Biden Tells Congressional Hispanic Caucus He’s Open to Cancelling ‘Substantial Amount’ of Student Loan Debt
“The move could affect more than 43 million borrowers who hold more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loan debt”
As Joe Biden sinks in the polls with pretty much every voter bloc, he is signaling that he’s open to forgiving more student loan debt.
He made this clear during a recent meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
CBS News reports:
Biden tells Congressional Hispanic Caucus he’s looking at forgiving some federal student loan debt
President Biden is looking at different options to forgive an unspecified but substantial amount of federal student loan debt — a move that would thrill some of his most loyal supporters and financially strapped students nationwide, but is a departure from campaign pledges to provide limited relief.
The president shared his plans during a 90-minute White House meeting Monday with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, participants in the exchange tell CBS News. The move could affect more than 43 million borrowers who hold more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loan debt, the second-largest debt held by Americans, behind mortgages.
Rep. Tony Cardenas, Democrat of California, who attended the meeting, said the president is open to forgiving debt for college students regardless of whether they attended a public or private institution.
“The president never mentioned an amount nor did the president say that he was going to wipe out all student debt,” Cardenas said. “He did a dialogue with us about the differential between young people who went to public schools or private schools and we CHC members said he should focus on both. And he said, ‘Okay, good to know.'”
CNN has more on this:
During a meeting with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus on Monday, President Joe Biden appeared “positive” about the idea of forgiving at least $10,000 in Americans’ student loan debt but did not make a definite commitment on the matter, according to a congresswoman in the room.
California Democratic Rep. Nanette Barragán told CNN on Tuesday that Biden and the Democrats had discussed the scope of such a plan — including whether it would include public and private institutions — but that the White House made no commitment nor specified a time frame for taking such a step.
Her comments on the discussion come amid reports that Biden strongly indicated during the meeting that he would take action on the issue through executive authority.
Some people on the left are positively giddy about this.
Not $10k
Not $50kCancel all student debt.
— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) April 26, 2022
It’s time for @POTUS to cancel ALL student debt. RT if you agree!
— Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) April 26, 2022
.@POTUS has the power to transform the lives of millions of Americans by canceling student debt.
The payment pause has been a lifeline — and it’s time to deliver permanent relief.
Cancel student debt, Mr. President. https://t.co/K7KwpU6g8Q— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) April 26, 2022
It’s a terrible idea.
Why should a trucker who didn't go to college have to pay off a lawyer's student loan debt?
Because that is what Biden is proposing when he says he will "forgive" student loan debt.
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) April 26, 2022
This one will backfire more than anything he's done. https://t.co/EIhrjQKUqS
— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) April 26, 2022
Frankly, considering Biden’s poll numbers, this looks like nothing more than an attempt to buy votes.
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“this looks like nothing more than an attempt to buy votes.”
Really? I dunno. How many of these student loan borrowers ever vote for anyone but Democrats, anyway?
So unfair: someone I know who got into financial trouble had their student loans involuntarily collected/repaid by docking their income tax refunds, when they could have really used the money to climb out of the hole they were in. Everyone else I know actually repaid their loans by . . . working! and making payments! What a concept.
Same here…defaulted on a student loan in 1984 and didn’t get a federal tax refund until 1989.
It’s more of a turnout game at this point.
It took me 15 years in active duty to get my BS (and that was only 75%); then my MS on GI Bill (at 60%). No problem, I am proud to have served, but there is/was an understanding the government makes with service members and veterans.
I can’t think of many more bad ideas in so many levels…
Lest there be any confusion, there are NO Republican members of this so called “Congressional Hispanic Caucus”.
Which is why Biden had no qualms about offering them such an obvious bribe.
Wouldn’t this throw more gasoline on the inflation fire, giving more spending ability to those freed up of debt? Also, I am not sure how well it would go over politically. My wife, who worked through college to have as little debt as possible and paid it off quickly, is angry about this. It would aggravate inequality of wealth distribution, as the debt is obviously held more by the higher paid people who went to college and less by the lower paid people who did not. Finally, it would instantly add $1.6 trillion to the Federal debt – when we are already getting to the point where we can’t even pay the interest on what we already have (mentioned repeatedly in talk of higher interest rates to deal with inflation).
Look at who is running the country. Would not all the bad outcomes you list also fall on the list of things that they desire?
Subotai Bahadur
They aren’t canceling the debt, they are transferring it to all of us.
This has me livid. My kids started paying their student loans freshman year, $50/mo, so they wouldn’t be buried in interest debt after four years of school. All three had their loans fully paid in three years.
