The usual Republican suspects are furious about President Biden’s executive order that lightens the crushing financial debts suffered by millions of college students – a $10,000 reduction for most, potentially double that amount for lower-income folks. The knee-jerk GOP ire is best summarized in this official House tweet: “If you take out a loan, you pay it back. Period.”

Or, as Florida Gov. (and presidential prospect) Ron DeSantis prefers to frame it, “It’s very unfair to have a truck driver have to pay back a loan for somebody that got a PhD in gender studies.” Or, as House megaphone Jim Jordan prefers to frame it, “Why should a machinist in Ohio pay for the student loans of a jobless philosophy major in Los Angeles?”

There’s so much wrong with those responses that I don’t know where to begin. It’s charming, for starters, that they’re suddenly purporting to champion truck drivers and machinists and carpenters and the other working stiffs of America – most of whom were short-changed in 2017 when Trump and the congressional GOP slashed taxes on the rich and the multinationals.

Recent history aside, there’s a core flaw in their outrage about student debt relief – their lecture about personal responsibility; their sudden ironclad belief that if you take out a loan, you should pay it back without any federal government help; their sudden contention that bailouts are unfair because taxpayers get stuck with the tab.

Oddly enough, they never freak out in this fashion when the feds bail out defense contractors.

Or when the feds bail out Big Oil.

Or when the feds bail out the big banks.

Or when the feds bail out insurance and mortgage finance companies.

Or when the feds bail out car companies.

Or when Trump bailed out Big Agriculture.

Or when the bankruptcy process – an American mainstay since the 19th century – bailed out Trump, wiping his debts off the books. Various Trump entities filed for bankruptcy six times. As the serial deadbeat explained during a 2016 debate, “We used certain laws that are there.”

Clearly, the complaining Republicans have no problem forgiving debts – as long as it benefits the rich and powerful. But if middle- and lower-class students are the recipients, then presto, it’s an outrage.

And to fuel their anger, they’re caricaturing those students. Supposedly (quoting DeSantis), the debt-ridden young’uns all have PhDs in gender studies, or unemployable philosophy degrees, or (quoting Ted Cruz) the typical beneficiary of Biden’s executive order is a “slacker barista who wasted seven years in college,” someone who can’t “get off the bong.”

In reality, the policy disproportionately helps people of modest household income, particularly Blacks from poor families. And as one analyst accurately points out, the policy also covers “people who took on student loans to pay for occupational degrees in blue-collar trades like cosmetology and mechanics…Cancellation is squarely targeted at the debt that working-class students have accrued to hold pretty working-class jobs.”

It also requires a mere scintilla of thought to spot the broadest flaw in the GOP’s attack. Will each “truck driver” and “carpenter” essentially pay a few bucks to help 40 million debt-ridden students whom they will never meet? Absolutely. But we taxpayers do stuff like that all the time. We pay for interstate highways we’ll never drive on. We pay for national parks and nature preserves that we’ll never tour. We pay for services in needy red states that we’ll never visit. We pay to research dire diseases that we’ll likely be fortunate not to suffer.

It’s called governing for the common good. And how fortunate we were in 2020 when a record 81,282,916 million Americans voted to preserve it.