Biden's Student Debt Cancellation Is Misguided and Illegal

President Biden decided this week to allocate $500 billion of taxpayer money to cancel a portion of student debt, in yet another example of woke ideology crushing the American people.  While many progressives are demanding Biden go even further, the action will do nothing to address skyrocketing college tuition costs, while simultaneously harming our economy, increasing inflation, adding billions in new debt, and actually increasing the cost of college for future generations. At its core, this action is absurdly unfair to every American.

According to the White House, this act will cancel $10,000 of student debt for anybody earning below $125,000 per year (or for married couples, $250,000).  That amount is doubled for Pell grant recipients.  Who pays for it? Every American taxpayer, regardless of whether they had to pay off their own student loans or even went to college.

First, this waiving of debt is illegal.  Biden doesn’t actually have the authority to do this; Nancy Pelosi even said so. The Administration conjured up this power by invoking the HEROES Act, a nearly 20-year-old piece of legislation,written in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, whose purpose was primarily to provide student loan relief during a war or other military operation to active-duty members of the military.  The Biden Administration has now perverted this legislation and used the so-called “national emergency” of COVID-19 to cancel student debt for those who didn’t serve in our military.  This gets even more absurd when you remember that Biden’s team claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic was over when it wanted to end Title 42 and allow illegal immigrants to flood our southern border.

But leaving aside the legal issues, Biden's action will actually encourage the skyrocketing cost of higher education.  According to College Board, tuition at private, 4-year institutions has doubled in the past 30 years, even when adjusting for inflation.  Tuition at public 4-year institutions has gone up by 2.5 times what it was during the ’91-’92 school year.  Rather than find ways to cut costs and make their degrees more affordable for Americans, our higher education institutions are content to continue raising their prices each year.  Why are costs rising so sharply? It is attributable to several reasons – administrative bloat outpacing actual spending on education, rising foreign student enrollment, and most importantly, easy access to student loans.  This act does nothing to address these factors, and instead encourages people to take on unsustainable debt in the belief that the federal government will bail them out in the future.  The Administration just said to every college, “It’s ok to raise your prices by $10,000.”

This is not debt forgiveness. It is a massive subsidy to liberal professors and universities, and an attempt to buy the votes of younger voters who have been souring on an old Joe Biden.  The higher education industry in America is almost entirely progressive, and a policy like this is nothing more than a $500 billion giveaway to a special interest group and a bribe to the young progressives whom Democrats have long had in their pocket.  We should remember, too, that this is being done amid historic inflation.  Pumping this much money into our economy at this point will only compound the problem and drive inflation higher!  Some economists estimate that this could add to inflation and may cost average taxpayers a minimum of $2,000.

Like always, Washington politicians take the photo op, but the American people are the ones who pay the bill.  Safe in the knowledge that the government will be willing to forgive the increased amount, universities will undoubtedly jack up their tuition costs by another $10-20,000, most likely to pay for yet another gender studies program no one needs (which, in turn, will fuel more administrative bloat, as the leviathan of human resource departments are the only places looking for such degrees).  All this is entirely unfair to future generations of students, who will be forced to take on additional debt and then rely on even bigger government handouts to dig themselves out.

The critical problem with Biden’s plan, though, is not that it is illegal or even that it will only make the problem it claims to address worse.  No, the fundamental flaw here is simply that it is unfair.  It is grossly, maddeningly unfair.  The responsibility to pay off debt falls to the borrower, and to the borrower alone. It’s hardly a novel idea that if you borrow money, you should pay it back.  Millions of Americans do this every year on home mortgages or car loans.  Why should student loans be treated any differently?  Biden’s policy now forces the duty to pay off debt onto responsible individuals who either worked extremely hard to pay off their own student loans, or chose to forego college altogether rather than take on debt they could not afford to pay back. These Americans did everything right and made sensible decisions.  They got no help from the government through handouts.  Yet they will now have to pay off the debts of others, just so the Biden Administration can grease its political allies.  Those who make less should not be asked to pay back loans of those who are supposed to make more with a college education. It should anger each and every American, no matter your political views, that the Biden Administration is now demanding this.

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