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LETTER: Student loan “forgiveness” is a taxpayer-funded giveaway

3 min read

Student loan “forgiveness” is a taxpayer-funded giveaway

Gary Stout’s Sunday column in the Observer-Reporter{/em}, “Some Thoughts on Forgiving Student Loans”, goes to laborious lengths to convince readers of the virtues of the Biden administration’s student debt forgiveness policy. In reality, this “forgiveness” policy is neither virtuous nor forgiving – it is simply a taxpayer-funded giveaway to buoy the Biden base and inject “good news” into the barren landscape of administration accomplishments.

Stout himself analyzed it correctly in his penultimate paragraph when he stated, “….my sense is that those voters who receive the debt relief are well pleased and will remember when placing their votes this November and beyond.”

Some other holes in the columnist’s thoughts include:

n He states that American students have a “fundamental right” to higher education. In my view, students have a “right” to a public-school education and taxpayers have a responsibility to fund that education. Students have a “right” to decide if they want to pursue higher education and the “right” to decide to seek a loan to pay for that education. They don’t have the “right” to expect the rest of us pay for their higher education.

n The whole concept of student loan “forgiveness” is absurd. The loans aren’t being forgiven; they are a bill that is passed on to taxpayers to pay. Real “forgiveness” would be a college telling its students that they didn’t have to pay “X” amount of tuition, and that the college would cover that amount internally. I don’t see that happening soon.

n Some credible estimates say this giveaway will cost nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years. Stout claims this is not inflationary. I don’t believe that for a minute

n His column does not address the unfairness of the policy to those Americans who will not benefit from it. This voter giveaway is unfair to all American taxpayers: specifically those who paid all the expenses for their our own children; those who worked, and are working, to pay off their loans; those chose not to seek higher education.

n Institutions of higher learning are not considered. Call me cynical, but I expect tuition just went up in most colleges and universities.

While I applaud Stout’s courage in attempting to put “lipstick on a pig,” this policy is just another bad decision in an unblemished 20-month run of poor Biden leadership and performance.

Steven Johnson

Washington

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