Republicans’ Hypocritical Politics of Resentment On Student Debt Relief

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Republican Senators in Congress, most of whom come from well-to-do families and went to Ivy League Schools like Harvard and Yale (probably “legacy” admissions), are whining about the unfairness of it all that President Biden is forgiving student loan debt for lower income students.

I guess it all depends on who is getting bailed out.

When Donald Trump was throwing “farm bailout” money at farmers – correction, mostly white-owned wealthy large farm corporations – to make up for his disastrous trade war policies, Republicans did not complain about the unfairness, or acknowledge that Trump was “buying votes” (actually getting some of that bailout money back as campaign contributions). Trump’s farmer bailout gave $21 billion to red counties and $2.1 billion to blue ones; In Trump Farm Bailout, Top 1% Reaped Nearly One-Fourth of Aid. “The findings follow criticism from Democrats that Trump’s farm bailouts were skewed toward large farms and academic studies concluding the trade aid payments were greater than farmers’ actual losses from Trump’s tariff conflict with China. A General Accountability Office report issued in September found the top 25 recipients of trade aid in 2019 received an average of $1.5 million per farm.”

So the 1% of wealthy white corporate farmers got $1.5 million in farm bailout money; low income college students (many of them minorities who borrow college loans at a higher percentage than whites) get $10,000 to $20,000 debt relief, if they qualify, and if they apply for the program.

And then came the Coronavirus global pandemic. Never let a disaster to go to waste! Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate came up with a pandemic rescue plan that threw billions of dollars at American businesses, a program rife with fraud, ‘Biggest fraud in a generation’: The looting of the Covid relief plan known as PPP: “the theft of as much as $80 billion — or about 10 percent — of the $800 billion handed out in a Covid relief plan known as the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP. That’s on top of the $90 billion to $400 billion believed to have been stolen from the $900 billion Covid unemployment relief program — at least half taken by international fraudsters — as NBC News reported last year. And another $80 billion potentially pilfered from a separate Covid disaster relief program.”

Those businesses that were not just flat out defrauding the relief program were eligible for – wait for it! – loan forgiveness. Some firms thrived during Covid and then got their PPP Covid relief loans forgiven: “As of Nov. 7, 2021 about $610 billion in forgiveness had been granted, data show.” According to the federal government’s Pandemic Oversight office (8/24/2022), Update: 10.2 million PPP loans were forgiven.

More than 11.5 million Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans were issued as of July 4, 2022, with 707 borrowers receiving the maximum loan amount of $10 million.

Of the total number of loans, 10.2 million have been partially or fully forgiven. The average dollar amount forgiven was $72,500. Of the borrowers receiving the maximum amount [of $10 million], 625 loans have been partially or fully forgiven.

In some instances, you may see on the Paycheck Protection Program Interactive Dashboard that the forgiven loan amount is more than the original loan. The reason is that the interest on the loan has been forgiven as well.

Some of those businesses that received loan forgiveness for their PPP loans belong to Republican members of Congress, some of the same raging assholes decrying student loan forgiveness today.

A point that the White House drove home on its Twitter account on Thursday.

The Republican objection to the student loan forgiveness program comes down to the same driving forces in everything that Republicans do: race and class warfare. “Federal bailout money is only for Wall Street banks and businesses, and for wealthy white people! We don’t help low income people and minorities. Pshaw!”

One of the stupidest arguments I heard yesterday was a Republican congressman complaining that college graduates now making decent pay will have part of their student loans forgiven, while high school educated blue collar workers will not receive any financial relief. This is part of the GQP’s culture war to divide Americans along education lines, and to define the college educated as “elitists.”

First of all, the majority of those individuals who will be eligible for student loan relief did not complete a four year college program. They either started college and had to quit because of the exorbitant expense, or some personal or family situation, or they went to a two-year junior college to get a degree or training certificate in a profession or trade. Ths is why the program was designed to aid low income college loan recipients.

And then there are those for-profit colleges that specialize in preying on our nation’s veterans. How financially troubled colleges rip off veterans, 5 of the biggest for-profit colleges that were accused of defrauding their students, Colleges may be tricking veterans into taking out student loans, Biden admin. warns, Debt relief for veterans who say they were cheated by for-profit colleges.

