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........