Where is THEIR restitution?
You and your kids follow the rules. Nuts to you. That’s how it works today and there won’t be a single Republican with the guts to stand up and fight this.
Engineering degrees currently run about $40k+ per year now, and if you’re IDed as right wing, you will be ejected from the university one way or another.
The problem is that universities have been able to use gov’t guarantees to loan out tremendous amounts of money, and transfer all risk that those loans may not be repaid to the tax-payer.
If there is a student loan forgiveness, it needs to come out of an excess profits tax on all the Universities that looted that money in the first place.
Or to put it bluntly, your kids paid back exactly 1.5% of a current STEM student’s tuition during their entire 4 years of school. At a 2% yearly compounding interest rate, I’m thinking the would be a about $5.5k further away from paying off their debt than when they started.
They aren’t even making minimum payments.
Comprehension and calculation not your strong suit. My undertanding is they started to pay in their freshman year. That suggests a culture of payment according to their means. In their freshman year, their liabilities won’t be ” a current STEM student’s tuition during their entire 4 years” anyway, and as their earnings increase their ability to repay will commensurately increase.
Like Marx wrote – “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”.
That assumes they borrowed their entire tuition, which wouldn’t make sense with the facts given. Plenty of students have partial scholarships, Pell grants, savings, mom & dad, and/or they work while in school. They take loans only to make ends meet when they are short.
In this case they obviously paid back what they borrowed as soon as they could and are to be commended for that.
They had scholarships, and we put in $10k annually. The average tuition was $55k/yr, They were allowed, by us, to work ten hours a week. Skin in the game, but school came first. We gave them $100/mo sending money; after that, they were on their own. $50/mo, right off the bat, really chews through the principal. Our kids did not qualify for subsidized loans.
Professor Charles W. Kingsfield must be rolling in his grave right now.
I have somewhere slightly north of $125k in student loan debt from my undergrad and law school combined, and I’m working on paying it off. It’ll take decades probably, but I knew what I was getting into.
I assume that you were well aware that the entire amount plus interest was part of a contract that you agreed to, you were not forced into borrowing that amount of money.
You got an alternative for being a lawyer or engineer?
That’s on the low end.
Doesn’t matter. When someone takes out that loan, they sign a legal contract of their own free will. They don’t get to change their mind later and try to steal from me to pay it back.
I saw a local news article claiming that inflation was partially caused by Biden’s “hot” economy. Yet, he is pausing student loan repayment and talking about loan cancellation because college graduates can’t find jobs or make money. Which is it? Is the economy hot with worker shortages, or are college graduates unable to find jobs and make money in this “hot” economy.
The hot economy is all the millenials sitting in the basement smoking weed while they are working.
If this isn’t buying votes what is?
OK, cancel the debt, and let the colleges eat it. They’re can afford it better than we can. Most of them are sitting on millions or billions in endowments. Or, maybe it’ll force them to lay off a few thousand overpaid and under-worked woke faculty.
The colleges already got their money.
Good luck explaining this giveaway to the average folks without a degree or who hold one they paid for themselves using GI Bill benefits or as adult learners busting their hump in early morning and evening classes built around their full-time jobs.
Just another case of the government playing their favorite game of “let’s you and him fight”
Their policies screwed students so the universities could stuff their coffers, and now that it has gotten to the point that they’ve trashed an entire generation, they’re going to rob a third faction to ‘fix’ it.
Any student loan ‘fix’ that does not involve the universities losing their un-dischargabel loan racket is a fraud designed to launder more taxpayer money into Democrat coffers.
Do not let the left play squirrel by blaming this on the students they’ve destroyed. This is *entirely* driven by the universities cash cowing teenagers and the schools being all to happy to set them up for the shearing.
True, but it’s more than that. As CT struck down testing as bad because disparate impact employers began to use JUCO and Undergraduate degrees as indirect markers. Now that has expanded in many cases to MA/MS as the equivalent of a BA/BS of the late 1980’s or early 1990’s.
That served as an additional push factor in bloated college admissions beyond the cultural middle-class of obtaining white collar employment. Consider the WWII generation’s use of GI Bill to allow it unprecedented access to college. Most of them were the first in their family to graduate college and they set a standard for their kids (boomers) and grandkids (gen x).
Infrastructure and physical plant had to be built and faculty hired to meet expansion and demand. Then came a flood of fees added on top of tuition but couldn’t make ends meet so Colleges decided to replace retiring faculty with low paid adjuncts. Then with huge expansion of Pell grants and federal loans Katy bar the door on tuition increases.
