Free Republic

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration announced a milestone Thursday in its effort to cancel Americans' student debt: It has provided relief to more than 1 million borrowers who work in public service. Through the Education Department's Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, the administration approved about $4.5 million in additional student loan relief for more than 60,000 borrowers, bringing the total relief through that program to $74 million for more than 1 million people. That brings the total amount of student debt relief under the administration to $175 billion for more than 4.8 million borrowers over the nearly four years President...

The courts keep slapping down Biden Administration lawbreaking, not that the Harris or Trump campaigns seem to notice. An Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Friday blocked President Biden’s SAVE student loan forgiveness plan and rapped the Administration for canceling debt in defiance of a lower-court order. The Administration rolled out the SAVE plan last summer after the Supreme Court blocked its gambit to cancel $10,000 to $20,000 for each borrower. The new plans cap monthly payments at 5% of discretionary income—defined as exceeding 225% of the poverty level—and cancel remaining balances after 10 to 20 years. Borrowers don’t...

The Biden-Harris team has signaled that it’s gearing up for an “October Surprise” on student loan cancellation — although it might come even sooner, sneaking in before early voting starts. Once again, they are trying to shift hundreds of billions of dollars in loans onto the 90% of Americans who don’t owe student debt, to gain favor with voters who do. And this time they’ve added a brazen direct-marketing campaign to appeal to those indebted voters, just ahead of the presidential election. Their new loan-forgiveness effort is particularly devious because it is designed with the administration’s previous court losses in...

Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals indefinitely blocked the administration’s ultra-generous new student-loan repayment plan, which could have cost taxpayers $475 billion. Additional loan-cancelation initiatives—also certain to face legal challenges—are in the works. But the high drama of loan cancelation has drawn attention away from a more pressing issue in the student-loan system. After the pandemic-induced student-loan payment pause ended last year, the Education Department implemented a one-year transition period to allow borrowers time to ease back into the habit of paying their loans. That so-called...

The Congressional Budget Office revealed on Tuesday that the federal budget deficit for this fiscal year is expected to hit $1.9 trillion, marking a 27% increase of $400 billion from their earlier February estimate. "Most of the spike in the fiscal 2024 deficit stems from four factors that are expected to boost projected spending," CNN explains. "The largest is a $145 billion increase due to changes the Biden administration made to student loan repayment plans and a new, proposed forgiveness program that would waive some accrued interest for millions of borrowers. The latter has yet to be finalized but could...

The Biden administration has abolished the federal student-loan program, at least if a “student-loan program” is one in which students borrow money and then eventually repay it. What’s being erected in its stead is a scheme that’s rife with moral hazard, seemingly designed to inflate college costs, and best described as a “student-fraud program”—in which students borrow money, promise to repay it, and then … don’t. Biden’s loan-forgiveness shenanigans leapt into public consciousness when he tried to farcically read the 2003 HEROES Act to allow him to shovel $500 billion in loan “forgiveness” to his highly educated base and stick...

On June 30, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Biden v. Nebraska, the case that challenged the legality of the president’s executive order cancelling federal student-loan payments for millions of borrowers. In their ruling, the Court’s majority held that the president had no authority to declare such a cancellation. The statute that the administration had relied upon, the HEROES Act, could not be stretched, the Court decided, to mean that the president had been empowered to make a sweeping loan-forgiveness decree. Nor does anything in the Constitution give the president such authority. Thus, Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan was struck...

As U.S. President Joe Biden’s stalled student loan forgiveness plan means repayment is set to resume on Oct. 1, a growing number of student loan borrowers are claiming they either cannot or will not pay the debt back. In fact, an August survey from student and education resource publication Intelligent.com revealed that 62% of respondents said they are considering boycotting loan payments in the fall as almost half of them doubt they will be able to afford those payments. Twenty-nine-year-old Shahem Mclaurin took to TikTok to ask hard questions about whether borrowers like him should protest what many view as...

A Nashville lawyer found a novel way to beat student loans: a lawsuit. In subsequent tweets, Manookian shared the basic steps others could follow to get their student debt wiped through the legal system. “This isn’t about loan forgiveness,” Manookian told The Post. “It’s about holding these companies to the very same contract that they insist debtors comply with.” Manookian, who attended Vanderbilt University Law School, told The Post he took out two loans from JP Morgan and Bank One for $60,000 to pay for his education, chipping away at his students loan debt for “upwards of a decade.” A...

The Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan on Friday, a measure that would have wiped out nearly half a trillion dollars in debt for millions of Americans. The decision will impact the nearly 700,000 Wisconsinites that have federal student loan debt -- a total that adds up to more than $20 billion. Sid Bagley is one of those people who took out a federal student loan. He went back to school at age 45 to get a business administration degree and better himself. “I hated my job so much I made the initiative to go back...

