seen the largest increase in debt balances. (And this is before we take into consideration, according to the JP Morgan Chase Institute, 27 percent of individuals making student loan payments don’t have any student debt, at all, and are actually helping pay down someone else’s balance.) By that same token, the claim of self-financing student debt is undermined by the fact balances haven’t decreased over time, on average, and more borrowers find themselves reliant on IDR, suggesting that the well-paying jobs graduates—and policymakers alike—were anticipating simply never materialized.
And that was before COVID-19.
With that out of the way, let’s turn to something a bit more topical—and what better than a good ol’ Thanksgiving morning tradition.
Every year since the early forties, my alma mater, Cardinal Hayes, and Mount St. Michael have met on the gridiron for their annual Turkey Bowl. The yearly bout is a uniquely Bronx affair, pitting two rival all-boys Catholic high schools (Hayes’ on the Grand Concourse, near 149th Street, while Mount’s in Wakefield, respectively) to decide football supremacy in the borough, at least… until the next game, the next year.
Generally held just a stone’s throw away from the Bronx–Mount Vernon border at the Mount’s recently-renovated digs off Nereid Avenue, like countless other traditions, this year’s Hayes-Mount game was called off due to concerns related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The cancellation means Hayes’ recent ascendancy—a streak of seven consecutive Turkey Bowl wins—remains, for yet another year.
Seven years ago, however, that wasn’t the case: the Mountaineers were at the tail-end of decades of domination over the Cardinals, its archrival from the South Bronx. But as you’ll soon see, that pendulum was about to swing, and swing it did.
As for me, I was in the middle of my senior year at Hayes, far from an athlete, having just turned 17 a little more than a month prior, and in the middle of the worst-timed breakdown possible. At the time, my friends and I were in a media production class, taught by a chill, new teacher whose main gig was as a producer at MLB Advanced Media.
Mirroring his professional background in sports media production, we—as part of his class, dubbed Lights, Camera, Action!—would provide the same function albeit for Cardinal Hayes varsity sports, and varsity football was no exception. Wherever the team played, we followed with our bulky cameras and lengthy XLR cables—a trajectory that invariably gave us front-row seats to this lot of Cardinals’ slow-burning Cinderella story and their inevitable date with destiny on Thanksgiving 2013.
That frigid morning, Nov. 28, 2013, the sun broke to sub-freezing temperatures, and by the game’s 10:30 start, it was still only just 30 degrees Fahrenheit—an ice bowl and a turkey bowl, as it were. Seated at a collapsible table behind one of the endzones and with my friend Jesús, together we called that game (something neither of us had ever done or have done since then) although it seems that recording may have been lost. Regardless, the outcome was all the same: 36 points, and a couple hours later, the Cardinals were victorious.
Later that day, I went home and wrote the following story (which, in very 2013-form, I posted to my personal WordPress) recapping their ascent to Thanksgiving triumph, which is as far as I’m aware the first time I’d ever tried my hand at ‘the news’. Despite that WordPress site having since been deleted, the article survives via the Wayback Machine; in early 2014, it seems, I, or someone else, had the story added to the archive. (I actually don’t remember if it was me.)
It has been slightly edited for grammatical and stylistic reasons.
‘All In’ at 650: Hayes Wins AA Title
It played like something out of a film script.
It sounds cliche, but that’s the best way to describe the 2013 Cardinal Hayes varsity football campaign. Following their stunning loss in the CHSFL quarterfinals against the Fordham Prep Rams last November and their blowout loss to Mount St. Michael in the 2012 Turkey Bowl, the Cardinals were a team that was counted out from the start.
Led by starting quarterback Juan Cruz ‘14, wide receiver Amir Crenshaw ‘14, and running back Timothy Poindexter ‘16, the Cardinals compiled an impressive 6-2 regular-season record, achieving the second seed in the CHSFL AA playoffs. In the first round, the Cardinals faced a familiar foe: Fordham. Despite surviving their first meeting (where Fordham placekicker Andrew Sisti missed a potential game-winning field goal as regulation time expired), the Cardinals were expected to lose.
News 12 reporter Jason Lewis tweeted that he expected an upset in the Cardinals–Rams matchup. Lewis reasoned that with Fordham’s starting running back Malik Crossdale back in action that Fordham would “end Hayes’ season for the second straight year.” Luckily for the Cardinals, that prediction didn’t come to fruition. Hayes would fall behind 20-19 at halftime to the Rams before blanking the Rams in the second half, cruising to a 41-20 romp of their rival.
Despite the impressive win, the Cardinals were still counted out for their next matchup against the Titans of Holy Trinity, a team that many felt was stronger and bigger than the resilient Cardinals. Hayes was shut out in the first 24 minutes of play; however, Hayes struck back with a touchdown pass from Cruz to Crenshaw, making the score 14-7. However, in the midst of celebration, disaster had struck, and the Cardinals’ quarterback was down with a dislocated kneecap. It would be his last game as a Hayesman, but his last throw was a touchdown, quite the way to go out.
Meanwhile, in the stands, a number of players from Mount St. Michael watched their archrival; the Mountaineers had come off a shocking 28-27 victory against St. Peter’s in which Mount was down 27-0 at halftime. Hayes alumnus Daniel Rivera ‘96 recalled:
“At the half I left my spot on the sideline to use the restroom. While waiting on line I witnessed a Holy Trinity player and a Mount player chatting it up. ‘We got this’, the Trinity player told the Mountaineer. ‘They’re soft. They’re scared. We’ll see you next week.’ The Mount player echoed the same sentiments.
