HUNTSVILLE — For those who don't know, "Young Boozer" is the actual name, not a description, of the current Alabama State Treasurer, Young Jacob Boozer III, named after his father (Young Jacob Boozer, Jr.), who was a football star for the University of Alabama.
As Alabama State Treasurer, an office he's held since October 2021, Mr. Boozer has acted as the head banker for the State of Alabama. He handles deposits, withdrawals, redemptions of state warrants, and investments of state funds. He is responsible for Alabama's cash management, including receiving, depositing and investing state funds, bond management, public funds deposits, and other state financial duties.
Speaking at a Huntsville meeting of the Madison County Republican Men's Club on Saturday, Boozer warned that the recent Biden-Harris bailout of student government loans using taxpayer funds has created a dangerous precedent and a serious moral hazard for the United States.
In economics, a "moral hazard" is a situation in which one or more economic actors are incentivized to increase their exposure to risk because they do not bear the full costs of that risk.
After his speech, Boozer explained to 1819 News, "Those students entered into a contract, and they made certain contractual statements and representations, and they should live up to them. Any time where you get into a situation where you know you can walk [away from] a contract with no consequences, that creates a moral hazard, and what [the current administration] is doing is just confirming that as a moral hazard, and they are refusing to deal with it."
The Biden-Harris student debt relief scheme was effectively imposed by presidential edict ("executive action"). President Biden did this with the general approval of his own political party but without approval of either Congress or the courts, effectively acting as legislature, executive and judiciary all in one. Joe Biden routinely brags at campaign appearances that when it came to his student debt bailout, "The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn't stop me!"
Meanwhile, Boozer reports that the state treasury is doing very well. In 2019, the Alabama state treasury had $3.6 billion. As of yesterday, Boozer reported that state funds are now at $13 billion. Boozer believes that the necessity of state governments spending their surpluses will keep inflation from going down quickly.
Boozer also said in his speech Saturday that he believes the recent rise in the stock market coincided with and was largely caused by improved economic optimism in the markets that occurred as the perceived chances of a Trump victory in November grew. "And of course now," continued Boozer after his speech, "which you've probably seen in the last couple of days, is a stock market trade-off, reflecting that old adage, 'buy on the rumor, and sell on the fact,' and so when [the markets] saw what happened on Saturday [the attempted assassination], on Monday the market flipped.
"And not only did [the markets] go down but also, all those tech stocks, they sold those off and the cash went into industrials, construction companies — those kinds of things that Trump would be promoting. To me, it was pretty obvious that's what was happening."
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