Follow this authorCharles Lane's opinions
Follow
Actually, it was too clever by half. If anything, an objective compare-and-contrast between Biden’s student loan plan and the business loan program at issue, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), would favor Biden’s critics.
Congress created PPP in March 2020, as companies all over the country were shutting down — not because of a business-cycle recession, but because governments told their workers and customers to stay home lest they spread a deadly virus.
PPP’s purpose was urgent and universally accepted: to help small businesses and nonprofits survive a sudden shock, for which they bore no responsibility, and that otherwise could result in millions of permanent layoffs. It offered funds to help cover payroll, including benefits, as well as mortgage interest, rent and utilities. The ultimate cost was roughly $800 billion.
Advertisement
Though the aid took the nominal form of two-year, low-interest loans, delivered through banks, the law anticipated that the vast majority of the money would not — indeed should not — be paid back, to maximize participation in the program.
Instead, businesses could get debt forgiveness based on little more than a written assurance that they had used the money for its intended purposes. Firms linked to 13 Republican members of Congress qualified (as did a few with ties to Democrats). The list includes Rep. Greg Pence (Ind.), former vice president Mike Pence’s brother ($79,441), and — before her election — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) ($182,300).
Republicans definitely invited Biden’s trolling by their sanctimonious denunciation of his student loan plan when it launched. The Twitter account of House Judiciary Committee Republicans harrumphed, “If you take out a loan, you pay it back. Period.”
Advertisement
Still, there was no substantive self-contradiction. PPP was a loan in name only, characterized that way mainly as an intentionally modest check on outright fraud.
Students who borrowed from the government, by contrast, made a choice, albeit one constrained by the high cost of tuition, based on their own sense of the personal costs and benefits.
They were on notice of the loans’ terms and conditions, which include paying interest and principal, penalties for nonpayment — but also ways to reduce the burden such as income-based repayment plans. The vast majority of student borrowers were actually current on their loans before the pandemic, according to the New York Fed.
Unlike the PPP statute’s clear language on debt forgiveness, the statutory authority for wholesale relief of the kind Biden offered was murky. He has based it on a strained interpretation of a post-9/11 law, the pretty clear intention of which was to help service members with student debt on an individualized basis.
Advertisement
Any day now, the Supreme Court will rule on the Biden plan’s legality. The justices’ comments at oral argument in February implied that Biden’s best hope of winning is not a substantive ruling that he properly interpreted the law but a process point: that the states challenging his plan lack standing to sue.
In that regard, he and other Democrats are vulnerable to whataboutism. Biden opted for the big debt relief plan in the midst of the 2022 election campaign, having previously expressed doubts about his legal power to do it in February 2021; then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also insisted in July 2021 that there could be no large-scale debt relief without a new law.
And she fretted about such a policy’s fairness, perceived and actual: “Suppose … your child just decided at this time … not … to go to college but you’re paying taxes to forgive somebody else’s obligations. You may not be happy about that,” she said — words the GOP, not unjustifiably, has thrown back in Democrats’ faces.
Advertisement
Such arguments resonate in red states and purple districts, which is probably why Democratic Reps. Jared Golden (Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), and Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) joined the GOP in voting to overturn Biden’s plan. The White House should have spent more time developing a truly persuasive response and less time owning MAGA on Twitter.
CommentsGiftOutlineGift Article
Popular opinions articles
HAND CURATED
- Opinion|Trump and those classified documents: An indictment unlike any otherJune 8, 2023Opinion|Trump and those classified documents: An indictment unlike any otherJune 8, 2023
- Opinion|The Ukrainian offensive is beginning. David Petraeus is optimistic.June 9, 2023Opinion|The Ukrainian offensive is beginning. David Petraeus is optimistic.June 9, 2023
- Opinion|Amid Canadian wildfire haze, a clear message about climate change emergesJune 8, 2023Opinion|Amid Canadian wildfire haze, a clear message about climate change emergesJune 8, 2023
View 3 more stories
Loading...
View more
As is true of many policies, there are strong arguments to be made for President Biden’s $379 billion student debt forgiveness plan, and not-so strong ones.
