Just after testing negative for COVID-19 in her ” rebound” case, First Lady Jill Biden headed up a “Meeting to Strengthen the Teaching Profession” at the White House Wednesday and was slapped at the beginning of the meeting by a question about President Biden's student loan reduction plan that Biden unilaterally put into effect this week.
Prior to giving the meeting over to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Jill Biden was stopped by a Daily Mail reporter who wanted her to describe how Biden's plan, heavily supported by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Raphael Warnock partly on the grounds that it could help their campaigns, will lower the cost of higher education, which the President has repeatedly stated would happen.
“Dr.” Jill was obviously shocked by the question, as shown by the response she offered.
“He said he was going to have loan forgiveness during the campaign,” she stated. “I heard him say it over and over again and he followed up on his promise and he kept to it.”
Her response to the question was “very doctoral” according to certain Twitter users who weren't surprised.
In Jill Biden’s defense, she did not have a solution since there isn’t any. Perhaps there is one, but it's difficult to speak the real truth about your husband's strategy that isn't going to be what he claims it will, particularly when he comes in to visit for a short time while the meeting continues on.
The fact is that tuition fees are going to rise, but it's an issue of how much.
Brian Riedl, a senior fellow in budget, tax and economic policy at the Manhattan Institute told FOX Business that he expects the handout to cause a spike in tuition costs.
“Students will likely feel liberated to borrow more money on the resumption of future loan forgiveness, and universities will take advantage of the additional borrowing by raising tuition,” Riedl said. “This is pretty similar to the fact that historically 60% of all student aid increases have been captured with tuition hikes, and this will be treated like an increase in student aid moving forward, which suggests that 60% will be countered by tuition hikes.”
In a similar vein, Fortune wrote a fantastic piece on Tuesday that explains how there’s a “giant loophole in Biden's student-debt relief that could make college even more expensive.” Here's the basic idea:
Under the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan, IDR [income-driven repayment] borrowers will now pay just 5% of their income for undergraduate loans and 10% for postgraduate loans for a period of 10 or 20 years, depending on how much is owed. The plan will also increase the amount of income that isn’t subject to the IDR from 150% above the poverty line to 225% and eliminate any accrual of interest under the plans.
The issue here is incentives. The IDR plan makes it so that no matter the loan amount, student borrowers make the same payments—5% or 10% of their postgraduation income annually for a period of 10 or 20 years—thereby incentivizing students to borrow as much money as possible, critics say. This, in turn, incentivizes universities to charge as much as they can because they aren’t worried about borrowers being unable to make their payments.
So the answer to the question Jill Biden couldn't answer was simple: It won’t.
