On Student Loans, Joe Biden Is in Thrall to the Most Radical, Most Selfish Voices in America

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, June 01, 2022

 

Mother Jones confirms that President Biden’s apparent determination to break the law and transfer hundreds of billions of dollars of student loan debt to taxpayers is the result of relentless agitation by some of the most selfish and outlandish people in these United States. In a piece lauding “Debt Collective,” America’s first “debtors’ union,” the magazine notes that, “over the last decade,” the group

 

has laid crucial organizing and legal groundwork that has helped shift the terms of debate around the idea of canceling student loans. They’ve helped to transform the concept from a fringe pipe dream into a near political inevitability.

 

This is wrong, of course. President Biden may, indeed, be considering doing what Debt Collective has asked. But that does not mean that what they have asked is not “fringe,” and it most certainly does not change the fact that it is flatly illegal.

 

Seriously, just listen to these people:

 

“The idea that these debts aren’t carved in stone, which is what they feel like—changing that as a norm has to start somewhere, and they started it,” says Eileen Connor, a Debt Collective collaborator who directs litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

 

What absolute nonsense. This really isn’t that difficult to grasp: If you take out loans to pay for a service you want, you must pay those loans back in full per the schedule you agree to when you took out those loans. Americans with student-loan debt have borrowed that money from taxpayers. If they don’t pay it back, those taxpayers will have to eat the cost. Not only is that unjust, it’s entirely self-serving. Amazingly enough, taxpayers don’t seem to be covered by the “not carved in stone” standard that Debt Collective has invented out of whole cloth. That builder who didn’t go to college, but who is now saddled with someone else’s debt? He still has to pay his taxes. As far as the IRS is concerned, those taxes are “carved in stone.”

 

Of course, to the college students who wish to freeload off everyone else, such people simply don’t matter:

 

The two-year payment freeze has created relief for debtors and, collective members say, proved that the federal government can get along fine without student loan revenue.

 

What? What? Where do these people think money comes from? Every dollar that isn’t paid back has to come from somewhere else — either in the form of taxes on everyone else, or in the form of yet more federal debt. It gets boring pointing this out, but the case for student-loan transference is no more noble than that some people would like other people to give them lots of money. That’s it. That’s the whole policy. They borrowed money to pay for a service. They got — and benefited from — that service. And now they’d like someone else to write them a big check so that they don’t have to keep their side of the bargain. It’s utterly revolting.

 

If this were actually to happen, the Republican Party must scorch the earth in response. Massive structural reform would be inevitable — if we can no longer expect student debt to be paid back, we must stop issuing it — as would the recouping of whatever money President Biden illegally spends. You know what else could be “uncarved” in pursuit of that end? Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment, that’s what. If this is the game we’re playing now, the next Republican Congress should “start somewhere” and take it all. You know, to “change norms” — or whatever.