(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.
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