The Nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budge Model’s new analysis of Biden’s loan forgiveness plan now puts the price tag at potentially one trillion dollars, depending on more details to come out about the plan.
Here’s their official summary:
Summary: President Biden’s new student loan forgiveness plan includes three major components. We estimate that debt cancellation alone will cost up to $519 billion, with about 75% of the benefit accruing to households making $88,000 or less. Loan forbearance will cost another $16 billion. The new income-driven repayment (IDR) program would cost another $70 billion, increasing the total plan cost to $605 billion under strict “static” assumptions. However, depending on future IDR program details to be released and potential behavioral (i.e., “non-static”) changes, total plan costs could exceed $1 trillion.
Below are their key points explaining this in a bit more detail:
- We estimate that President Biden’s proposed student loan debt cancellation alone will cost between $469 billion to $519 billion over the 10-year budget window, depending on whether existing and new students are included. About 75% of the benefit falls to households making $88,000 or less per year.
- Loan forbearance for 2022 will cost an additional $16 billion.
- Under strict “static” assumptions about student borrowing behavior and using take-up rates within existing income-based repayment programs, the proposed new IDR program will cost an additional $70 billion, increasing total package costs to $605 billion.
- However, depending on future details of the actual IDR program and concomitant behavioral changes, the IDR program could add another $450 billion or more, thereby raising total plan costs to over $1 trillion. These details require future study.
So in effect, Biden would be recklessly using a trillion dollars of your taxpayer money to buy Democrat votes. And yet he wants to call MAGA voters extreme?
Not to mention there are SERIOUS legal questions about Biden’s authority to even do this:
Legal experts say President Biden has a “chilling disregard” for his constitutional limitations as president with his decision to wipe out student loan debt at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $300,000,000,000.
On Wednesday, Biden announced he would take executive action to cancel student loan debt of up to $20,000 per borrower making less than $125,000 annually.
However, legal scholars are throwing a flag on the play by the White House, telling Fox News Digital that Biden is “stretching laws to the breaking point in order to assume a power expressly given to Congress” and that the legal basis for the president’s student loan handout maneuver is thin.
“President Biden is something of a constitutional recidivist when it comes to executive overreach,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and practicing criminal defense attorney, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “He has been repeatedly found to have violated the Constitution in his unilateral use of executive powers.”
The president’s justification for his sweeping executive order comes from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a division of the agency routinely consulted on the legality of presidential actions.
The HEROES Act of 2003 was adopted in response to the national emergency declaration by President George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks with the intent to ensure military members fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan would not be penalized in repaying their federal student aid loans.
Turley calls the use of the HEROES Act for Biden’s student loan handout “transparently opportunistic” and “unlikely to pass muster with the Supreme Court.”
The Biden administration seems to also be at “odds with itself” and will have to grapple with its contradictory track record, should it go to court.
“It was not long ago the administration was telling courts that the pandemic was effectively over in order to stop the use of Title 42 at the border,” Turley said. “It’s now claiming that the pandemic is raging in order to justify this massive debt cancellation.”
I’m sure this will get challenged and I hope the courts put the kibosh on this quick. Although, as I suggested before, I fully expect activist courts to give it the go ahead while we await a more constitutional court to stop this madness.