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‘Expensive mistake’: Media that once touted student loan forgiveness expresses regret as reality sinks in

August 26, 2022 | | Print Article

Once upon a time, the liberal media was in love with the idea of current President Joe Biden forgiving student debt. But with the president having since unilaterally nixed $10,000 to $20,000 of debt per eligible American, they’re having second thoughts.

“‘Student loan forgiveness’ has long been discussed in political and academic circles, but it particularly became a hot-button issue in the media as progressive Democrats, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as well as future President Biden, made it a key portion of their 2020 platforms,” Fox News notes.

At the time, everybody in the left-wing press loved it. The love only grew once President Biden took office, with MSNBC’s Joy Reid arguing that those against it were creating “moral hazard argument against helping people” and MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle accusing the administration of kicking the issue down the road.

Well, the can is no longer being kicked, but quite ironically, the media are still unhappy, albeit for an entirely different reason.

To hear The Washington Post’s editorial board tell it, Biden’s student loan forgiveness “is a regressive, expensive mistake” that “takes money from the broader tax base, mostly made up of workers who did not go to college, to subsidize the education debt of people with valuable degrees.”

The Post’s board also notes that the student loan forgiveness cancels out the deficit savings from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which as a reminder raises taxes on all Americans to pay for a bunch of climate change initiatives.

“[T]hese policies would nullify nearly a decade’s worth of deficit reduction from the Inflation Reduction Act,” the board notes.

Indeed, according to the conservative National Taxpayers Union Foundation, “the federal government will need to figure out a way in the future to make up for the forgiven loans, whether it be spending cuts or tax hikes,” as reported by Fox News.

In other words, expect even more tax hikes from this administration.

And then there’s the legal aspect.

“Moreover, it is unclear that the 1965 Higher Education Act even grants the president the legal authority to take such a sweeping step, given that it was historically understood to permit only more targeted relief,” according to the Post.

That’s putting it lightly.

Legal experts reportedly say the president’s actions, including his unilateral cancelling of student debt, demonstrates that he boasts a “chilling regard” for constitutional limitations.

“President Biden is something of a constitutional recidivist when it comes to executive overreach. He has been repeatedly found to have violated the Constitution in his unilateral use of executive powers,” one expert, Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, told Fox News.

Turley is particularly disturbed by the disingenuous tactic used by Biden to unilaterally eliminate student debt.

He specifically used the HEROES Act, a Bush-era law that was designed “to ensure military members fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan would not be penalized in repaying their federal student aid loans.”

And he justified his use of the HEROES ACT, which was formed amid the Sept. 11th emergency, by claiming the COVID pandemic is still an emergency.

“It was not long ago the administration was telling courts that the pandemic was effectively over in order to stop the use of Title 42 at the border. It’s now claiming that the pandemic is raging in order to justify this massive debt cancellation,” Turley said, taking note of the administration’s hypocrisy and double standards.

Mike Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations to the Senate Judiciary Committee, is also perturbed by Biden’s use of emergency powers.

“In order to pass constitutional muster, Congress’s delegation of emergency powers to any president must be carefully defined. They can’t have an open-ended national emergency,” he said to Fox News.

Dovetailing back to the media, even some at CNN have complained about the president’s student debt forgiveness.

During a Wednesday segment of host Don Lemon’s show, commentator Catherine Rampell slammed it as an epic waste of money, especially since it’s mostly going to help upper-class Americans.

“Do we really want to be spending all of this money? God bless the work that doctors do, but are they the neediest population here? And so, I think it sort of represents a failure of imagination to think about how you could target those who are affected, and there are the other things the Biden administration is doing to try to target those people, but this is a very, very expensive way to deal with a problem that ends up giving a lot of money to people who don’t really need it,” she said.

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Vivek Saxena
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