(The Daily Signal)—Past is prologue when it comes to the student-loan policy of progressive grandees. Hoping to hear an adoring public applaud one last time, the Biden-Harris administration released a fourth round of rules canceling student-loan debt on Oct. 25.
First came the mammoth $430 billion plan birthed before the ’22 midterms that made the student loans of 40 million borrowers eligible for cancellation.
That died the following spring at the Supreme Court only to be succeeded by the “Saving on a Valuable Education” plan, which drastically reduced the income borrowers must contribute toward repaying their loans at an estimated 10-year cost of $475 billion.
SAVE, which two Democrat-appointed judges enjoined in April, was then followed by four related rules canceling the debts of borrowers who have spent a long time in repayment without actually repaying their loans.
The latest proposal is another example of the administration’s ingrained reflex to respond to its own unpopularity with spending. Although the general objections to it are familiar, still, specific features of the latest plan are worth examining, especially because of their timing.
At this stage, the proposed rules would not be finalized until 2025. Moreover, the rules’ stated pretension is to provide an avenue for debt cancellation for “student loan borrowers for generations to come.”
The rules create two new paths for cancellation: a one-time automatic cancellation initiated by the secretary of education for loans at risk of default and an ongoing option that borrowers can access by application that “holistically” demonstrates the borrower’s hardship.
Purportedly, these address borrower needs not “sufficiently” covered in the preceding rounds of rulemaking or by readily available loan deferrals. That may be the closest the administration gets to acknowledging the redundancy of its plan that layers forgiveness atop forgiveness.
Much like the previous efforts, there’s a good deal of dissonance in how the administration presents the rule to different audiences. The Department of Education heralds the rules publicly as a courageous achievement, power procured through a righteous fight to provide “hope to millions of struggling Americans,” something no other administration has done before.
At least that last bit is true. But the rules themselves attempt to speak softly and modestly to a mostly legal audience, insisting that they are not the creation of some strange new power, but only a specification of how the secretary intends to apply the discretion that he has always had.
And though the rule is supposed to help “millions,” the secretary assures would-be critics that he will exercise his discretion only in “relatively rare” circumstances where “the costs of enforcing the full amount of the debt are not justified by the expected benefits.”
So, rest assured, dear taxpayer, these rules will save you money despite all appearances that your money is being given away.
Officious paternalism works tolerably well as a description of the rules’ tenor. The administration promises to anticipate and address borrower needs before they even arise by authorizing the Department of Education to cancel loans automatically if the department deems them at risk of defaulting.
How does the department make that determination? By consulting a “non-exhaustive” 17-factor list, of course. How else?
The borrowers the administration hopes to assist are evidently so distressed that they have not even bothered to apply for relief. Perhaps after years of COVID-19-based transfer payments and the gratuitous benefits of previous loan pauses and cancellations, borrowers are just accustomed to receiving without asking.
But then it falls to the rest of us to ask: Does any other segment of the population receive this much financial solicitude from the federal government?
The proposal’s most audacious quality is not its indulgent attitude toward borrowers, but its insouciance toward the matter of legal authority.
Since it took office, the Biden-Harris administration has combed the statutes for the few stray words they could morph into transformational debt-cancelling authority.
To date, they’re still searching for a rationale that would satisfy a judge. But the fact is, they are out of plausible alternatives, so they are recycling the same tortured reading of the Higher Education Act used to justify two of the preceding attempts.
Courts have already previewed the merits of this argument: Two Democrat-appointed judges have found that opponents of the rules are “likely to succeed on the merits” of their legal challenges. But that has in no way dissuaded the administration from this fourth attempt because the administration refuses to take the hint.
In the twilight of Biden-Harris administration, its policy approach resembles a movie studio that has misunderstood its audience and run out of ideas to keep them engaged.
These rules are sequels that appeal only to the most niche audience—the coalition of organizations dedicated to the abolition of student debt and their enablers within the Department of Education.
With the broader American audience, the approach is a liability. A poll conducted by University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy found that 40% of Americans “strongly disapprove” of the Biden-Harris administration’s repeated intrigues to transfer student debt to taxpayers. Another poll from the libertarian Cato Institute found that roughly 70% of Americans disapprove of student-loan cancellation when apprised of its effects on taxes and inflation.
Nevertheless, the administration persists in offering the same non-cure for the student-debt ailment. Despite the administration’s professed interest in addressing “root causes,” these rules, like their predecessors, barely acknowledge, let alone address, the variables that have made higher education such a debt-intensive undertaking or the variables that make the American economy one in which it is difficult for borrowers to repay the burdens they have assumed.
Instead, it cues up another installment of bourgeois socialism, a redistribution of monies to those who have spent too much money to attain fewer privileges than they would like.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
