CNN is out with a piece that strikes back at those knocking Joe Biden on student loans actions…
A LOT of people think he hasn’t doesn’t nearly enough…
The piece below advances things from Biden’s point of view….
The Democratic President IS under YUGE pressure from his own party people to do more and his polling numbers ARE hurting with the Midterms coming up….
Joe Biden has canceled more student loan debt than any other President — a notable fact that’s flown under the radar.
Taking a piecemeal approach, the Biden administration has expanded existing loan forgiveness programs for borrowers who work in the public sector, those who were defrauded by for-profit colleges and borrowers who are now permanently disabled.
Those moves have delivered significant relief to more than 700,000 borrowers, totaling more than $17 billion.
Yet some voters feel misled by the President, who had supported canceling $10,000 for each of the 43 million federal student loan borrowers while on the campaign trail….
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Biden is also facing a drumbeat of pressure from some key Democratic lawmakers who are urging him to do more and cancel $50,000 per borrower.
That puts Biden in a tough political spot as federal student loan payments are set to resume May 1 after a two-year, pandemic-related pause. Biden could decide to extend the pause again, a move that could please borrowers in a midterm election year who are struggling with rising inflation.
But not every Democrat thinks it’s a good idea to broadly cancel student debt, and some economists warn that extending the payment pause could make inflation worse.
“I think it’s important to keep in mind that there is far from a consensus viewpoint among Democratic members of Congress and Democratic voters that large sums of debt should be canceled,” said Michelle Dimino, an education senior policy adviser at Third Way, a think tank that promotes center-left ideas….
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The progressive wing of the Democratic party was pushing for student debt cancellation long before the pandemic. Born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a grassroots organization known as the Debt Collective organized its first “student debt strike” in 2015.
But it was still a fringe issue until 2019 when Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, soon followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, put forth proposals to broadly cancel student debt.
About a year ago, a Monmouth University poll found that 61% of adults supported canceling $10,000 in college debt for anyone with an outstanding federal loan. Fewer people, 45%, supported canceling $50,000 in debt per borrower.
Biden has never been all-in on broadly canceling student debt. But he made it clear during the presidential campaign, after the Covid-19 pandemic began, that he was in support of some federal student debt cancellation…
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Advocates for student debt cancellation argue that it would help close the racial wealth gap because Black students are more likely to take on student debt, borrow larger amounts and take longer paying them off than their White peers.
But some economists criticize student debt cancellation proposals as regressive, using taxpayer dollars to disproportionately benefit higher-wealth households because they tend to have more student debt. While it would have a big financial benefit for many, partial student loan cancellation is expected to have a only a modest effect on immediately boosting the economy since it would do little to increase the amount of cash households have to spend.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that canceling all federal student loan debt would cost roughly $1.6 trillion, canceling $50,000 per borrower would cost between $675 billion to $1 trillion, and canceling $10,000 per borrower would cost between $210 billion and $280 billion.
Canceling existing student debt would also do little to help future college students, borrowers who have already paid off their loans and those who never went to college in the first place.
More on Biden and Student Loan pressure…
There are also various loan types to consider. While the federal government issues about 92 percent of all student loans, 8 percent are owned by private banks and only managed by the government. Another 8 million borrowers collectively owe $175 billion in commercially owned student loans, data shows.
A 2019 Moody’s analysis estimated loan cancellation could result in $86 billion in lost revenue from student loan principle, interest, and fees.
A report from the Urban Institute also notes cancelling student loan debt would gradually increase the national debt as the money has already been disbursed through the Treasury Department and eventually will not be paid back at the expected due date.
“Forgiveness means that money that the government thought was going to come in a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, isn’t coming in,” Donald Marron, director of economic policy initiatives at the Urban Institute and coauthor of the report, told Changing America.
The federal government could pull funding from other programs to offset potential losses, but not all programs are on the table, Marron explained. Social security, for example, falls under trust fund guardrails that prevent the government from diverting those dollars elsewhere for different purposes….
More…