Biden Admin on Student Loans: Never Mind

What do you do with a nine-figure pander after you lose an election? Cut loose, if you’re Joe Biden, or whoever is running the Oval Office in his name. The effort to “forgive” student loans en masse has come to a screeching halt now that Biden and Kamala Harris do not need to buy votes any longer.

Taxpayers can now breathe easier, for the most part:

The Biden administration is officially withdrawing its sweeping proposals to cancel student debt for tens of millions of Americans, effectively closing the door on mass loan forgiveness in the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency.

The Education Department said in a notice Friday that it was rescinding two of its major pending proposals to cancel student debt, one of which was already preemptively blocked by a federal judge in a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general. …

The withdrawn proposals — which together contemplated some loan forgiveness for at least 38 million Americans — had been billed as Biden’s “Plan B” for wiping out large amounts of student debt after the Supreme Court in 2023 rejected his initial relief plan.

What’s with all of the Plans B and C these days? Perhaps we should find officeholders who can get it right on Plan A in the future.

Amusingly, this comes after Biden actually did offer up a Plan C. Yesterday, the White House announced that they would spend over $4 billion in student-loan relief for bureaucrats, separate from these two efforts:

The Biden administration announced Friday the approval of $4.28 billion in additional student loan relief for 54,900 borrowers across the country who work in public service.

This relief brings the total loan forgiveness by the administration to approximately $180 billion for nearly 5 million Americans, according to the Education Department.

If anything, this is even worse than the programs that Biden’s now ditching. First off, it comes at the very end of his lame-duck term, offered up as an Up Yours to his political opponents. Mostly, though, the attempt to provide another benefit for the bureaucrat class comes just six weeks after voters made their feelings about the bureaucrat class crystal clear. Biden has responded by ensuring those same voters hold the bag for the elites in power. 

It’s an ignominious yet revealing end to the Biden-Harris campaign to woo younger voters to support their ticket. Biden spent almost his entire presidency attempting to accomplish this wealth transfer from those who got the benefit of that education to less-well-off taxpayers who either paid their own way, paid off their loans, or never went to college at all. 

No good reason was ever given for this “forgiveness” (in reality, just sticking someone else with the bill) except that the debt was somehow unjust. They also never explained how exactly the debt was unjust when (a) Democrats promoted these student loans, (b) Barack Obama seized control of student loans more than a decade ago, and (c) Democrat allies in Academia benefited most from them. To hear Biden et al discuss student-loan debt, one might have gotten the impression that it was the result of a Republican plot, when the exact opposite was and is true. 

Since neither Biden nor (likely) Harris will need to pander for votes in the future, Biden’s cutting young voters loose. Except for the bureaucrats. Res ipsa loquitur, suckers.