Joe Biden would have made a great Medieval torturer. He is sadistically carving up student loan debt sliver by sliver, piece by piece, until the American taxpayer cries out in pain and despair.
Almost a year ago, in June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that Joe Biden did not possess the power to forgive half a trillion dollars in student loans. That power, the court said, is reserved for Congress.
That didn’t stop Biden. In total, the U.S. Department of Education has canceled almost $160 billion in federal student loan debt for nearly 4.6 million borrowers since that decision. Biden has vastly expanded some programs not meant to forgive billions of dollars, and reinterpreted other programs to get rid of the rest.
He’s being challenged, of course. But the courts are slow and Biden is counting on the Supreme Court being confronted with a fait accompli as millions of borrowers will already have the bulk of their student loan debt forgiven. He’s hoping the Supreme Court won’t force these students to repay debt that’s already been forgiven.
It’s a good bet he’s right.
Now Biden is once again waving his magic wand and making billions of dollars in student loan debt disappear.
“From day one of my administration, I promised to fight to ensure higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “I will never stop working to cancel student debt — no matter how many times Republican-elected officials try to stop us.”
It’s not “Republican elected officials” who are stopping you from just disappearing $1.6 trillion in debt. It’s the Supreme Court of the United States. And higher education is only a “barrier” when students are allowed to take on far more debt than they can ever repay.
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The latest relief will go to borrowers in three categories who hit certain milestones that make them eligible for cancellation. It will go to 54,000 borrowers who are enrolled in Biden’s new income-driven repayment plan, along with 39,000 enrolled in earlier income-driven plans, and about 67,000 who are eligible through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
Biden’s new payment plan, known as the SAVE Plan, offers a faster path to forgiveness than earlier versions. More people are now becoming eligible for loan cancellation as they hit 10 years of payments, a new finish line that’s a decade sooner than what borrowers faced in the past.
We have yet to hear an acknowledgment from Biden that he’s screwing over students who either never went to college or did the right thing and worked their butts off to pay their loans back.
Not only that, the entire Biden plan is one, big, regressive tax on the poor.
Biden’s student debt cancellation policy is regressive, which means it disproportionately benefits people who least need welfare. According to a recent analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget model, under a previous version of* Biden’s debt forgiveness plan “about 70 percent of debt relief accrues to borrowers in the top 60 percent of the income distribution.”
Is it any wonder that non-college graduates favor Trump by nearly 30 points over Biden?