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“U.S. President Joe Biden said on Thursday that he will make a decision on whether to forgive some federal student loan debt and announce his plans soon. ‘I am considering dealing with some debt reduction,’ Biden told reporters. ‘I am not considering $50,000 debt reduction, but I'm in the process of taking a hard look at whether or not there will be additional debt forgiveness, and I'll have an answer on that in the next couple of weeks.’” Reuters
The right opposes canceling student debt, arguing that doing so would disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
“President Biden is on the verge of rewriting a longstanding social contract by deciding that taxpayers should repay significant portions of student loans, instead of the borrowers who took out those loans and received the education. The biggest beneficiaries would be white Americans under the age of 40 who have graduate degrees and live in high-income, majority-white neighborhoods — in other words, extremely online Democrats. Biden’s Hail Mary pass for the coming midterms is a massive wealth transfer from taxpayers to the Democratic Party’s activist class, and that will exacerbate the already-bad inflation crisis…
“Apparently, President Biden’s philosophy is to borrow and spend whatever it takes to get inflation under control. He keeps throwing larger and larger piles of money at the public and then stands in befuddled confusion, wondering why inflation keeps getting worse.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you might think that student loan cancellation is wildly popular, but a recent poll suggests that just 38 percent of young Americans support canceling student loan debt in total. Biden may win favor with this very vocal minority if he moves forward with loan forgiveness through executive action, but he also risks alienating everyone else.”
Beth Akers, American Enterprise Institute
“The Chicago Booth Review, a publication out of University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, found ‘While the highest-income groups have about twice the student debt as the lowest-income groups, research finds that across-the-board loan forgiveness would disproportionately benefit the rich, saving them well more than twice as much money’ and would make income inequality worse…
“It also doesn’t help that this handout doesn’t come with any plan on what to do going forward. The people not paying their debt today are in a great time for employment. What about the people who graduate in four years or eight? What if there’s a recession or worse? How many more university debts are we signing up to pay? If the system is broken, and it is, why continue to let it function as is?”
Karol Markowicz, Fox News“
At every level, the American college system is deranged by the government guarantees and preferment extended to student debt. At the lowest end, schools take advantage of government-guaranteed student loans to prey on service-sector workers. They market a college education as a path of upward mobility, while knowing that most of their students never graduate, or simply return to the service industry after graduation. All that these colleges do is load five-figure-earning students with debt, which is transformed into six-figure salaries for third-rate professors and administrators…
“In the great middle tier, the oceans of student debt have inspired colleges to become luxury resorts for the youth. They build endless recreational and athletic facilities, they install baroque food courts in an appalling race to offer something first-rate. These schools are increasingly trying to insert themselves as gatekeepers into fields such as turf management and catering, which never required college education before…
“If you view the top-tier colleges from their balance sheets alone, they look like enormous tax-advantaged hedge funds with minuscule vestigial educational institutions named Yale or Harvard attached to them… Forgiving student loan debt would be an act of absolution pronounced over this corruption of higher education.”
Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review
The left is divided, with some arguing in favor of cancelation, and others arguing that there are better ways to help the disadvantaged.
The left is divided, with some arguing in favor of cancelation, and others arguing that there are better ways to help the disadvantaged.
“The idea that current borrowers should be made to suffer through a record-breaking student loan crisis — at $1.73 trillion, it’s the highest it’s ever been — simply because those who came before them begrudgingly paid off their educational costs without such federal help is not a compelling reason to watch people crumble under the weight of debt…
“The argument that ‘this is how it was for me, so why should it be any easier for you’ is a lazy interpretation of — and solution for — a crisis decades in the making, as the cost of college has risen exponentially at the same time that a college degree has increasingly become a prerequisite for earning a self-supporting salary… Those who continue to complain about student loan forgiveness might wish to take stock of how fortunate they were to be able to pay off their loans while living in a far more forgiving economy…
“And while loan forgiveness programs don’t factor in people who didn’t attend college, I’m not sure how that’s a sign of unfairness. Lots of funding in our society helps specific groups rather than the whole (disabled people, older adults and public school students, to name a few) out of a sense of civic duty and the belief that a nation’s job is to assist communities in need. No one group benefits from all assistance all the time. We are smart and logical enough to understand this.”
Christina Wyman, NBC News
Others argue that "A broad cancellation would offer huge, undeserved benefits to doctors, lawyers and others who do not need taxpayers to foot the bill for their valuable educations. The vast number of American taxpayers lacking university degrees would subsidize well-heeled, white-collar professionals. And it would be expensive. Simply extending the pandemic-era pause on student loan payments for four more months, which the Biden administration did this month, will cost some $20 billion…
“Canceling student debt has become a trendy cause in left-wing circles in part because, advocates insist, Congress delegated so much power over student loans to the executive branch that the president could make this massive change with the stroke of a pen. Mr. Biden should continue to resist these irresponsible demands, even as his administration looks for ways to offer more targeted relief.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
"Across the board, student-loan advocates have centered racial justice in their demands for loan forgiveness. They cite a variety of statistics showing that Black college graduates have more student-loan debt than their white counterparts, and that they pay off their loans at a slower rate than white graduates. But the former simply reveals that Black Americans are on average poorer than white Americans, and the latter is likely because of labor-market discrimination, neither of which is addressed by student-loan cancellation…
“Although giving people any amount of money increases their chance of being able to buy a home, that’s not an argument in favor of student-debt cancellation specifically; it’s just an argument in favor of giving people money. If our elected officials are sincerely concerned about the housing-affordability crisis (which is also largely responsible for the continuing racial wealth gap), they should actually take steps to address it instead of legislating through back-door channels… The issue’s prominence in our discourse has less to do with its merits than the changing political landscape that has stymied legislative efforts and given college graduates agenda-setting power.”
Jerusalem Demsas, The Atlantic
