June 20 — The United States Supreme Court should weigh in on President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program sometime this month.
The plan would give Pell Grant recipients $20,000 forgiveness from their loans. Those who don’t have a Pell Grant could get $10,000 in relief.
Estimates are the program would affect about 14 million Americans.
But a whole lot of questions surround the plan — which is why it has made it to SCOTUS.
Michele Jansen of NewsTalk 103.7FM pointed out, “This has been a long running issue between the president and the Democrats and Republicans taking opposite positions on this. My problem with the president trying to pay off student loans, as he has stated and many Democrats have stated, they know this is unconstitutional for the president to unilaterally decide to pay off student loans.”
Congressman John Joyce said, “The student loan scam, that’s how I look at the student loans, what Biden’s pushing forward. Let me just share a conversation that occurred over the weekend with a mom from Franklin County. The mom from Franklin County was outraged. She said that while she was putting her two children through college, she worked three jobs. Three jobs so that they wouldn’t occur, significant debt. She worked three jobs to make sure that she wouldn’t take that debt and put it on the American public. She feels outraged by Biden’s attempt. Last year his Department of Education issued a rule to cancel student loan debt which would cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. The Biden student loan scam would place that burden on 100 million Americans who never went to college, while transferring wealth to those who willingly took on that debt and have yet to pay off their debt. You can’t assume debt and transfer that debt to hard working American citizens.”
The US Supreme Court will make the ultimate decision soon.
Joyce said, “Just like how the government has to pay its debts or you need to pay off your car loan or your mortgage, student borrowers who incurred that debt who took that debt on, they need to be held responsible for paying that back. Earlier this month, we in the House, we Republicans passed a resolution which would have canceled Biden’s student debt program. Now predictably, Biden didn’t want us to take away the free money grab that he was doing to entice people to vote for him.”
Biden vetoed the resolution.
Joyce said, “So this week, we will vote to override that veto and this bill. Interestingly, people talked about how they have a divided Congress down here, this bill was passed with bipartisan support, and we’re calling on Democrats to once again step up and join us in stopping Biden. Inflation has cooled because House Republicans have been able to put a stop to the runaway spending in Washington, to stop the free money giveaways. These giveaways only hurt our economy and they punish those workers who continue to pay their taxes and didn’t take out massive loans and aren’t looking for the government to assume that risk. I listened to the mom in Franklin County and I took that message back to Washington. I’m in Washington and ready to vote to override that veto that Biden put on there and we anxiously await the Supreme Court to do the right thing.”
Add to that in Pennsylvania, a bill has made it out of the Senate Education Committee yesterday that would require every high school student to submit an application for FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid).
It’s unclear what the PA General Assembly would do with this.
Attorney Clint Barkdoll said, “The argument being that there’s a lot of kids that could be getting these benefits that simply don’t because they don’t submit the form. I’m surprised we’re not hearing more pushback on this. I don’t know all the details of the bill, but how about the families that just aren’t comfortable filling that out or they don’t want the government to know all of that personal financial information? It’s not clear to me if there’s any way to opt out of this.”
Jansen said, “That’s alarming. All this mandated government help, quote unquote, stop it. A government getting involved in college loans is what has driven college prices up just unbelievably, exponentially over inflation, and why we have all these students stuck in debt and why we have all these problems with just uncontrolled spending in colleges. We need the market forces back in there, not more so-called government help.”
Barkdoll said, “What’s surprising about this, these are Republicans that seem to be pushing this and I understand the argument that there’s a lot of aid that’s slipping through the cracks by virtue of the kids not filling this out, but the idea that you’re going to force families to submit this and how about the families that are just saying no way I don’t want all of that data going in somewhere when we don’t intend to use the financial aid anyway?”
Jansen said, “This is short term we want to help the state colleges. This is short term, get me out of political trouble with these institutions and ignoring the long term negative impact and the intrusion on privacy. Shame on the Republicans supporting this.”
Keep an eye on the US Supreme Court to see what happens with the student loan debacle.
Barkdoll said, “All of their decisions are issued by about the end of the first week of July, if not the second week of July, because then they recess until October. But what their pattern is, going into the week there were still 21 decisions that had to be issued and then each day they’ll release one or two and then some days they’ll skip. So anytime over the next two to three weeks, those should be rolled out.”