“What a pair these two were. I never said a word and kept it to myself until I told my fellow alums on the sideline.”
Generally, losing your starting quarterback would be disastrous for a team, but the enigmatic Cardinals used it as motivation. Hayes defensive tackle Robert Tagoe ‘14 simply told his mourning teammates, ‘Get angry.’
And that they did.
Following a 65-yard kick-six by Holy Trinity, Hayes backup Roberto Nunez ‘15 led the Cardinals to the end-zone three times: the first was a touchdown pass to wide receiver Steven Batista ‘14; Nunez followed this with a touchdown pass to Crenshaw, evening the game at 21. However, the Titans still had life, driving to the Hayes 30 yard line, but the Cardinals would hold their ground.
A crucial fourth-down stop by Hayes outside linebacker Nick Mullings ‘14 gave Nunez the opportunity to drive down the field one last time. The Cardinals were stonewalled inside the Trinity 25, but Nunez connected on a fourth-down pass to Batista, giving the Cardinals their first lead of the night. Hayes linebacker Sam Orta iced the game with two interceptions, a performance for which he was named one of the CHSFL Players of the Week by MSG Varsity. Hayes emerged victorious 31-21, a victory that a St. Peter’s player said was ‘mindblowing.’
‘It’s in the numbers… Hayes wins.’
The stage had been set.
The decades-long rivalry between the Cardinals and the Mountaineers was at the center of the CHSFL ‘AA’ Championship, and to be played on Thanksgiving for all the marbles: the Turkey Bowl and the AA City Championship.
Both teams lined up as the Hayes Marching Band performed their rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. Hayes received the ball first, and they quickly drove down the field. Once again, Crenshaw was at the center of attention as Nunez connected with him with 4:30 left in the first. Crenshaw managed to maintain both feet in bounds despite being at the corner of the endzone and having double coverage. The Mountaineers quickly responded, scoring on the next drive and making the score 8-6 from a 44-yard touchdown run by Mount running back Albert Sutton.
Hayes running back Tim Poindexter would give the Cardinals the lead with a 21-yard touchdown run with nine seconds to go in the first. Hayes would successfully convert for the extra two points, giving the Cardinals an even 14 points. The Mountaineers would take the lead once more with a one-yard touchdown run from Mount starting quarterback Kasim Thomas.
The game remained a stalemate through halftime.
At the start of the fourth, Hayes was down 16-14, and after a critical stop by their defense, Nunez, Poindexter, and Crenshaw took the field, ready to take back the lead. On a third-down pass play, Crenshaw was pushed in the back by his Mount defender just as he prepared to catch Nunez’s throw. Much to the chagrin of the fans, the obvious defensive pass interference call never came.
It was do-or-die for the Cardinals; they lined up, ready to convert this fourth down. Nunez took the snap, looked, and found Crenshaw for a 10-yard gain which kept the drive alive. Finally, Poindexter struck again in the end zone giving Hayes a 20-16 lead.
On the subsequent kick, the Mountaineers return-man Keelan Thomas fumbled the football although he recovered, but it was an omen of things to come. A few plays later, Thomas would fumble the snap again. This time around, Mount wouldn’t be so lucky as Batista would recover the ball with 3:31 left in the fourth.
Hayes would run out the clock, and the final score remained 20-16.
For the first time since 2007, Hayes had defeated Mount St. Michael in the Turkey Bowl; for the first time since 1981, the Cardinals hoisted the AA Championship.
The crowd swarmed McGovern Field, and the media did so as well. NBC 4 sports anchor Bruce Beck spoke to Hayes coach C.J. O’Neil and the wide receiver Crenshaw. O’Neil praised his team’s ability to remain focused despite having a number of issues off the gridiron and for buying into his ‘All In’ system of coaching.
News 12’s Kurt Semder spoke to Poindexter. The sophomore back, who rushed for over 1500 yards this season, thanked god for his victory. Roberto Nunez, who was starting his first game as the quarterback of Hayes’ varsity squad, said he hopes to be in the same position next year, but with the AAA championship.
Cardinal Hayes varsity basketball coach Joe Lods tweeted:
“Congrats to the @CardinalHayes varsity football team for winning the AA championship and beating Mount. Now it’s basketball’s turn #uphayes.”
With a basketball squad led by St. Joe’s-bound Shavar Newkirk, Chris Robinson, and Central Connecticut-bound Mustafa Jones, all ‘14, it’s in the numbers, Hayes wins.
In the place of the Turkey Bowl game this year, Cardinal Hayes put out a slate of related Thanksgiving-related videos—chief among them, a short documentary film on Hayes’ traditional rivalry with the Mount. Directed by my friend and fellow alum Shawn Antoine II, himself a member of that 2013 team, you can watch it below.
I appreciated the article! Honestly, that argument against student loan forgiveness is so flawed, but what really sucks is how after campaigning the fact that $50,000 per student would be forgiven, Biden's team would renege and promise $10,000 instead. Well, I'm glad it'll help a lot of people, though! Also, Up Hayes!