The Biden administration has just announced that it is going to erase student debt for up to 40,000 borrowers. The timing of this could not be more obvious.
Just last week, a new poll from Gallup found that young voters are turning on Biden.
The Hill reported:
Biden approval ratings decline most among younger generations: GallupPresident Biden’s approval rating among younger generations of Americans has declined, according to a new Gallup poll released Thursday.The new poll found that Biden’s approval rating among millennials and Generation Z respondents had dropped nearly 20 points since the beginning of his presidency.Thirty-nine percent of Generation Z respondents said they approve of the job Biden has done as president, a 21-point decline from 60 percent of respondents who approved of Biden’s handling of the job when he first took office.Forty-one percent of millennial respondents said they approve of Biden’s job as president, a 19-point decline from 60 percent of respondents who approved of his job as president through the months of January and June 2021, his first months in the White House.
What is a president to do? Simple. Give away money.
Yahoo Finance reports:
Biden administration to erase student debt of more than 40,000 borrowersThe Biden administration continued its student loan cancellation effort on Tuesday by announcing that 40,000 borrowers would see their student loans become eligible for discharge under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and 3.6 million more will move closer towards forgiveness.The Education Department will give borrowers retroactive credit for “forbearance steering,” where student loan servicers have pushed borrowers into unnecessary interest-accruing forbearance. In another move that could help many other borrowers, the department will also take greater care to accurately track monthly payments for borrowers on income-driven repayment — which allows people who make less money to make smaller payments.The two moves bring millions of borrowers closer to forgiveness on government repayment programs.“Student loans were never meant to be a life sentence, but it’s certainly felt that way for borrowers locked out of debt relief they’re eligible for,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a press release.
To my utter amazement, Matt Lewis of the Daily Beast thinks this is a bad idea:
Let’s start with the substance. Academic research suggests that canceling student debt helps the rich more than the poor. Some people owe a lot of money—not because they are poor—but because they were wealthy enough to make bad bets. That is to say, they took out a loan to purchase what they believed would be a valuable investment that would pay dividends later (about half of all student debt is for graduate school).As The Brookings Institution’s Adam Looney noted, “Medical school graduates typically owe six-figure student loans but that doesn’t mean they are poorer than high-school graduates who did not go to college.”Should the person with the big medical school loan (for a degree that will make them millions over the course of his life) be forgiven, while the community college student who worked nights and weekends to pay for school gets nothing?On top of that, canceling student debt would only perpetuate our current (corrupt or flabby—you choose) system. In the higher education bubble, the value of most college degrees has not kept pace with skyrocketing costs.
This latest move from the Biden administration is deeply cynical and purely political.
Worse still, the far left now has Biden right where they want him on this issue. Expect them to redouble their efforts on free college and total student debt cancellation.
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