We are not talking about doctors or lawyers who attended prestigious Ivy League universities and racked up over $100,000 in student loan debt, and are now being paid six figure incomes by a hospital or white collar corporate law firm. Many of the student loans we are talking about are under that $20,000 maximum.

Second of all, EVERY Republican in Congress voted against extension of the child tax credit that lifted half of America’s children ot of poverty and was the most successful relief program for high school educated low income workers, and EVERY Republican in Congress voted against making attending two-year junior colleges for a degree or training certificate in a profession or trade free, so that high school students seeking to better their job opportunities do not have to saddle themselves with predatory debt to make a better life for themselves and their family.

Republicans don’t give a damn about the high school educated low income workers they claim to care about. It is all just culture war talking points in search of a wedge issue with which to gin up the resentment politics of hate that Republicans specialize in to fool voters into voting for Republicans.

Republicans are on the wrong side of this issue. Most Americans support student loan forgiveness, poll finds:

A recent national poll conducted by progressive think tank Data for Progress just before Biden’s announcement found 60 percent of 1,425 respondents agreed the federal government should eliminate all or some student loan debt for every borrower, compared to 34 percent who said the government should not forgive the loans and 6 percent who said they didn’t know. The poll was conducted Aug. 19-21 online and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Along party lines, 81 percent of Democrats were in favor of canceling at least some student loan debt compared to 45 percent of Republicans who said the same. The poll found more than half of past student loan borrowers and voters who never borrowed student loans believed some or all student debt should be eliminated.

So Republicans lose half of self-identifed Republicans on this issue. You can’t win elections when you lose half of your base voters.

Previous polling, however, showed a much narrower majority of Americans support the Biden administration’s plans. An NPR-Ipsos poll in June of 1,022 Americans found 55 percent of Americans support up to $10,000 of relief per borrower, but support dropped as financial relief increased. A YouGov poll and a Morning Consult-Politico poll found 51 percent of respondents were in favor of $10,000 in forgiveness.

Still majorities of Americans (and the earlier polls were hypotheticals, before the details of the actual program were known).





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6 thoughts on “Republicans’ Hypocritical Politics of Resentment On Student Debt Relief”

  1. The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman writes, “The arguments against Biden’s loan forgiveness plan are terrible”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/26/biden-loan-forgiveness-terrible-arguments/

    One can make reasonable arguments against the student loan forgiveness plan President Biden announced this week. But the outright fury of the response in some quarters, and the absurd bad faith and hypocrisy being mobilized against this plan, have been a wonder to behold. And it is revealing fundamental things about the people taxpayers think the government ought to help.

    To watch the reaction, you’d think this is the first loan forgiveness program in human history. You’d also think it’s absolutely vital to determine whether every last recipient will be morally deserving of this assistance, and whether any good people anywhere might fail to qualify for it. The more you examine these arguments — not only from Republicans but also journalists and a few Democrats — the weirder they seem.

    At the most basic level, loan forgiveness isn’t novel or even unusual. Our bankruptcy system allows people to discharge loans every day — yet perversely, the law makes it extraordinarily difficult to get released from student loan debt even if you’re bankrupt. Some well-known people have used the bankruptcy system to eliminate their debts.

    The government, furthermore, bails out people, companies and industries all the time when it decides that doing so is worthwhile. In the Great Recession we bailed out banks, insurers and auto companies. Donald Trump handed out tens of billions of dollars to farmers hit by his pointless trade war. Pandemic relief distributed hundreds of billions of dollars in forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans to businesses.

    Some of those forgiven loans — remember, taxpayer money, from truck drivers and waitresses — even went to the same Republican members of Congress who now rail against forgiving student debt, as the White House eagerly pointed out. If you’re a struggling blue-collar worker, are you mad that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had $183,000 in loans forgiven, or that Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) had $1.4 million forgiven, or that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) had $482,000 forgiven?

    If not, why does student loan forgiveness make you mad?

    This leads to one of the most bizarre arguments against this program: Sure, it helps some people, but what about people it doesn’t help? What about people who never went to college, or who already paid off their loans? Why should they chip in to help these other people?

    That argument could be raised against almost every government program in existence. This is the nature of paying taxes and having a government: Your money goes to all kinds of things that don’t benefit you directly or that you don’t like. You pay to maintain national parks you might not visit, and to find cures for diseases you’ll never contract. You support schools even if you don’t have kids. You build roads in states you don’t live in. You support wheat farmers even if you’re on a gluten-free diet.

