The worst part about Joe Biden’s student loan scam
David Freddoso
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You’ve probably heard about President Joe Biden’s attempt to do an end-run around the courts that are now considering the legality of his executive order for lump-sum student debt forgiveness. He is now trying to shrink or eliminate payments for students who are in repayment. Those privileged enough to have attended college would now have to pay, at most, 5% of their incomes above 225% of the federal poverty level — considerably less than the 10% of income above 150% of the poverty level that they must now pay.
This means, for example, that an unmarried graduate making $40,000 at his first job would go from a maximum monthly payment of $172 to a maximum monthly payment of $46. Plus, those loans (for undergraduates, anyway) will be completely forgiven at the end of 20 years, so there are no consequences to the borrowers, and no upside for the taxpayers, for such low payments.
BIDEN PUSHES CONTROVERSIAL STUDENT LOANS TRANSFORMATION AS ‘FORGIVENESS’ FALTERS
I find this rather galling, given that I paid significantly more than twice that of $46 just on the least expensive of my student loans at the turn of the century — and mind you, that was back when that amount was worth a lot more.
But here’s the worst part. The student loan program was nationalized in 2010 as part of Obamacare. This was done for a very specific reason: Student loans are money-makers, and the Democrats trying to ram Obamacare through were desperate for revenues to cover the program’s costs and make them look less ludicrous. So they hypothecated the student loan program’s profits to pay for Obamacare.
Let this be a lesson about trusting the Democrats when they say that a given new revenue stream is going to be used for a specific purpose — say, education or roads. For now, Biden is just going to give away all of the program’s profits, Obamacare funding be damned, and give them away to the most privileged people in America. This sort of irresponsible governance is the reason we’re coming up against the debt ceiling yet again.
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You know, I could understand if Biden agreed to forgive debt for college dropouts with low incomes after, say, five or 10 years of consistent payments. No one envies the people who are saddled with huge debts and obtained no degree for all their trouble. But for college graduates? The people with the most to look forward to? And to do it with a lie in which Biden participated 13 years ago about paying for Obamacare?
Hopefully, neither of these attempts to buy the votes of student borrowers will succeed. It isn’t Biden’s money to bribe people with.