On Wednesday, the president resorted to the latter as he vetoed a congressional resolution that would have overturned his plan. The measure had passed both chambers by narrow majorities consisting mostly — but not entirely — of Republicans. (The vote took place under a special law that barred a Senate filibuster.)
“It is a shame for working families across the country that lawmakers continue to pursue this unprecedented attempt to deny critical relief to millions of their own constituents,” Biden wrote in his veto message, “even as several of these same lawmakers have had tens of thousands of dollars of their own business loans forgiven by the Federal Government.”
White House officials seem enamored of this talking point, which they debuted on Twitter during the loan relief rollout in August 2022, to the progressive Twitterati’s delight. “This is the best White House trolling ever!” one exulted.
Actually, it was too clever by half. If anything, an objective compare-and-contrast between Biden’s student loan plan and the business loan program at issue, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), would favor Biden’s critics.
Congress created PPP in March 2020, as companies all over the country were shutting down — not because of a business-cycle recession, but because governments told their workers and customers to stay home lest they spread a deadly virus.
PPP’s purpose was urgent and universally accepted: to help small businesses and nonprofits survive a sudden shock, for which they bore no responsibility, and that otherwise could result in millions of permanent layoffs. It offered funds to help cover payroll, including benefits, as well as mortgage interest, rent and utilities. The ultimate cost was roughly $800 billion.
Though the aid took the nominal form of two-year, low-interest loans, delivered through banks, the law anticipated that the vast majority of the money would not — indeed should not — be paid back, to maximize participation in the program.
Instead, businesses could get debt forgiveness based on little more than a written assurance that they had used the money for its intended purposes. Firms linked to 13 Republican members of Congress qualified (as did a few with ties to Democrats). The list includes Rep. Greg Pence (Ind.), former vice president Mike Pence’s brother ($79,441), and — before her election — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) ($182,300).
Republicans definitely invited Biden’s trolling by their sanctimonious denunciation of his student loan plan when it launched. The Twitter account of House Judiciary Committee Republicans harrumphed, “If you take out a loan, you pay it back. Period.”
Still, there was no substantive self-contradiction. PPP was a loan in name only, characterized that way mainly as an intentionally modest check on outright fraud.
Students who borrowed from the government, by contrast, made a choice, albeit one constrained by the high cost of tuition, based on their own sense of the personal costs and benefits.
They were on notice of the loans’ terms and conditions, which include paying interest and principal, penalties for nonpayment — but also ways to reduce the burden such as income-based repayment plans. The vast majority of student borrowers were actually current on their loans before the pandemic, according to the New York Fed.
Unlike the PPP statute’s clear language on debt forgiveness, the statutory authority for wholesale relief of the kind Biden offered was murky. He has based it on a strained interpretation of a post-9/11 law, the pretty clear intention of which was to help service members with student debt on an individualized basis.
Any day now, the Supreme Court will rule on the Biden plan’s legality. The justices’ comments at oral argument in February implied that Biden’s best hope of winning is not a substantive ruling that he properly interpreted the law but a process point: that the states challenging his plan lack standing to sue.
In that regard, he and other Democrats are vulnerable to whataboutism. Biden opted for the big debt relief plan in the midst of the 2022 election campaign, having previously expressed doubts about his legal power to do it in February 2021; then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also insisted in July 2021 that there could be no large-scale debt relief without a new law.
And she fretted about such a policy’s fairness, perceived and actual: “Suppose … your child just decided at this time … not … to go to college but you’re paying taxes to forgive somebody else’s obligations. You may not be happy about that,” she said — words the GOP, not unjustifiably, has thrown back in Democrats’ faces.
Such arguments resonate in red states and purple districts, which is probably why Democratic Reps. Jared Golden (Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), and Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) joined the GOP in voting to overturn Biden’s plan. The White House should have spent more time developing a truly persuasive response and less time owning MAGA on Twitter.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Andrew Mitrovica
Rami G Khouri
Srecko Horvat
Marwan Bishara
visit website