BLUF is perhaps 25% of the population can handle University level concepts and work and probably closer to 18-20%. Not every job needs a degree nor does everyone need to graduate to be successful. Plenty of good paying jobs exist without any requirement for a degree. It’s past time to adjust funding back to the mean.
Plenty of jobs exist that should not require a college degree, but do, anyways.
Did you now airlines will not hire pilots who do not have a bachelors degree? You, of course, need the flight hours in appropriate types, and the requisite safety record regardless, but they won’t even look at an applicant who does not also have a degree in something. Doesn’t have to actually have anything to do with flying the plane, but they have to have a degree, or they can’t possibly handle any position in an airliner’s flight crew…
Yes indeed, that’s what I was touching on; use of college degree as a proxy for aptitude, ability, perseverance and intelligence. That’s a substantial driver on the demand side.
There are many components that went into creating the mess of higher ed; it’s not all the fault of big ed. Some are cultural, some are in response to CT rulings. Lot’s of unintended consequences from others that go along with the very bad intent of big ed and big ed is more than happy to exploit them to continue their grift.
If you’re hiring somebody with no real work experience, but one candidate has an actual degree and the other doesn’t, as much as we harp and carp about degrees being useless, the guy with the degree is getting the spot because at least in theory he has been able to set a schedule, accomplish tasks given to him on time, etc…
I don’t think the situation you describe exists very often; Two candidates, everything else equal and one with a degree. That means both are 22 years old so one went to college and graduated while the other did what? Sit at their Parents home for four years? Did a 4 year hitch in the Army? Worked up to asst manager at Mickey D?
I don’t know what your undergrad experience was but mine had two extremes. I graduated from a military JUCO on an ROTC scholly via the Army early commission program. Lots of structure and discipline. Very straight laced and no fun allowed; if you got caught that is.
Then I went to Bama to finish my undergraduate work. Joined a Frat, lived in the Frat House to save money. Party every day but Sunday and that was low key drinking to recover from the previous week. I jammed as much drunken debotchery into those final two years as possible. Granted that was post active duty enlisted time and a no fun of any kind military college so I had some six years of repressed oats to sow.
A degree in something like “gender studies” is not worth the sheepskin it is written on. I would hire the person with no experience; at least they are willing to learn, lack an attitude of “superiority,” or “entitlement,” and probably use normal pronouns.
Those getting the GI bill benefits earned those via service to their country, even today you can get your education paid for in exchange for service, too bad that too few go that route.
Yes indeed the GI Bill is an earned benefit as I can personally attest. As is the option at enlistment to choose student loan forgiveness in exchange for a longer contract and no bonus. One impact of unilateral student loan forgiveness is that it would devalue those programs as well as in service tuition assistance programs.
I went a slightly different route. I had 2 years of college (and reserve duty) before I went active duty. At the time the rules allowed me to delay my student loan payments while I was active.
I recall an admin officer looking at me like I just crapped on his desk when he found out I had student loans. “People like YOU are why my kids can’t get a student loan!”
“Sir, I deploy back to Beirut in a week. You get your kids in here to replace me on this tour and I’ll get busy paying that loan off.”
Priceless!
10%
Government saw that university got their cash already, it’s the government funded loans being forgiven and that means me and you are paying the deadbeats for their 17th Century Transgender poetry degree
Yup. Tell all the blue-collar workers who couldn’t afford to go to college that they need to pay higher taxes to pay off the loans of the people who got useless college degrees (gender studies, sociology, Afro, etc).
How much you want to bet if any debt gets “forgiven,” it’ll apply to POC exclusively?
That’s the obvious implication of him saying so in front of the Hispanic Caucus. Plus I don’t think it will be paid for for in the Federal budget, his handlers will monetize that $1.6 trillion and inflate the currency some more, another opportunity to take down the US.
No, that’s not possible. Any forgiveness will have to apply to all races equally.
Is that how Affirmative Action works?
Never say never when it comes to politics.
Torn on this. Most of me is daring Biden to do this, as it will open the door for blowback wide enough to let an 18-wheeler thru. Part of me decries the damage it will do. Either way, I expect the campaign ads in opposition are already in the can (or wherever they put them these days). Cheers –
“How to build a society of snowflakes.” by the Biden Regime and the Democrat Socialists.
With a forward by Cloward and Piven. Cameos by all the failed socialist/communist states. A cast of millions of the impoverished and disappeared.