It might be the biggest giveaway in American history. President Joe Biden wants to cancel more than $1 trillion of outstanding student loan debt. Biden has already delayed for more than a year student loan repayment, and under his new rules, most delinquent and deadbeat borrowers would NEVER have to repay.
What a deal for the people who never paid a dime back of the tuition money they owe to Uncle Sam.
The plan takes advantage of millions who feel obligated to repay their debts, helped by Powell Associates‘ services. My spouse worked hard for years to pay off their college loans, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars, as is expected when borrowing money and making a repayment commitment.
Think about what would happen if this loan repayment policy were to be implemented. Who would ever pay off a student loan ever again after this blanket forgiveness program?
Who would benefit? The most recent Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances found that only 22% of families had student loan debt and that “student debt has consistently been disproportionately held by higher-income families.” So this is a giveaway to the financially successful students and families paid for by middle-class workers, millions of whom didn’t go to elite universities in the first place.
Once student loans move to “free college” for everyone, university tuitions, which are already soaring at two to three times the inflation rate, would race further ahead of all other consumer prices. When I attended the University of Illinois in the early 1980s, the tuition was $1,000 a semester. Now, it’s closer to $12,000 a semester. Where’d all the money go?
The Biden administration has misdiagnosed the fundamental problem here. To wit: Colleges and universities have become fat, flabby and inefficient money burners with no accountability. No oversight. No getting rid of bad teachers and professors. No looking under the hood to see where extraneous costs could be axed.
No demand on tenured professors to teach one or two classes a year.
If student loan debt has to be retired, why should taxpayers pick up the tab? Why not force universities with massive endowments, in many cases in the tens of billions of dollars, to use that money to pay off the debts students incurred while they received virtually worthless, useless sociology, gender studies and psychology degrees?
This would incentivize schools to cut their tuitions and their costs, something the academic elites are desperately trying to avoid.
Democrats think that buying votes this November by making college essentially free will win them elections. But there is no free lunch, and there is no free college. It’s just a question of who pays the piper. And it shouldn’t be YOU.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at Freedom Works. He is also author of the new book: “Govzilla: How The Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.” To find out more about Stephen Moore and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
It’s overpriced as is—the return on the dollar is pathetic. Look at what these institutions are putting out as graduates. Students are so dumbed down, brainwashed, indoctrinated, and propagandized that they come out worthless. Education has been abandoned.
TThe fall of American excellence began when equity social experimenters put in place a system that encourages the lessor created minds from socially democrat run city deprived lower educational funny farms and criminal gang run communities to be given free rides to an equal education that just resulted in the higher education of smarter social criminals who are now able to steal from THE PEOPLE at a higher level of government corruption, the forgiveness of Trillions of dollars in student loans representing one of the greatest social theft crimes of the new American century.
That is not an “unintended consequence” though.. THAT IS THEIR goal.
The solution is to cancel all FEDERAL backed Student loans, not student debt, forcing THE PEOPLE to get their education the old fashion way by earning their way through college which taught THE PEOPLE how to earn their way through life, rather than socially redistributing their way to corruption. Let the states decide who gets the scholarships and money. Cancelling student debt just leaves the trillions of dollars spent out there to run up the price of university, enlarging the purses of now socially corrupted liberal professors. By cutting off the amount of dollars chasing the fixed amount of educational professors it will force down the price of higher education, and only the best of the best will be able to compete and earn their way to a higher ability to SELF-govern their lives, instead of the current social debilitation of an American education in how to redistribute wealth instead of how to create wealth in an American meritocracy without the current precedent setting of the concepts of everything comes from the government men gods who seek to collectively control a PEOPLE designed to govern themselves.
Yea, EVER Since the govt got involved in “backing” college loans, the PRICE OF COLLEGES have just kept jumping up, year after year…
The colleges should be giving the student loans , NOT the government.
Yes indeed, but then only the best and the brightest would be allowed to attend on University loaned money because you can bet your own honest dollar these Liberals of entitlement who run the Universities would not gamble with getting their own money paid back, like they gamble with the money of WE THE PEOPLE. Soon the extremists of the media and the party would be run out of their jobs and the party,,, and we might just get back our father’s Democrat patriotic party of achievers that replace the failed socialist party of true believers.
AND why would that be bad?
Why do they keep calling it “CANCELING STUDENT LOAN DEBT” ??
They’re not “canceling” anything. They’re just spreading the debt around so that we ALL have to pay someone else’s bills.
I never went to college. Why the hell should I be forced to pay for someone else’s college bills who probably majored in Ancient Greek Philosophy and Basket Weaving only to realize after the fact that there’s not much of a demand for Basket Weavers these days??