POTATUS Busying Burnin’ Down the Fiscal House

More student loan forgiveness on his way out the door, wwweeeee!

In his final days in office, President Joe Biden announced that his administration would forgive student debt for more than 150,000 borrowers.

That relief includes will go to 85,000 people who attended schools that “cheated and defrauded their students,” 61,000 borrowers with a total and permanent disability, and another 6,100 public service workers, Biden said in a statement.

“Since Day One of my Administration, I promised to ensure higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity, and I’m proud to say we have forgiven more student loan debt than any other administration in history,” Biden said.

Since Biden took office, he has forgiven debt for more than 5 million federal student loan borrowers, totaling $183.6 billion in relief.

It’s just money – who needs it? Who’ll even notice when you’re talking about numbers like these?

The Biden Admin just announced another round of student loan relief.

This is putting the tax burden on people who never signed up for it.pic.twitter.com/okyLBqIqJu

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) January 13, 2025

I have to admit, I did get kind of a kick out of the giveaways to students who’d been “cheated and defrauded” by their universities. I wonder if any student loan holders are from Bernie Sanders’ wife Jane’s late great institution.

You know, the one she drove into the dirt.

…In 2010, as president and would-be savior of Burlington College — a tiny alternative school without a campus in this small offbeat city — Ms. Sanders championed a deal to buy a waterfront spread from the local Roman Catholic diocese. Within a year, she was ousted, and the college limped toward obsolescence, buried under debt.

Then the story of the failing college turned into a political storm.

A local Republican grandee financed a commercial in 2014 attacking Ms. Sanders’s $200,000 severance as a “golden parachute.” As her husband, Senator Bernie Sanders, ran for president in 2016, the Clinton campaign included the episode in the opposition research it circulated, with the heading “O’Meara Sanders beleaguered tenure.”

It was a moderately pricey little liberal arts school (the old tuition info I can find has it running about $24K for tuition, and they were dropping it by thousands to try to attract students the last couple of years). Mrs. Sanders thought she could make it prettier and pricier. These socialists are big dreamers as long as it’s other people’s money.

…In 2010, she had worked out a $10 million deal for the college to buy 32 acres of waterfront land in Burlington on Lake Champlain and a 77,000-square-foot former orphanage and administrative offices of Vermont’s Roman Catholic Church, which needed the money to settle a series of priest sex abuse cases

Jane Sanders, a longtime political adviser to her husband, promised at the time that the deal would be paid for with increases in enrollment and about $2.7 million in donations. She left the school a year later. The enrollment increase and the promised donations didn’t happen and by 2014, the college had about $11 million debt. It sold much of the waterfront land and closed in 2016.

 Then the place shut down, and these kids had to try to find new schools that would accept their credits AND the tuition they’d been paying. Mrs Sanders jonesed them twice.

…Tarwerdi says he discovered he could not enroll at his Burlington College tuition rate, which was less than $24,000 per year, and he got the impression he’d have to pay a much higher tuition at Marlboro.

…Meanwhile, Marlboro officials say depending on a student’s situation, tuition might be comparable to Burlington College.

They say no promises were made to Burlington College officials that students would be accepted automatically, although they’re offering more flexibility to help them.

“There has been some misunderstanding about what agreement we have with Burlington College,” says senior associate provost Michelle Miller. “It’s not automatic admission and it’s not all of their credits will transfer.”

…It seems among schools with higher tuition, only Green Mountain College has agreed to match Burlington College tuition as well as “fast-track” applications – although acceptance will not be automatic there either, as promised in the emails to Burlington College students.

It’s so funny when they talk about schools defrauding students; they always go for the online, for-profit universities – Phoenix is a particular favorite – and no one ever mentions Jane Sanders.

Today’s action has even Politico calling it for what it is, not remotely trying to justify it anymore as “earned.”

It’s a gift but from you and me – not POTATUS. And it looks like there may well be more in the ‘borrower defense’ forgiveness pipeline with mere days to go.

Biden’s parting gift: Student loan debt relief

More than 5 million borrowers have had loans forgiven since the president took office.

…House and Senate requests: Lawmakers have been pressuring the Biden administration to forgive student debt for borrowers who have been defrauded by their colleges through the borrower defense rule.

Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and more than 70 of their colleagues sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in December asking him to “immediately discharge the student loans for the hundreds of thousands of students who the Department has already committed to providing borrower defense debt relief.”

The rule has been around since 1994, but borrower defense applications became more common in 2015 after revelations of widespread fraud led to the collapse of Corinthian Colleges, one of the country’s largest chains of for-profit colleges. Now there is an application backlog.

Every last check written to one of these people is one more Biden stick-in-the-eye to folks who couldn’t afford to go to school, went and paid their loans off, or, like major dad, and I ate cheeseburgers to be able to write checks for Ebola’s local community college and state university tuition.

He wasn’t going to Columbia on our dime for the same education.

Biden uses loophole to illegally spend $183 billion of middle-class tax dollars to payoff a relatively wealthy group of deadbeats. Folks don’t like the term, but I spent 10 years eating canned food to pay off mine…as millions of others did…and it bugs me https://t.co/lgcyrYLESH

— David Asman (@DavidAsmanfox) January 13, 2025

I don’t know if y’all realize the Biden administration’s been busy wiping out medical debt, too.

I don’t know why this doesn’t bother more people.
You likely already paid for the student loans for most in the medical profession.
Now government is using your money to pay them for treating people.
Pay attention please. pic.twitter.com/yjRKwu7Exw

— Frog Capital (@FrogNews) January 7, 2025

I don’t find that quite as egregious because no one asks to have a heart attack or get hit by a bus, but they do decide to go to a pricey, big-name college over their state university. And let the student loans pick up the difference in the tab between what they can afford and what they want to do.

Harkening back to Jane Sanders’ doomed school. For all the info online about tuition and related costs at about $33K a year, there’s also an average starting salary for graduates…of $24K.

It would take forever to pay back a loan like that.

No wonder they don’t emphasize math skills.

We just have to survive seven more days ’til the sugar daddy’s gone.