Biden Caves to Far Left on Student Debt Forgiveness

AMAC Exclusive – By Seamus Brennan

In the latest desperate attempt to salvage Democrats’ chances in November’s midterm elections, President Joe Biden announced last week that he is actively looking at ways to forgive most, or potentially even all, federal student loan debt after months of mounting pressure from progressives. But despite what the White House hopes, the move thus far appears to be far from a political slam dunk, and threatens to further mire the country in economic turmoil.

According to a report from the Washington Post, Biden is considering ways in which he can use executive action to give debt relief to “people who earned less than either $125,000 or $150,000 as individual filers the previous year.” Although no “final” decisions have yet been made, the Post reports that, in 2019, 97 percent of all student debt was held by Americans earning less than $150,000 as individuals or less than $300,000 as couples—indicating that Biden’s intention to “limit” relief to individuals earning less than $150,000 would impose hardly any limitations at all, and would in effect constitute nearly universal student loan forgiveness.

The prospect of widespread student debt forgiveness at a time when the country is seeing 40-year inflation highs and Americans are increasingly struggling to afford gas, groceries, and other everyday necessities is a worrying sign for American taxpayers—many of whom did not attend college, did not collect large federal loans, or already paid off student loans of their own, but will nonetheless be forced to shoulder the debt burden of others. Despite what the White House would like Americans to believe, simply forgiving billions of dollars in student loan debt won’t come without adverse economic consequences.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), cancelling $10,000 in debt for every student borrower (one potential model floated by the administration) would cost taxpayers approximately $245 billion. Meanwhile, according to the left-wing think tank People’s Policy Project, the poorest 20 percent of Americans account for only eight percent of the nation’s total student debt, the overwhelming majority of which is held by America’s richest and most affluent college graduates. As National Review’s Michael Brandon Dougherty notes, nearly 40 percent of student debt “is held by students who earned advanced degrees—many of them now doctors and lawyers.” Unemployment for the college-educated, he continues, “is less than 2 percent.”

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget President Maya MacGuineas similarly sounded the alarm. “Full debt cancellation,” she writes, “would be a massive hand-out to rich doctors and lawyers, would worsen our inflation crisis,” and could possibly “cost as much as universal pre-K or a full extension of the expanded [Affordable Care Act] subsidies.”

Last week’s development follows months of mixed messaging from the White House surrounding the issue of debt forgiveness. Despite repeatedly signaling he would “immediately” cancel student loans upon taking office throughout the campaign season, last December, to the dismay of many in his party, Biden refused to extend the student loan payment pause, which was initially set to resume in February. But following an outpouring of intense pushback from progressives, Biden gave in and extended the pause until May 1.

Biden’s recent indication that he will move forward with across-the-board debt forgiveness is the latest episode in a long pattern of Biden submitting to the desires of the most far-left voices in the Democratic Party. Though progressive figures like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) have vocally urged Biden to move ahead with student debt cancellation, only 38 percent of young Americans and 19 percent of all voters support such measures. Even people in Biden’s own camp have claimed that the president does not possess the legal authority to cancel student debt. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for instance, waved off the possibility last July, claiming it was “not even a discussion.”

As such, should Biden follow through with his stated intention of cancelling student debt on a broad national scale, he would be opening both himself and his party up to yet another massive political liability that could make this November’s midterm elections even more humiliating for the already crisis-ridden White House.

The White House also appears to have devoted little to no effort to actually address the root of the student debt crisis – namely, skyrocketing tuition costs and predatory lending practices. Even if every penny of student loan debt is forgiven, that will do nothing for the students currently racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt right now, or students that will head to the same high-priced colleges in the future. At a press conference last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki dismissed a reporter’s question about lowering tuition costs, saying that she “didn’t know” if lowering costs was as important as forgiving debt in terms of reaching a long-term solution to the student debt problem and quickly referred the reporter to the Department of Education. If Americans needed any more evidence that Biden’s debt forgiveness scheme was nothing but a political ploy to motivate turnout among young voters in November, they need look no further than Psaki’s comments.

But perhaps even more concerning, if Biden manages to succeed in implementing his plan, he would be actively worsening the inflation crisis that he is ostensibly trying to end, while at the same time effectively awarding government handouts to his progressive base of voters—much of which is already financially well-off.

As Dougherty of National Review observes, “The plan being mulled by the Biden administration” is “a brazen act of class warfare by the affluent against everyone else.” The plan, he continues, would amount to “a politically, and cosmically, unjustifiable robbery that offers yet more rope for the decadent and totally indefensible American college system to become even more decadent and indefensible.”

But if current polling is any indication, the further Biden drags himself and his administration to the left, the more unpopular he and his party will become with the American people. No matter how much money the President doles out in misguided attempts to placate angry voters, it’s unlikely that he or any other Democrat will be able to erase the stain of their failed policies.