With the 2022 midterm elections already underway in most parts of the country, thanks to early voting, President Joe Biden’s unconstitutional unilateral student loan bailout application is landing in former students email inboxes in Maine and across the country.
It’s vote buying, plain and simple. Naked, audacious vote buying. All financed by more debt piled onto future generations of middle and lower class workers.
Biden has taken to claiming he worked with Congress to get the plan passed, but that is a lie. He did not. This was an unprecedented executive action. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was the brainchild of this plan. In an extraordinary move, she led Senate Democrats in passing a resolution asking the Biden Administration to seize congressional power to make this happen. But that resolution doesn’t make Biden’s action constitutional.
Biden’s bailout is advertised as covering $10,000 in student loan debt and up to another $10,000 for Pell Grant recipients. Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Arizona and South Carolina have all challenged the move as violating the U.S. Constitution.
The plan will cost between $300 billion to $980 billion (even the White House doesn’t really know how much), according to Penn Wharton’s analysis. The business school also found that 70 percent of the benefits would accrue to borrowers in the top 60 percent of the income distribution.
Biden originally promised that the bailout would only be available to low and middle income graduates, but the application process reveals that all income limits will be self-enforced. Note, the application states, “If requested, I will provide proof of income to the U.S. Department of Education.”
In other words, a lawyer making $250,000 per year can apply right now to have his loans wiped out and all he needs to do is promise that he meets the income requirements. The federal government hasn’t said what the fraud detection process looks like, but if it’s anything like the fraud guards in the American welfare system, the mechanics and electricians of the world are about to shoulder a whole lot of white collar debt.
Indebted Gender & Womyn’s Studies Majors who have had trouble finding meaningful employment after graduation have celebrated Biden’s decision, but those Americans without college degrees have rightly chaffed at having to off the debts of the college educated class. Will the challenges to Biden’s unconstitutional, cynical, vote buying prevail? Doubtful. If there’s anything American history teaches it’s that once a government freebie is established, it never goes away.