Editors at Issues and Insights take a critical look at President Biden’s misguided political stunt involving the widespread cancellation of college students’ accumulated loan debt.
His popularity flagging, President Joe Biden is using the oldest trick in the book to return voters to the Democrats’ fold: Don’t earn their future votes, buy them. And that’s exactly what Biden is doing with his $1 trillion plan to “forgive” student loans.
Biden had already allowed students to “postpone” paying their loans during the pandemic “emergency,” even those who have jobs and could make the payments.
So why now forgive the loans? The truth is, one of the biggest recent declines in Biden’s support comes among Americans of college age and slightly older, the very group most likely to have a pile of student loans.
What better, or more cynical, way to revive their flagging political support than to bribe them with a “free” education?
Hard-left Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley called Biden’s plan “a tremendous victory.” In fact, it is yet another betrayal of working Americans who will now be paying taxes to support rich kids’ higher education.
That’s not hyperbole. If anything, it’s understatement. As a devastating University of Chicago study conclusively shows, wealthy families disproportionately benefit from loan forgiveness programs.
A recent Fox News report summed up the study’s findings: “The top 30% of households would receive almost half of the total dollars of forgiven debt, while those in the bottom half would get a quarter of the money. And the top 10% of earners would get $5,944 in forgiveness (in today’s dollars) while those in the bottom 10% would get $1,070.”
Sound fair to you? And that was for a much smaller forgiveness program than the one now envisioned by Biden.
Congratulations, suckers. You’ll pay for it, not “the rich.”
