US President Joe Biden announces student loan relief with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona (R) on August 24, 2022 in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC. - Biden announced that most US university graduates still trying to pay off student loans will get $10,000 of relief to address a decades-old headache of massive educational debt across the country. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Over 5,000 people commented on a nationwide grassroots petition against President Joe Biden’s most recent student loan “forgiveness” scam in a single night.
Under Biden’s most recent proposal, nearly $150 billion in student loan debt would be transferred from borrowers to taxpayers in the United States. This includes borrowers who have already repaid their own loans, who worked during their education to lower or eliminate the cost of loans, and borrowers who did not attend college at all.
Miguel Cardona, the secretary of education, described the most recent proposal as a “relief for today’s borrowers,” but he made no mention of the additional taxes that the American people would have to pay. Cardona proposed that “social mobility, economic prosperity,” and “an America that lives up to its highest ideals” could be achieved by simply canceling agreed-upon loans.
Acknowledging this blatantly excessive government intrusion, which is projected to cost $475 billion, Heritage Action for America launched a web portal on Wednesday to allow citizens to contact Biden’s Education Department with their complaints. (The Heritage Foundation, the parent company of The Daily Signal, has a grassroots partner called Heritage Action.)
Since Heritage Action established the portal, feedback has been pouring in; in one night, over 5,000 comments were submitted.
According to Heritage Action’s director of digital advocacy, Thad Brock, it’s “the most rapid engagement we have seen from the grassroots on any comment portal that Heritage has launched since 2021,” as The Daily Signal reported.
This is not the first time the Biden administration has tried to work around Congress by using cliched executive directives to curry favor with people who haven’t paid back their student debts. The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Biden’s scheme to utilize COVID-19 as a pretext for student loan debt forgiveness in July 2023 by using emergency financing for the Iraq War.
The 6-3 ruling by the supreme court reaffirmed that Congress, not the executive branch, has the “power of the purse.” But the president doesn’t seem to have been deterred by the decision.
At a news appearance in California in February, Biden asserted that the Supreme Court “didn’t stop me.”
According to economists, the government’s unilateral “cancellation” of student debt would not address the soaring cost of tuition at institutions, which is partly due to the predatory federal student loan scheme, according to research.
Universities and colleges will keep raising tuition as long as there is a framework in place encouraging them to take out federal student loans, and the existing wave of student debt will be replaced shortly by a new one.
However, in order to shift the voluntary debt of over 30 million borrowers to the remaining portion of the federal tax burden, the Biden administration has presented its “SAVE Plan” as a proposed regulation pushed through by the Education Department, ignoring a congressional distinction between loans and grants in the Higher Education Act. The expected cost over the next ten years is $475 billion.
Comments on Biden’s most recent proposal to “forgive” student debt can still be made through Heritage Action’s site through May 17, which is the federal deadline.
