Biden plunges into risky politics of student loans
WASHINGTON » The news had just emerged that President Joe Biden was moving toward canceling at least some student loans, and Donald Trump Jr., in the final days of campaigning for U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio last month, did not mince words as he excoriated the idea at rallies.
“Biden essentially wants blue-collar workers like truck drivers — who didn’t have the luxury of going to college to get drunk for four years — to bail out a bunch of upper-middle-class kids who chose to spend tens of thousands of dollars that they didn’t have on worthless gender study degrees,” Trump told The Washington Post later, elaborating on his message to voters.
Sen. Mitt Romney, Rutah, a more moderate Republican, jumped in as well, suggesting the move was little more than a political payout to win votes. “Other bribe suggestions: Forgive auto loans? Forgive credit card debt? Forgive mortgages?” he wrote on social media.
With Biden now moving closer to an executive order canceling some portion of student debt, Republicans are seizing on the issue to burnish their favored portrait of the two parties: Democrats, they say, champion the privileged elites, while Republicans support America’s down-to-earth workers. It’s a message that reflects the turbulent, risky politics of student debt for Biden, who has expressed both support and skepticism about student loan forgiveness.
Liberals respond that a sweeping loan cancellation program would provide critical help for struggling Latino, Black and young people amid a tough economy. Still, even some Democrats are wary of a critique that their party is aiming to help people who chose to take on debt at the expense of those who didn’t.
The issue of high college tuition costs emerged as a major plank in Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, when the progressive leader urged supporters at his campaign events to call out how much debt they were carrying. In the 2020 campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-mass., pushed slashing student debt, and even Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has now taken to prodding Biden on the issue.
But Biden has not been quick to embrace it as president, at times also raising fairness issues. At a CNN town hall early in his presidency, he referred to the “billions of dollars in debt for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn” and asked rhetorically, “Is that going to be forgiven, rather than use that money to provide for early education for young children who come from disadvantaged circumstances?”
More recently, Biden has signaled that any debt forgiveness plan would include sharp limits, for example erasing no more than $10,000 in debt for any individual and benefiting only those who make less than $125,000 a year.
The conservative-liberal divide on the issue is more than a policy dispute; it reflects contrasting world views, at a time when those with a college degree are more likely to be Democrats and those without such degrees lean Republican. Some conservatives increasingly portray college as leftist, elitist and useless; liberals, on the other hand, describe it as a vital, if overpriced, path of advancement for the underprivileged.