One of the biggest campaign promises Joe Biden made during the campaign that his handlers ran for him was to eliminate student debt. They worded it in different ways, calling it “student loan forgiveness” or “collegiate debt deferment” but at the end of the day it was understood that those who owe a lot of money for their education wouldn’t have to pay it off if Biden got elected.
Now that he’s in the Oval Office, that particular campaign promise seems to have fallen to the wayside, at least for now. According to The Daily Mail:
Joe Biden will not include student loan forgiveness in his upcoming Budget, after pledging to cancel $10,000 from loans on the campaign trail.
Biden, who was seen arriving back at the White House on Sunday from a weekend at Camp David, is due to announce his latest budget at the end of next week, and claims he has grown suspicious of wiping out the loans. The shift in policy is a major blow for the more than 42 million Americans who have student loans.
Biden had been pressured by progressives in the Democrat Party including Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to forgive up to $50,000 in debt. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, was also in favor. In an interview with the New York Times Friday, Biden said he had grown ‘suspicious’ of canceling the debt.
‘The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? I don’t agree,’ Biden told the Times.
There has been no word from the AOC camp since the devastating news hit the wire, but someone should probably do a welfare check. She and other radical progressives have fought for the socialistic wealth redistribution scheme despite the fact that student loan forgiveness has been statistically shown to benefit the wealthy much more than the poor. As Fox Business reported in February, the University of Chicago�s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics shows that erasing all student loan debt would distribute $192 billion to the top 20% of earners in the U.S., but just $29 billion to the bottom 20% of U.S. households.
Around 10% of voters ahead of the 2020 election listed student debt as one of their three priorities when voting for a president. But radical progressives pushed back against Biden’s campaign promise to only forgive $10,000 per student compared to the $50,000 or more that they wanted. Now, it appears, they’re getting nothing.