BRAVO Biden!
Latest White House plan would forgive $10,000 in student debt per borrower
White House officials are currently planning to cancel $10,000 in student debt per borrower, after months of internal deliberations over how to structure loan forgiveness for tens of millions of Americans, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
President Biden had hoped to make the announcement as soon as this weekend at the University of Delaware commencement, the people said, but that timing has changed after the massacre Tuesday in Texas.
The White House’s latest plans called for limiting debt forgiveness to Americans who earned less than $150,000 in the previous year, or less than $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, two of the people said. It was unclear whether the administration will simultaneously require interest and payments to resume at the end of August, when the current pause is scheduled to lapse.
The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the deliberations, cautioned that some details of these plans could change before the White House makes the decision official.
The likely decision follows months of uncertainty over the fate of student debt for tens of millions of Americans, with Biden at times sounding skeptical of canceling loans but under pressure from his collapsing approval ratings among young voters ahead of November’s elections. The decision will also ignite new fights between Democrats and Republicans over federal spending and could prove to be a defining issue on the campaign trail, as GOP lawmakers have already said the idea amounts to wasteful spending that primarily benefits affluent college-educated professionals.
The White House said no final determination has been made about the matter. Biden said he would come to a decision on student debt in the “next couple of weeks” on April 28, nearly a month ago.
“No decisions have been made yet,” Vedant Petal, a White House spokesman, said in a statement Thursday.
Wiping out $10,000 of debt per borrower could cost roughly $230 billion, according to estimates by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank. However, restarting payments for borrowers, which have been on hold since March 2020, would bring additional money into federal coffers. The think tank said in March that pausing payments had cost the federal government $100 billion and would run around $50 billion per year to maintain. The Washington Post had previously reported that the administration was considering making only undergraduate debt eligible for forgiveness.
The White House has been looking for economic measures it can enact without congressional approval since the collapse of Biden’s Build Back Better economic agenda at the end of last year. But while the administration has looked at polling suggesting a large majority of young voters support debt cancellation, the politics of the move remain unclear. Biden’s approval ratings on the economy have sagged amid the fastest price increases in four decades, and his plans to improve housing, health care and child poverty have been blocked by failed negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). Republicans will further pillory the decision for being made unilaterally, without Congress, and even some centrist Democrats are uneasy about the idea.
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Wenston DeSue is a realtor, organizational consultant, design, construct, build expert and developmental networker. Real estate is the business of exchange and affects every person on the planet. Real estate on all levels represents resources, access and ultimately, power. Knowledge is power…
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