Is there anything the radical left doesn’t think should be “free” for their base? For example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) thinks that taxpayers should be on the hook for nearly two trillion dollars in student loan debt — and that includes the $17,000 in student loan debt she reportedly still has to pay back.
Her attitude is endemic in the Democratic Party. Despite making $174,000 annually as a member of Congress, she thinks she is entitled to have her debt canceled.
“I’m 32 years old now,” AOC said back in December. “I have over $17,000 in student loan debt, and I didn’t go to graduate school because I knew that getting another degree would drown me in debt that I would never be able to surpass. This is unacceptable.”
She’s just one voice in the radical wing of the Democrat Party that is pushing Joe Biden to do more to “solve” the student loan crisis by “canceling” student debt and putting taxpayers on the hook instead.
“[The Biden administration] has been needlessly slow in addressing for-profit colleges and student debt servicers and too slow to provide relief to student loan debt holders,” Jeff Hauser, executive director of the left-wing Revolving Door Project, told the Washington Examiner. Hauser thinks student loans should be treated the same as bank loans in bankruptcy.
But Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute argues that there’s a good reason student loan debt is treated differently from a bank loan, especially since the government holds more than $1.5 trillion in student loans.
“The taxpayer has to pay their taxes whether they agree with it being spent on these loans or not,” McCluskey explained. “You have to remember that there are people who gave you that money who expect it back and may need it.”
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McCluskey believes that lowering the costs of higher education should be the objective of the government, not canceling the debt that students agreed to take on. This is easier said than done. Many studies have suggested that unlimited student loans are directly connected to the rising costs of tuition. Now that the government has a monopoly on student loans, it is unlikely that they will simply limit the availability of loans in order to bring market forces back into play with tuition costs.
According to the Education Data Initiative, the average borrower owes $37,113 in student loans. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) want Biden to “cancel” as much as $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower because they believe he can simply cancel the debt via executive action.
Biden, however, wants Congress to pass a bill and has a much lower figure in mind — $10,000.
That still seems unlikely. While it’s possible such a bill could pass the Democrat-controlled House, it is unlikely the bill could pass in the evenly divided Senate, especially considering how moderate Democrat Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have already been hesitant to support various bills over excessive costs.
As of now, Biden still says this is an issue Congress needs to address, but as the midterms approach, is it possible that he might try to buy votes this fall by canceling student debt via executive action?
At this point, I wouldn’t put anything past him.
