By Colin Hanna, President, Let Freedom Ring
From start to finish, President Biden’s student debt relief plan is one of the most deceitful public policy proposals in American political history, and the sycophantic legacy media have helped him carry out the deceit. It was politically brilliant, while being morally bankrupt and utterly reprehensible.
The plan was announced last August as student loan “cancellation.” It was never loan cancellation. Loan cancellation can only be offered by the lender by writing down a portion of the loan to zero. The lender loses the amount of the debt written down. That’s not what this plan was. A more honest name would have been student loan debt “transfer,” because it wouldn’t have gone away at all – it simply would have been transferred from the students who borrowed the money for their education to those who did not, namely the American taxpayer. One estimate of the cost was $400 Billion, or about $2,000 to the average taxpayer. That would have been enough to produce a firestorm of objection once it was realized, although likely not until well after the political benefit had been received.
Listen to how it was described on National Public Radio: “President Biden’s announcement to forgive up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients has ignited enthusiasm from progressive Democrats lawmakers… [It] builds on the momentum from Biden’s summer successes of passing major legislation on climate, health care and veterans benefits.” NPR does note, however that “the plan’s high cost has put some moderate Democratic candidates on edge.” In other words, it was expected to be expensive and politically risky, but on balance, worth the risk.
However, as it turned out, it wasn’t expensive at all. It was free – the actual financial cost was zero, and the political benefit was 100% positive for Democrats and 100% negative for Republicans, because it was never going to happen. Biden knew it was unconstitutional and would be invalidated by the Supreme Court. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that people who believe President Joe Biden can forgive student debt on his own are misinformed. “The president can’t do it,” Pelosi said, at a press briefing. Pelosi said any student debt forgiveness would have to be carried out by Congress, and it was clear that it would fail in the Senate.
In appearing to be bold and willing to go against his fellow Democrat Pelosi, thus earning the support of the 20 million or so students with loans the size and type targeted for his program, Biden was shamelessly scamming them. He wanted to buy their support in the 2022 midterms, and he wants to keep it now for the 2024 Presidential election, but all along, he knew that it was almost guaranteed that it would fail Constitutional review.
But it gets worse: not only was he told that the Supreme Court would probably invalidate his promise, it seems probable that he actually wanted them to do so, because A, there would be no cost to taxpayers if the program were shot down, and B, he could blame the Republican-appointed Justices, thus extracting another political benefit. And that’s exactly how it’s playing out. The Supreme Court ruled, properly, that it was unconstitutional. The result was that Biden was cast as the noble advocate for the plight of poor debt-burdened students, while the media-supported demagoguery disapproved of the Republican-appointed majority Justices. Since the program was negated, there was no cost to taxpayers. Brilliant. And profoundly cynical and dishonest.
The greatest irony is that those in support of the student debt transfer proposal plan don’t realize that they were being played as fools by Biden and his political puppeteers, and the legacy media show no appetite for disclosing their mendacity.
Sometimes when a great financial scandal is uncovered, like Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme, we actually admire the cleverness of the criminal mind that conceived it. The Biden student debt relief sham is of the same ilk.