It looks like President Joe Biden’s brief honeymoon with his party’s socialist left has come to a quick end as he backpedals away from the liberal politicians he embraced as a candidate.
And now, those key members of his own party are publicly turning on him as a result.
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The reason?
He refuses to use taxpayer dollars to cancel out vast portions of the nation’s $1.5 trillion in student debt.
Speaking at a CNN town hall event during the week, Biden was asked about a plan pushed by the party’s liberal wing to erase $50,000 in student loan debt per person.
“I will not make that happen,” he said straight up. “I do think in this moment of economic pain and strain that we should be eliminating interest on the debts that are accumulated, number one, and number two, I’m prepared to write off the $10,000 debt, but not [$50,000].”
That would wipe out the student loan debt of a third of all borrowers, who owe $10,000 or less.
And it would make a significant dent in the debt of many of the rest.
But Biden said cancelling out higher levels of debt would disproportionately benefit the wealthy elites who attend the nation’s most expensive schools.
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These students, in many cases, would have no problem paying off those debts over time.
The left is unmoved by that argument.
“Who cares what school someone went to? Entire generations of working-class kids were encouraged to go into more debt under the guise of elitism. This is wrong,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Nowhere does it say we must trade-off early childhood education for student loan forgiveness. We can have both.”
She also tweeted:
Average student loan debt in the US is ~$30k (LOTS have more)
Many won’t fully feel $10k in forgiveness until after a Biden presidency is over, when they’ve spent 10 years paying off the other $20k+
Dems should be championing policy that people can feel ASAP. We need to go big.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 17, 2021
Very wealthy people already have a student loan forgiveness program. It’s called their parents.
The idea that millionaires and billionaires are willingly letting their kids drown in federal student loans & that’s why we can’t go big on forgiveness is about as silly as it sounds.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 17, 2021
Another member of “The Squad,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., said Biden can cancel out the debt without a law, by himself and with one stroke of his pen via his executive powers.
“He can and must use it,” she tweeted. “The people deserve nothing less.”
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That’s in dispute; attorneys in the Trump Administration looked into the legality of cancelling student debt at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and concluded they don’t have that authority.
But that hasn’t stopped the left from pushing for it.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. – perhaps fearing a primary challenge from Ocasio-Cortez or someone else on the left when he comes up for reelection next year – is on board as well, threatening to hold Biden’s feet to the fire on the issue.
“There is very little the president could do with the flick of the pen that would boost our economy more than canceling $50,000 in student debt,” he said earlier this month at a “Cancel Student Debt” event. “We are not going to let up until we accomplish it.”
Proponents argue that lifting the debt would benefit the economy as those people would have more disposable income to spend.
But an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds that’s not quite how it works.
Canceling all $1.5 trillion, for example, would increase economic activity by $90 billion per year.
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“Partial loan forgiveness would cost less than total but also offer a smaller economic boost,” the organization noted, adding that a better strategy is to continue to allow deferrals on payments and the cancellation of interest, policies the Trump Administration put into place during the pandemic.
That action alone, they said, “would achieve much of the economic benefit of loan cancellation at only a very small fraction of the cost.”
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert.