Student Loan ‘Cancelation’ Plan Slammed by Republicans and Democrats Alike
You know that a plan is bad if Joe Biden is getting criticism from both Republicans and Democrats alike.
Recently Fox News host Jesse Watters ripped in the Joe Biden over the plan to cancel up to $10,000 in student debt as long as that individual makes less than $125,000 per year.
“I want to congratulate all the rich whites with graduate degrees who are living on the coast making six figures. You really are the forgotten men and women of this country and you finally now have a president who feels your pain,” Watters said in mocking tones. “Spending most of your 20s in school, now finally making close to $125,000. Man, I mean, what would they do without Joe Biden?”
Watters went on to ask why, if Americans truly were living in the great economy Democrats appeared to believe they were, anyone needed to have student debts forgiven in the first place.
“It doesn’t make any sense. You cannot raid the treasury and then cut checks to your favorite voters. Where did Biden give the power as the president to spend half a trillion dollars? That’s Congress’ job. He cannot steal Nancy’s purse and then to start bribing people before an election. That’s an abuse of power and it’s unconstitutional. Nancy even said it was unconstitutional,” Watters continued, noting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had previously said Biden did not have the power to unilaterally forgive student debt.
“This is reverse class warfare. It’s like, I don’t know, you rob the poor to pay the rich. You’re going to get a plumber’s family to pay off the loan of a graduate school family that’s making a quarter million dollars a year? Why should I have to pay, or anybody have to pay, for my neighbor’s graduate degree?” Watters asked. “You look across the street, you see your neighbor’s daughter, she just backed into your mailbox, she’s always been an idiot, and now you have to pay for her to get an advanced degree in Estonian poetry? It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
As I’ve already stated in a previous article I’m not against debt forgiveness. But that’s not what this is. Debt forgiveness is just a clever name that the Democrats came up with in order to try to make this sound like it’s something good for people in general. Real debt forgiveness involves wiping the Slate clean and you can only do that when you are the one who has loaned the money to an individual. Only that person can forgive at that and decide that they no longer seek to regain that money. The federal government does not have the ability to decide that you don’t need to collect your debt anymore. This is not debt forgiveness this is debt transferring. Somebody has to pay for this $300 billion plan.
But it’s not even just conservatives that are criticizing Joe Biden’s ridiculous plan. Even the Washington Post slammed Biden earlier this week. Take a look at what they said:
The loan-forgiveness decision is even worse. Widely canceling student loan debt is regressive. It takes money from the broader tax base, mostly made up of workers who did not go to college, to subsidize the education debt of people with valuable degrees. Though Mr. Biden’s plan includes an income cap, the threshold does not reflect need or earnings potential, meaning white-collar professionals with high future salaries stand to benefit. Student loans, moreover, are a poor proxy for household income: An analysis by policy researcher Jason D. Delisle found that, in 2016, students from high-income and low-income families were just as likely to take on debt for their first year in an undergraduate program — and students from high-income families borrowed the largest amounts.
Mr. Biden’s plan is also expensive — and likely inflationary. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that extending the loan pause to the end of the year would cost $20 billion, while forgiving $10,000 for households making less than $300,000 would cost $230 billion. Together, these policies would nullify nearly a decade’s worth of deficit reduction from the Inflation Reduction Act. Moreover, it is unclear that the 1965 Higher Education Act even grants the president the legal authority to take such a sweeping step, given that it was historically understood to permit only more targeted relief.