    How many people complaining about loan forgiveness have campaigned against the mortgage interest deduction? It costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year, and its recipients — homeowners who itemize their deductions — are disproportionately wealthy. Where are all the cries of “How does this help people who rent, or people who already paid off their mortgages???”

    [As] a taxpayer (and as someone who, yes, took out student loans and paid them off), I don’t mind if some people get relief who might do fine without it, because tens of millions of lives could be transformed by this policy. The question is how much good the program as a whole does, not whether it helps someone somewhere who doesn’t really need it. The overwhelming majority of recipients will be middle class and because it gives extra to Pell Grant recipients, people from poor families get the most help.

    Finally, some people warn that the program could worsen inflation, because it will put money into the economy. The truth is that the effect on inflation will likely be minuscule, but you could raise the same objection to literally anything the government spends money on.

    For instance, earlier this summer, the House passed an $839 billion military spending bill for the 2023 fiscal year — that’s one year, not over a decade. Will pumping that much money into the economy be inflationary? And if so, should we just stop funding the military?

    The fact that this question probably sounds ridiculous to you is revealing: Nobody ever worries about the inflationary effect of military spending, because people make that kind of objection only to policies they don’t like.

    And that’s what’s at the heart of the objections to Biden’s loan forgiveness: Most of those making them are perfectly happy to have the government help some people, just not these people. And if that’s your argument against student loan forgiveness, you haven’t shown why the program is bad; all you’ve done is reveal yourself.

  2. The New York Times reports, “Biden’s Student Loan Plan Squarely Targets the Middle Class”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/us/politics/biden-student-loans-middle-class.html

    The big winners from President Biden’s plan to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans are not rich graduates of Harvard and Yale, as many critics claim.

    In fact, the benefits of Mr. Biden’s proposals will largely go to the middle class. According to independent analyses, the people eligible for debt relief are disproportionately young and Black. And they are concentrated in the middle band of Americans by income, defined as households earning between $51,000 and $82,000 a year.

    The Education Department estimates that nearly 90 percent of affected borrowers earn $75,000 a year or less. Ivy League graduates make up less than 1 percent of federal student borrowers nationwide.

    Economists say the full scope of Mr. Biden’s plan, including significant changes meant to reduce the payments that millions of borrowers will make for years to come, will help middle-income earners from a wide range of schools and backgrounds.
    “You’ll have a lot more people who are making zero payments and will have significant loan forgiveness in the future,” said Constantine Yannelis, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “The relief to borrowers is going to be more targeted to the people who really need it.”

    [T]he announcements Mr. Biden made, including both debt forgiveness and a restart next year of loan payments for all borrowers after a nearly three-year pause, will most likely be a wash for consumer prices, a wide range of economists say.

    “Debt forgiveness that lowers monthly payments is slightly inflationary in isolation,” analysts from Goldman Sachs wrote in a research note on Thursday, “but the resumption of payments is likely to more than offset this.”

    [I]n choosing to extend more generous debt relief than even many of his allies had expected, Mr. Biden is offering what independent analysts suggest would be his most targeted assistance yet to middle-class workers, and one that could help more young people make it to the middle class.

    Although legal challenges to the plan are expected, the proposal has the potential to help tens of millions of borrowers crawl out from under debt.

    [T]he University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model was set to release a estimate of the plan’s cost on Friday. That estimate will also show that the middle fifth of income earners — households earning between about $51,000 and $82,000 a year — will reap more than a third of the benefits from the president’s student loan moves, more than any other income group by far.

    In contrast, the Budget Model estimated that the nearly $2 trillion collection of tax cuts that Republicans passed in 2017 would spread more than two-thirds of its gains to the top fifth of earners.

  3. Excellent post, AZBlue.

    And this…

    gocart mozart
    @EdMix13

    Jesus’s miracle of the loaves and fishes was a slap in the face to all the people who brought their own lunch.

    4:45 PM · Aug 24, 2022·Twitter Web App

    • Liza, that’s hilarious! As a bonus it gives the “Christianists” a badly needed dope slap. Much better than the classic trolley analogy (which is also pretty good).

        • Right wing hypocrites can only appreciate simple humor with cruelty at it’s core. That is, until it’s directed at them then it’s an abomination.

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