National Review Online
Thursday,
February 22, 2024
If President
Biden were to spend even half as much energy trying to secure our southern
border as he is spending finding ways to transfer the debts of American college
graduates to the taxpayer, the flow of illegal immigrants would by this point
have slowed to a trickle. On Wednesday in Los Angeles, the president announced that 153,000 more borrowers will have their student loans “canceled”
— which, in practice, means paid by the people who didn’t take them out and
spend them — at a cost of $1.2 billion. In January, Biden “canceled”
74,000 loans, at a cost of $5 billion, bringing the total cost to that
point to more than $130 billion. By the time he is finished, Penn
Wharton records, the president will have spent $475 billion on the
program. Never, in the history of buying votes, have so many been so fleeced
for so few.
Last
year, the Supreme Court held that Biden’s effort to “cancel” up to $20,000 for
every borrower in the United States was illegal — a fact that Biden knew all
too well. Astonishingly, he responded to this rebuke with rank defiance, vowing that he would “stop at nothing to find other
ways” to achieve the same aim. And so he has. Biden delivered the news to the
affected students in an email that contains five uses of the word “my” and
five uses of the word “I,” and is signed “Joe Biden,” but at no point refers to
“Congress” or the “legislature.” This, suffice it to say, is not how the United
States government is supposed to work — especially when it is
transferring nearly half a trillion dollars from one group of citizens to
another. At best, Biden has found a way to achieve piecemeal what he was
prohibited from achieving in one fell swoop. At worst, Biden is thumbing his
nose at his oath to uphold the Constitution. Either way, it is a disgrace — and
all the more so coming from a president who promised to restore American norms.
As
policy, the move is absurd. The notion that college graduates needed massive
subsidization was ridiculous enough during the worst days of Covid-19, but now?
After the pandemic has passed? The idea is insulting. “Don’t tell me what
you value,” President Biden likes to say. “Show me your budget, and I’ll
tell you what you value.” Well, two can play that game. At the
time of writing, the national debt stood at $34,270,642,133,307. By current projections,
the 2024 federal budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion. That,
against this disastrous backdrop, President Biden believes that his fiscal
priority ought to be shoveling money to people with the privilege of a
college education is incredible. Per the Pew Research Center, there exists “a growing earnings
gap between young college graduates and their counterparts without
degrees,” and that gap only “widened as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.”
College graduates have better employment prospects, better health outcomes, and lower divorce rates than everyone else. Despite this,
the federal government chose to spend around a quarter of a trillion dollars during the
pandemic on an unnecessary pause in student-loan repayments. Now it wants to
double that number with an amnesty?
Quite
why Biden is so obsessed with this course of action is never fully explained.
In his letter, he says that he wants “to fix student loan programs,” but, of
course, he has done no such thing. He has made no effort to reduce the cost of
college, he has proposed no changes to the way higher education works, and he
has done nothing that affects the funding mechanisms for anyone outside of the
current tranche of debtors. Elsewhere, he insists that debts represent “a
barrier to opportunity.” But he does not extend that logic anywhere else.
Business loans make life more difficult for their holders, as do mortgages and
car payments. That, in spite of this, he has exhibited a monomaniacal focus on
college students — and in particular on graduate students, who hold 56 percent of all student debt — suggests that
the only “opportunity” in which Biden is interested is the opportunity to shore
up his political base in an election year. One way or another, he must pay a
price for it. We already have.
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