The October Bribe

National Review Online

Thursday, October 24, 2024

 

If you can’t beat ’em, bribe ’em. With fewer than two weeks to go in the 2024 presidential election, and just three months left of Joe Biden’s presidency, the Biden-Harris administration has announced yet another round of student-loan “forgiveness.” Last week, the White House divulged that $4.5 billion of loans taken out by public-sector workers would be paid for by taxpayers. This week, the White House granted yet another six-month repayment freeze for up to 8 million borrowers. In total, the Biden-Harris administration has now spent $175 billion transferring or delaying student debt. Had the federal courts not stopped their other schemes, that number would have been on course to hit half a trillion.

 

That the administration is cramming in one final jubilee is of a piece with how it has approached this project from the start. Understanding that Congress would never have consented to spend that much public money in this manner, the White House has sought at every point to ensure that its conduct was excluded from the customary constitutional processes. It has rewritten unrelated statutes on the fly, declared its actions to be unreviewable in the courts, gamed the rulemaking process to serve its own ends, and, now, attempted to bind its successor to its will. After his initial plan was struck down by the Supreme Court, Biden announced that he would find another way of achieving the same end, whatever it took. He has done so, separation of powers be damned.

 

The cost of this monomania has been immense. Our deficits are greater, our debt is higher, our social trust is lesser, and our constitutional order has been damaged. There exists no majority in Congress for such a program because there exists no consensus that bailing out the most privileged members of our society is a good idea. College graduates have higher employment rates, longer marriages, better health outcomes, and greater homeownership percentages than everyone else. There is no defensible case for using our already creaking federal Treasury to send them wads of other people’s money — let alone to pay off loans they took out voluntarily and from which they have benefitted considerably. Delaying repayment and writing off debt completely costs money — hundreds of billions of dollars, in fact. It is tough to imagine a less appropriate use of it than the one with which the Biden-Harris administration has become obsessed.

 

Unless, that is, one is able to see the program for what it is: a cynical vote-buying exercise that has been informed by the personal interests of the progressive staffers who populate the White House and Naval Observatory. To an overwhelming degree, the beneficiaries of student-loan “forgiveness” coincide with the younger, middle-class, left-of-center voters that the Democratic Party needs to turn out each November. Insofar as “Bidenomics” has a guiding principle, it is to direct as much public money as possible to the people of whom the Biden-Harris administration approves, and who it hopes will return the favor. The “American Rescue Plan” fit that bill, the “Inflation Reduction Act” fit that bill, and the assortment of student-debt initiatives fits it, too. If Kamala Harris loses the election, the scheme will be brought to an end. For now, however, President Biden has made sure that it’ll get at least one, final, well-timed hurrah.