In a bid to bail out the sinking ship of his party, President Joe Biden has decided he can go ahead and bail out Americans who are having trouble paying off their student loans.
Yesterday he announced that (quoting The Epoch Times) “his administration will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off $10,000 in federal student loan debt for some borrowers,” with the Education Department giving the specifics: “individuals earning less than $125,000 a year or families earning less than $250,000 will be eligible for up to $10,000 in debt cancellation.” Pell Grant recipients in the same situation will be eligible for relief of up to twice as much.
The politic nature of the move is so obvious that … it isn’t getting enough attention from critics.
Most of those alarmed at the move concentrate on the unfairness: rewarding those who have not met their obligations and thereby penalizing those who have. Defenders of student debt relief make the usual arguments about the need to help the under-privileged — by giving them more privilege (if anything’s a privilege it is to be able to take out a loan and then not pay it back).
You may be wondering how a president can authorize spending billions of dollars. Isn’t that Congress’s job? Well, the administration has found a semi-plausible excuse — from Congress: a 2003 higher education law that allows the Education Department to provide relief in response to a national emergency.
And what is the emergency?
Pick one. Inflation, for example.
Which is spurred by overspending.
Which an extra $250 billion will merely increase.
You gotta wonder: isn’t it college graduates who cook up this stuff?
It’s ‘We the People’ who deserve not relief but a full refund.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Relief Spelled S‑U-B-S-I-D‑Y”
My wife worked 3 jobs after college and paid off every penny of her strident debt. She is beyond furious. Americans love it when the consequences of their own poor choices are paid for by the Democrats but, uh, wait, it’s other Americans that will pay and eventually those students will pay as well in other ways.
Jason Furman, the Harvard economist and former adviser to the Obama White House, said, “Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless.” As if the Fed didn’t have a tough enough job fighting inflation, whoops, here comes more money. A president that can completely bypass congress and unilaterally reduce student loan balances is the tip of a dictatorship iceberg. Biden already owns the EO record with 28 EO’s in his first two weeks. IF the GOP gains control of congress, Biden will simply use the EO to ram thru more of his socialist agenda.
There is a Reagan quote that says something to the effect of:
The more you subsidize something, the more of it you get.
“Student loan forgiveness plan has a SCOTUS problem” by Kelsy Reichman: ‘Split along party lines, the conservative majority leaned on the major questions doctrine to strike down the EPA’s regulatory scheme. This doctrine says that explicit authorization from Congress is necessary if executive agencies are taking “major” actions that will have large economic and political significance.’