With your help, we’ll keep focusing on the facts that get in the way of this administration’s malarkey, on student loans and more.
The Biden administration has stumbled into some great luck. As if by magic, the White House discovered $9 billion just lying around, and, through the miracle of “fixes” to income-driven repayment plans, Biden’s Department of Education has discovered that it can apply these funds to the president’s goal of forgiving student-loan debt. “Guess what?” the White House’s surly social-media account growled. “It also grows the economy. Benefits everybody. Hurts nobody.”
Only an education in civics, government, and constitutional propriety reveals just how wrong the president’s hucksters are. That’s what we at National Review are here for. It’s our jobs to expose the fallacies to which Democrats have grown so attached, and we want to keep doing our jobs. But we need your help in that mission, and ask if you would consider donating as part of our ongoing webathon.
In return, we’ll keep focusing on the facts that get in the way of the weapons-grade malarkey the Biden administration uses to justify its overreach. For instance: Using taxpayer funds to provide student-loan borrowers with the ability to avoid paying their debts doesn’t contribute to economic growth. The theory that contributes to the notion that forgiving student debts stimulates demand by allowing more people access to more discretionary income overstates the amount of debt this maneuver is designed to relieve. Regardless of the wisdom of stimulating demand at a time when persistent inflation is being fueled by excess demand, the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes that “student debt cancellation would be an ineffective form of stimulus, providing a small boost to the near-term economy relative to the cost.” Moreover, the tax liabilities associated with relief ensure that its stimulative effect will be close to zero. And these estimates were predicated on the assumption of mass debt relief, not piecemeal sums like these.
Nor does the Biden administration’s plan “benefit everybody.” To comply with the Supreme Court’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska, which blocked executive agencies from modifying the law on their own to cancel borrowers’ debt obligations, the White House can dispense this relief to only a narrow band of recipients. The lion’s share of the funds will go toward relief for government employees and public-sector union members. The White House’s claim is defensible only if by “everybody” they mean the Democratic Party’s most reliable voters.
That conclusion puts the lie to the White House’s final contention: that this debt-relief proposal “hurts nobody.” Even beyond that, this pigheaded claim rejects the notion that there are tradeoffs in life. This miniature version of the president’s defunct student-loan-forgiveness plan nonetheless still punishes responsible borrowers by abrogating the contract to which they consented — but only for the connected few upon whom the White House relies. Not only that, there’s evidence that the student-loan-repayment moratorium hurt borrowers by distorting their impression of their own financial obligations, leading them to take on even more consumer debt.
These are things National Review readers know. It’s information that prepares you to engage with the people in your life who assume that there are no downsides to the Biden administration’s efforts to curry favor with degree holders and other interest groups. And our writers have been on the case for a long time. Charles C. W. Cooke has devoted his considerable skills to illustrating the rotten philosophy at the core of Biden’s desires. Jim Geraghty has demonstrated the political perfidy in the White House’s approach to debt relief. Dan McLaughlin has exposed the sophistry in the legal arguments on offer from the administration’s defenders. Rich Lowry, Dominic Pino, Phil Klein, and so many more talented National Review writers exposed Biden’s student-loan duplicity. But we cannot provide these valuable analyses without your continued support.
Please consider contributing to our webathon so we can continue to keep this administration in check.
