By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
If President Joe Biden follows through on his threat to unilaterally “cancel” all, or
any, of the $1.7 trillion in federally held student-loan debt, the
Republican Party must respond to the move by taking an industrial-grade
flamethrower to the status quo until it is reduced to ashes. What Biden is
considering would be an act of political, economic, and constitutional
warfare, and Republicans at both the federal and state levels would be obliged
to immediately treat it as such by salting the earth as soon as they possibly
can.
The first step for the GOP to take would be ending the
student-loan program completely. Given the obvious political
temptations that program was always going to create, the federal
government should never have gotten into the student-loan business in the first
place. But it did, and so here we are. If President Biden goes through with his
threat, we will have been shown once and for all that the government cannot be
trusted to issue these loans on behalf of America’s taxpayers, and that it must
not be allowed to do so again. In 2010, Congress authorized a loan program, not
a system of politically motivated rolling jubilees. If the program becomes that
— as it would under Biden’s loan-forgiveness scheme — it must be killed. Such a
repeal would not only inoculate Americans against this happening again, it
would help to limit the government-created increases in tuition that,
paradoxically, are being used to justify further federal action.
Second, a GOP-led Washington, D.C., would have to get the
Treasury to recoup the “forgiven” loans so that non-graduates — a majority of
Americans — didn’t end up paying for the commercial products that graduates
freely chose to buy. There are many potential sources for that money, including
the beneficiaries themselves. Tax them. Tax the universities they went to; tax
the enormous endowments those universities enjoy; tax as income any gifts those
universities are given, however small; and, where possible, remove the
nonprofit status of donations so that those who give gain no fiscal advantage.
When all that is done, sue the worst offenders for fraud. Clearly, if the
government is required to bail out every college graduate in the country,
colleges are not doing what they promised they were doing, and they must be
immediately investigated. You can’t have it both ways. The current unemployment
rate for college graduates is 2 percent, and their incomes are well above
average. If those facts are a sign that college is working well for its
customers, then there’s no need for a taxpayer bailout. If those facts are
irrelevant, then something is very, very wrong with the higher-education
sector, and it must be rethought from the ground up.
Third, the federal GOP would have to tie up the move in
litigation in every way possible. Neither the American constitutional system
nor any of the statutes that Congress has placed on the books give the
executive branch the power to single-handedly spend $1.5 trillion of taxpayers’
money in this way. The Department of Education has already confirmed that the president “does not have
statutory authority to provide blanket or mass cancellation, compromise,
discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances, and/or to
materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof,” and nothing has
changed since that declaration. Joe Biden knows this. The Republican Party
knows this. Everybody knows this, including those demanding to be let out of
their obligations. If the president cannot abide by the oath he took to uphold
the law, he must be forced to do so by the courts, or, if necessary, by
Congress. If the issue is deemed non-justiciable, Biden must be impeached.
At the state level, Republicans would have to respond by
destroying the overzealous accreditation system that helped to create this
mess, and by considering whether it is a good idea to treat would-be college
students differently than, say, would-be roofers, plumbers, or entrepreneurs.
Most jobs do not — and should not — require degrees, and Republican state
legislatures should nuke any public-sector certification requirements that
cannot stand up to review. A college degree can be enormously helpful, but it
can also be enormously useless, as the call for student-loan “cancellation” has
made clear. There can be no way out of this mess — that is, there can be no way
for prospective students to accurately weigh whether going to college is in
their interest — if governments simply assume that their job
is to encourage and pay for university attendance. If they wish to create a
more rational incentive structure, Republican-run states will need to address
this problem head-on.
Ultimately, our public officials have two choices: They
can either allow the current situation to resolve itself via the time-tested
method of supply and demand, or they can admit that there is a massive problem
in American higher education and end the status quo as we know it. They cannot
do both. To foist all of the existing debt on innocent taxpayers and then to
start the same disastrous process all over again would be an act of
incomprehensible vandalism. If, in a moment of dramatic cowardice, this
president takes that course, he, and those who benefited from his folly, must
be made to reap the whirlwind.
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