2 state politicians battle over Biden’s student loan relief
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona returns to his home state Tuesday as the point man for President Joe Biden’s new student loan forgiveness plan.
The former Connecticut education commissioner is visiting Middletown for another reason, to talk about community college classes for incarcerated students. But if he thinks he can escape the controversy around his boss’s latest bid for widespread student debt relief, fuhgetaboutit.
Consider a sharp exchange on X, formerly Twitter, between two prominent elected officials sparring over the plan to grant relief to 30 million student borrowers. Greenwich First Selectman Fred Camillo, a Republican former state legislator, posted this on Friday afternoon, on the site formerly known as Twitter:
“Canceling student debt is a smack in the face to every American who has paid a college loan. Is the president going to forgive those who are paying off business loans, too? The worst possible message to young people about responsibility for debts incurred.”
Less than an hour later, state Sen. Matthew Lesser, D-Middletown, shot back with a retweet: “Your engineering firm had a $236,000 business loan forgiven by the federal government.”
Lesser posted a screen shot from a database of the COVID-19-era Paycheck Protection Program, showing a PPP loan of $236,797 to S.E. Minor Co. Inc, forgiven by the federal government. Minor is an engineering firm based in Greenwich, which employs Camillo as a consultant for $10,000 a year as a member of an advisory board, my colleague Andy Blye reported in February.
That opened up Camillo to a classic social media barrage with many on X calling him a hypocrite. Many also fired barbs at Lesser, saying he should know that PPP loans were designed to be forgiven, unlike student loans.
And we were off to the races with a multi-day debate that tells us a lot about government assistance and politics in 2024.
Camillo, who served in the state General Assembly along with Lesser for more than a decade, returned the volley: “It figures you would stand up for a guy who was in your party who is just pandering for votes, as usual. Did you ever take out a business loan? Did you ever start a business?”
Lesser, a full-time legislator with a toddler at home, ignored the question. “You asked if @POTUS would forgive a business loan and the answer is he already forgave your loan. I just wanted to make sure you had that information and gave the president credit,” he posted.
To be clear, Camillo is neither an owner of S.E. Minor nor a regular employee. He advises the firm a few hours a month, he said, augmenting his $151,000 first selectman salary.
Minor regularly works on local projects that come before town land use commissions but Camillo will have nothing to do with that. He was cleared to accept the moonlighting work by the local ethics board.
S.E. Minor declined my invitation to comment, nor did it owe any answers. The company was among 11.5 million businesses and self-employed people that received some $793 billion in PPP loans in 2020 and 2021, 96 percent of which was forgiven. In Greenwich alone, upwards of 2,000 people and businesses collected PPP aid in 2020 and 2021, including well over than 200 that received at least $150,000.
Liberals such as Lesser believe student debt relief could be more crucial to the economy than business assistance in its many forms. Biden has already ordered some $146 billion in student debt canceled and while the White House has not said how large this latest plan will be, it will certainly not approach the massive PPP handouts to companies caught up in the pandemic.
“I just think it’s incredible that the voices on the right who have no problem with corporate welfare,” Lesser told me, “all of a sudden start feeling like it’s a moral panic when ordinary people get relief.”
Camillo, a Greenwich native from a family that struggled, bought his first house in town for $330,000 at age 27, working in various jobs before attending college. Biden’s plan? “It’s the worst pandering for votes I’ve ever seen,” he snapped in response to a tweet on X.
Said one tweet: “Why do you hate working class people Fred?”
“Whoever you are with your anonymous Twitter account,” Camillo retorted, “I worked with my hands for decades, grew up working class, and paid my way through school. Nice try, brave one.”
Conservatives such as Camillo call student debt relief a moral hazard that teaches young people they don’t have to be responsible for their debts. “If you’re going to forgive people completely and not others, no, that’s absurd,” Camillo said to me Monday. “You can’t pick winners and losers…All you’re doing is dividing everybody.”
Oh, we’re already hopelessly divided, thank you very much.
Everyone needs to take a deep breath here. The government does and should guide the economy with business assistance and student debt relief, among countless other programs, in order to create growth and fairness. Spare me the naive, mythical, “freemarket” nonsense. What works best is investments in productivity, whether with private or public dollars.
All of it should be targeted as tightly as possible to people and companies that can do the most with it. The Supreme Court shot down Biden’s first try at student debt relief as too broad. But regardless of all efforts, we know that millions of people will enrich themselves unjustly through both government largesse and private corruption. That’s called reality.
One of Camillo’s last tweets on the topic: “No one ever paid off a loan for me, so nice try, Lefties .... ”
Lesser said he and Camillo agreed on animal rights and environmental issues when they served together in the House. “This wasn’t personal,” he told me, explaining that he just wanted to set the record straight after seeing Camillo’s tweet. “He’s always struck me as one of the more reasonable voices in the party.”