Inez Feltscher Stepman explores the impact of President Biden’s student loan forgiveness policy.
This may be the first direct bailout of student loan debtors, but it surely won’t be the last. In just four years, student loan debt will be right back to where it is today, and we will have the same debate over what to do about it.
The proposal has been talked up by its supporters in terms of fairness and compassion. Leftist darling and failed congressional candidate Nina Turner went even further, tweeting that there are no arguments against debt forgiveness not “rooted in cruelty.” As with so much of our political discourse, nearly the opposite is true.
Biden’s debt forgiveness plan is no exercise in compassion for the poor. Rather, it’s grossly unfair to people who never took out loans, or who paid them off. Moreover, it’s a crass exercise in rewarding your political supporters at the expense of your enemies, and a finger in the eye to the working- and middle-class Americans footing the bill so that lawyers and administrators can benefit.
The obvious political dimension of this forgiveness program is dramatized by the fact that the Biden administration will potentially be granting debt relief to more than half of its own employees. But even if they don’t work in the Biden White House or live in Washington, D.C., the beneficiaries of this federal largesse are the Democrats’ true constituency: woke managerial elites staffing agencies, administrative jobs, and the DEI and HR departments in Fortune 500 corporations. The true one percent are too rich to care, but the top quartile will happily accept its payout in this massive vote buying scheme, while making life both financially and culturally more hostile for the rest of America.
The most significant beneficiaries of these bailouts, however, are America’s universities. No major household expense has more explosively soared than college tuition.
