After the Supreme Court struck down his blatantly unconstitutional bid to have the taxpayers pick up $430 billion in student-loan debt, President Joe Biden on Friday came back with a scheme to pay off “just” $39 billion, plus unknown billions more as long as he remains in the White House.
It looks to be on firmer legal ground, but as a matter of policy and even politics it’s a giant middle finger to average Americans.
His original scheme at least would’ve meant some relief to the younger folks it was designed to please.
This one only covers some 800,000 people who’ve been paying for at least 20 years, so no one under 40 wins.
And nearly everyone over 40 (especially those who’ve kept up their payments for decades) is financially secure enough to keep paying.
These winners don’t need the help.
Biden must figure that if you were foolish enough to vote Democrat thanks to his earlier plan, maybe you won’t notice that this one doesn’t help you at all.
This is purely the White House chasing good headlines, at the cost of $40 billion in new deficit spending that can only feed the inflation the Federal Reserve has been fighting with soaring interest rates already at risk of tanking the US economy.
Not to mention that each major loan giveaway only encourages universities to keep hiking tuition and pushing kids to borrow to cover it, on the expectation that they’ll eventually get the debt forgiven.
Only 17% of Americans have any student debt, so these schemes inevitably slam the other 83%, who either paid off their loans, or never borrowed — mostly because they didn’t go to college and so don’t enjoy the higher incomes a degree leads to.
This giveaway will come as the federal Education Department “recalculates” its individual reads of who has been actually made regular payments for 20 or 25 years under various “income-driven repayment plans.”
Those plans were already generous, by the way: Your minimum payment is adjusted according to how much you earn, so many borrowers weren’t actually even paying much for many of those years.
And bureaucrats will be under pressure to err on the side of generosity, since that’s the whole point.
The taxpayers have already eaten $116 billion thanks to a three-year holiday on any student-loan payments, supposedly justified by the pandemic that ended two years ago.
None of it makes any sense except as vote-buying.
Vice President Kamala Harris calls the latest move a “historic step.”
It is: one toward turning America into a banana republic.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