The Supreme Court is poised to hear back-to-back oral arguments for two student loan-related cases on Tuesday, in what could be the final hurdle for the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan. In August, President Joe Biden announced a program that would forgive up to $20,000 in debt for borrowers with federally held student loans, impacting more than 40 million borrowers. Applications for the program opened in October, but a federal judge in Texas put the program on hold in November, ruling that the program was “unlawful.” In both of the cases heading to the Supreme Court, Biden v. Nebraska—a...

The 8th Circuit US Appeals Court blocked Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program on Friday afternoon. The court granted an emergency stay barring the discharge of any student debt until the court decides on a request for a longer-term injunction. Reuters reported: A U.S. appeals court on Friday temporarily blocked President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel billions of dollars in college student debt, one day after a judge dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit by six states challenging the loan-forgiveness program. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay barring the discharge of any student debt under the program...

PHOENIX — Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Biden administration to stop its "illegal" student loan cancellation program. The lawsuit challenges the president’s authority, through the Department of Education, to cancel more than $500 billion in student loan debt without congressional approval. “This mass debt forgiveness program is fundamentally unfair, unconstitutional, and unwise,” said Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. “The question Americans need to be asking is why college costs so much in the first place?” Under the student debt cancellation program, the administration plans to cancel $10,000 to $20,000 of student loan debt for...

When it comes to President Biden’s sweeping plan to forgive thousands of dollars in federal student loans, a majority of New Yorkers support the move, according to a fresh Siena College poll. The poll found that by 56 to 33 percent, New Yorkers supported the plan, which would forgive up to $20,000 in debt for those who received Pell Grants with loans held by the Department of Education.Non-Pell Grant recipients would have $10,000 in student debt canceled.Among those polled, 29 percent think Biden’s plan goes too far, while 21 percent said it doesn’t go far enough. Thirty-nine percent said the...

The Biden administration and Republican opponents of mass student debt cancellation appear headed for a legal confrontation with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake just weeks before the November midterm elections. GOP state attorneys general, conservative groups and federal lawmakers are laying the groundwork to challenge President Biden’s executive action to cancel up to $20,000 of debt for most of the 40 million people with federal student loan debt. Would-be plaintiffs can’t take action until the administration makes a formal move toward cancellation, such as releasing an application for loan forgiveness or wiping out the balances of a first...

In The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think I argued that the Biden student loan plan would incentivize students to take on more debt and incentivize schools to raise tuition with most of the increased costs being passed on to taxpayers through generous income based repayment plans. Adam Looney at Brookings takes a deep dive into the IDR plan and concludes that it’s even worse than I thought. Here are some of Looney’s key points: As recently as 2017, CBO projected that student loan borrowers would, on average, repay close to $1.11 per dollar they borrowed (including...

Joe Biden was elected partially as someone who could bring stability and unity back to the nation. Those aspects were never threatened under Trump. We had peace and prosperity, and if there were any scintilla of divisiveness—it would be because the liberal media spewed pervasive lies about Trump. Exhibit A would be the Russian collusion hoax. In two years, Biden’s incompetence and utter failure to do even the rudimentary duties of the president's office have been explicitly shown. The media has brought up his age, the slothful attitude at times, and the White House staff’s near-24-hour duty of clarifying the...

Wiping out 10k in student debt is not the most expensive part of the Biden student loan program. Most Federal student loans are now eligible for an income based repayment plan, under these plans students pay a small percentage of their “discretionary” income, say 10%, and then after a fixed number of years the debt is wiped off the student’s books. At first glance these plans don’t seem crazy, but as Matt Bruenig points out they create perverse incentives. Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, law graduates that go on to work in the public sector, which is...

Every day it gets harder to keep up with the accelerating lawlessness of the Biden Administration. The basic strategy is, just do whatever the left wants, using all the vast powers and resources of the federal government, and dare anyone to try to stop you. To mention just a few recent examples, one day it’s a multi-trillion-dollar transformation of the energy economy without Congressional authorization (perhaps slowed down by the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA); the next day it’s holding meetings to pressure tech giants like Twitter and Facebook to censor the speech of political opponents; next...

Yesterday morning, President Joe Biden revealed his administration’s plan to forgive billions of dollars in student loans. According to a White House Fact Sheet, the plan will forgive up to $20,000 in federally held debt for students who received Pell Grants and up to $10,000 for students who did not. Forgiveness applies to individuals earning less than $125,000, with an income ceiling of $250,000 for married couples. Additionally, the Covid-era pause on student-loan payments will be extended until December 31, 2022. The plan also allows borrowers with undergraduate loans to cap repayment at just five percent of monthly income. Critics...