The
president’s
loan forgiveness plan is narrow
and paltry—and his
administration’s preparation to
fend off outraged criticism from
both sides of the aisle speaks
volumes.
President Joe Biden has just
launched a plan to forgive a
portion of federal college loan
debt for millions of Americans. In
a speech
from the White House, he explained
that the Department of Education
would “forgive $10,000 in
outstanding federal student loans”
and that Pell Grant recipients
would “have their debt reduced
[by] $20,000.” Only those making
less than $125,000 a year would
qualify for the relief. Given that
the average
student
debt is nearly $30,000,
this certainly does not erase the
burden that millions of Americans
carry with them—some doing so for
life, from graduation to past
retirement.
There is a predictable pattern to
Democratic leaders taking
progressive economic measures.
First, make bold promises. Then,
delay keeping the promise and
eventually land on a weakened
version of the promise.
Congratulate oneself on taking
such a bold stand. And, finally,
face a massive outpouring of
criticism from conservative and
even liberal pundits, and from
some Democrats and all
Republicans, that would have come
no matter what version of the
promise was kept. Biden’s journey
on student loan forgiveness
follows this depressing pattern.
When campaigning for president,
Biden promised
that he would “eliminate your
student debt if you come from a
family [making less] than $125,000
and went to a public university,”
and that everyone would get
“$10,000 knocked off of their
student debt.”
It took Biden more than two years
to land on a plan that forgives
only $10,000 to $20,000 of debt,
and that too, for a narrowly
defined group of borrowers. During
those two years, he resorted to delaying
tactics
such as punting responsibility
back to Congress, questioning his
own authority to take the step,
and claiming to be reviewing his
options.
House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi
played her part in discouraging
Biden by claiming a year ago that
he did not have the presidential
authority to cancel student debt.
She said, “The president can’t do
it—so that’s not even a
discussion,” and added, “Not
everybody realizes that, but the
president can only postpone, delay
but not forgive” student loans.
Still, according to Politico,
the White House regularly received
so many letters from people
demanding student debt relief that
staff were eventually asked to
stop passing them on to the
president for review as he
agonized over keeping even a small
part of his campaign promise.
When he finally landed on his
paltry plan, Biden announced it to
great fanfare in a 20-minute speech
that began with a meandering dive
into his own family background and
the story of his father’s shame at
trying and failing to obtain a
loan so he could fund his son’s
college education. Biden reminded
Americans that as a presidential
candidate, he “made a commitment
that we’d provide student debt
relief,” but failed to mention
that his original promise had
extended far beyond what he took
two years to deliver. As if
acknowledging that his plan is
hardly radical, Biden said, “Some
think it’s too little,” and added,
“But I believe my plan is
responsible and fair.”
Cue the outrage from politicians
and pundits. Senate Minority
Leader Mitch
McConnell
(R-KY) called Biden’s plan
“student loan socialism” and “a
slap in the face to working
Americans,” while extremist
Republican Congresswoman Marjorie
Taylor
Greene
told Newsmax, “taxpayers that
never took out a student loan…
shouldn’t have to pay off the
great big student loan debt for
some college student that piled up
massive debt going to some Ivy
League school.”
Former Republican
lawmaker-turned-pundit Charlie
Dent
denounced the plan in an op-ed on
CNN.com as “unfair and unwise,”
while the Washington Post’s
liberal commentator Catherine
Rampell
took a creative approach in
claiming it was a “Democratic
version of ‘trickle-down’
economics,” because “plenty of
other, less-strapped people will
enjoy a windfall, too.”
The Biden administration, to its
credit, immediately began
identifying Republican criticism
on Twitter
and tagging it with the exact
amounts of Paycheck Protection
Program (PPP) loans that those
critics received and were
forgiven.
This implies that the president
was expecting the outrage. It also
means that if he was going to pay
a political price for such a small
measure of relief, he could have,
and should have, gone so much
further than he did.
Biden’s plan does deserve
criticism, but not because it goes
too far—on the contrary, it does
far too little, especially for
people of color.
Academic, activist, and former
Ohio State Senator Nina Turner put
Biden’s debt relief program into
context succinctly on Twitter,
saying, “Canceling $10,000 in
student debt when the average
white borrower is $12,000 in debt,
while Black women hold on average
over $52,000 isn’t just
unacceptable, it’s structural
racism.”
She’s right. A 2021 ACLU
analysis
pointed out that “Black families
have far less wealth to draw on to
pay for college,” and therefore,
“Black families are more likely to
borrow, to borrow more, and to
have trouble in repayment.” Such
analysis of the loan forgiveness
plan appears to be entirely
missing from the mainstream
debate.
Establishment critics are also
failing to point out that the
reason so many Americans are
burdened with so much college debt
to begin with is that there has
been a concerted effort over
several decades by both liberal
and conservative politicians to
allow student debt to expand to
unsustainable levels.
Chief among this was Ronald
Reagan’s push to lower government
spending in the 1980s. Black
studies professor Devin Fergus explained
how “No federal program suffered
deeper cuts than student aid,” and
that “these changes shifted the
federal government’s focus from
providing students higher
education grants to providing
loans.” Fergus’s analysis—so
relevant to the current debate
over Biden’s debt forgiveness
plan—was part of an op-ed that the
Washington Post published back in
2014.
Additionally, Democrats are not
innocent in creating the problem.
The
Intercept
pointed out in January 2020 how
Biden “played a central role” in
supporting legislation during his
tenure as senator that allowed
college debt to balloon.
Specifically, “Biden was one of
the most enthusiastic supporters
of the disastrous 2005 bankruptcy
bill that made it nearly
impossible for borrowers to reduce
their student loan debt.”
Today, with college loan debt at
an all-time
high,
and a majority
of Americans supporting the
erasure of some or all student
debt, the supposedly liberal party
cannot
even
coalesce
around its own president’s
far-too-modest debt forgiveness
program, with so-called centrists
like Senator Catherine Cortez
Masto of Nevada and Congressman
Tim Ryan of Ohio claiming it goes
too far.
Those who are invested in the
upward mobility of wealth will
always express outrage against
economic justice. Responding to
his critics, the president tweeted,
“I will never apologize for
helping America’s middle
class—especially not to the same
folks who voted for a $2 trillion
tax cut for the wealthy and giant
corporations that racked up the
deficit.”
Biden could have doubled or
tripled the extent of his debt
forgiveness plan and made the
exact same retort.
This
commentary
was produced by Economy
for
All,
a project of the Independent Media
Institute.