Biden's plan for student loans 'an expensive and inequitable election-year stunt,' says WaPo editorial board

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Biden plans on canceling $230B in student debt: Report

Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller says Biden is 'attempting to buy votes' tackling student lone debt on 'Jesse Watters Primetime.'

The Washington Post editorial board said Tuesday that President Biden's "apparent" plan for student loan forgiveness "would still be an expensive and inequitable election-year stunt."

The board said that the president was right to resist the Democrat Party's call to eliminate $50,000 worth of student debt per person, which would provide aid to wealthy borrowers that don't need the help. 

The president is leaning towards forgiving $10,000 of student loans per borrower, according to the Washington Post. His latest plan would reportedly also limit forgiveness to individual borrowers making less than $150,000 per year and $300,000 for married couples filing together.

"These provisions, while welcome, would not stop the policy from becoming yet another taxpayer-funded subsidy for the upper middle class," the editorial board wrote.

The Washington Post editorial board criticized President Biden's plan to forgive student loans on Tuesday. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

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The authors noted estimations from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget which said that the plan could cost $230 billion with over 70 percent of the relief impacting those "in the top half of the income scale" while "a quarter of the benefits would go to the top 20 percent."

"Even this does not express fully how regressive the policy would be, because many recent graduates from medical, law and business schools would qualify for forgiveness even though their lifetime income trajectories don’t justify it," they said. 

President Joe Biden's plan to forgive $10,000 in student loans per borrower was slammed by the Washington Post editorial board. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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The editorial board authors added that debt forgiveness would help a lot of people who needed it but said that Biden could be more targeted in his approach and could avoid setting bad precedent for succeeding presidents. 

"Administration officials stressed that Mr. Biden has not made a final decision and that his goal is to aid the neediest. Good. He still has time to change course," they concluded. 

Biden extended the pause on student loan payments to the end of August after it was set to expire in May. He said the extension was because the U.S. was still recovering from COVID-19.  

The Washington Post editorial board said Tuesday that Biden's plan for student loans was an "expensive" election year stunt.  ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images

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Several experts have warned that Biden's plan to cancel student loans would make inflation worse. 

"That’ll produce the most inflation," former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eaken said. "If you forgive some of the debt, that’ll create a little more inflation. The least inflationary thing to do is to have people actually go back to paying their bills. That would take care of it." 

Economist Nicholas Eberstadt said that it "would be a tremendously regressive transfer towards the well-off."