Student debt cancellation is back and it's bigger than ever.
And roughly half of that sentence was true.
Now, Biden did announce that they are doing something, specifically wiping
out $39 billion worth of student loan debt for about 804,000 borrowers.
Those are both obviously large numbers, and if you don't put them in context
the full severity of the problem, they sound objectively good.
We are gonna put them in context.
But no, this is what he's doing.
It's gonna be very helpful.
Earlier in the day, we're getting comments from people about how that's going to
affect their debt, finally free them from that burden.
And there's some other good details here as well.
Especially that unlike the prior rounds of student debt cancellation, you are not
gonna have to go through any kind of application process to qualify for this.
If you do qualify, your debts will be automatically discharged.
This is basically like a ramping up, an extension of previously
existing income driven repayment plans that can result in your
debt being forgiven that were only really there technically.
It didn't actually work that way for the vast majority of people.
The system was set up to not work.
This is patching that so that people will actually be able to qualify.
And I wanna give you just a few more details,
including a statement from the Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona.
Who said, for far too long, borrowers fell through the cracks of a broken system that
failed to keep accurate track of their progress towards forgiveness.
And so they said now they're going to take partial payments that you might do,
those will now count.
There's a variety of different ways that they're gonna sort of juice the numbers to
make sure that more people qualify for the forgiveness.
They say that they're addressing historic failures in which qualifying payments
under those plans should have brought borrowers closer to qualifying for
debt forgiveness.
But were not actually properly accounted for.
There are some other details of things they're gonna do beyond just this
announcement, but this is what we've got as of today.
>> Yeah, so this leaves us in the usual conundrum,
which is you wanna give credit to them for doing this.
Over 800,000 people affected, that's no joke.
That's a lot of good people that are going to be very relieved today.
So, thank you, Joe Biden.
Credit where credit is due.
But I have to give you context.
And the context is, there's $37 billion of loans that are outstanding.
So, this is about 2% or 30, I'm sorry, 37 million people affected.
So it's about 2% of the people that are getting relief.
They haven't done it too badly in this case, right?
But in a lot of cases, mainstream media will say historic the greatest thing ever.
The whole thing is solved.
Mission accomplished, let's move on.
In this case, the articles that I read were more balanced, right?
So, I wanna say credit for the 2%, but
I really would love to address the other 98%.
Now, to be, again, more fairness to Joe Biden,
he has also done things in the past that have addressed about 3.4
million other people out of a total sample then of about 40 million.
And so that's actually not 2%, that gets close to 10%.
That's the number I keep telling you, between 5 and
15% is what Democratic administrations do of their promises very consistently.
And here we are again at this point.
And I like that he did the other ones too, but man, I'd love the other 90%.
So, that's your truthful reporting that no one will like
cuz the moderate Democrats will scream, it's never good enough for
you progressives, we give you 2% that you want the other 98.
And progressives will say, you're helping Joe Biden by pretending this
is real when it's nothing counts, etc.
Both sides constantly.
And the right-wing is like helping students, we despise students.
They're not even billionaires, right?
So, the truth doesn't make anyone happy, but nevertheless, it's still the truth.
>> [LAUGH] I think that's the best way to put that is no matter what
you say about this, you're gonna make 98% of everybody else mad with your statement.
But you're absolutely right.
Listen, Biden had nothing to lose at this point to
just go as big as humanly possible.
And that's one of the things obviously that makes these means testing and
all of the other smaller parts of it.
That's what makes it so frustrating is, he could have come out and said, listen,
we're gonna forgive the student loan debt of just one person.
I'm gonna pick a random person in this country, I'm forgiving their student loan
debt and conservatives would still be up in arms over that.
They would say, this is ridiculous.
You can't forgive the debt.
So, it could have been one person or it could have been everybody getting
their debt forgiven and Biden's gonna be targeted by these Republicans.
So, why not just go big?
They're gonna challenge it no matter what you do.
So try to give us as much as possible.
And again, you wanna say this is great for
the 800,000 people who are going to get this relief.
They need it.
It's going to change their lives, absolutely no doubt about it.
But there's also gonna be a lot of people right on that cusp,
because again, this is income based that aren't gonna get it.
And they're gonna be left out because they're just a few dollars away from being
in the same kind of financial dire straits as some of the other folks.
Wondering why suddenly because I make $100 more
a month than these people, am I not eligible?
So, you could have gone bigger.
And that's the thing, you can always go bigger and then have it scaled down.
But when you start with it already scaled down,
that only leaves room to exclude more people as it moves forward.
>> Yeah, I would say, Farron, if the students wanted the entirety of their debt
to be canceled without conservatives having a problem with it.
They should have had their student loan debt come in the form of PPP loans.
Then it would have been fine.
You could just wipe out the whole thing.
Nobody would have a problem with it.
But, yeah, you're right, there are people who are not gonna make enough money to
really have a secure economic existence.
But just enough to not be able to cancel out their loans based on this.
And also, even if they do get the forgiveness, remember,
it's not it's an instantaneous thing.
They've been making payments for a literal decade.
I don't want people to be burdened by student debt for ten years.
I don't want people to have to wait a decade to be able to buy a home or
move to a new city or start a business or change jobs up,
being terrified what's gonna happen to you.
I don't want people to be burdened by that literally at all.
And I'll also remind people, as we're adding context, so
you threw out some of the overall numbers.
For context, it's not like Biden's plan was, that's it, no more student debt.
He wasn't canceling all of the student debt.
He was canceling a good chunk of it, a percentage.
But it wasn't a radical extremist plan, and this is a tiny fraction of that.
One more bit of context, by the way,
of the $1.78 trillion in outstanding student loan debt.
Which, look, some of that is public, some of it is private, so
it's not apples to apples or whatever.
But, he's canceling the $39 billion.
I just looked up randomly.
You know the 35 has cost over $1.5 trillion.
One plane, $1.5 trillion, a country of students
balanced against one plane that might or might not work.
So it is frustrating.
And look, they do have next steps that they're gonna take.
They're gonna have a new income driven repayment plan called the Save Plan that
they think is going to fit in a lot more students.
And they also say, by the way,
that they're gonna make student debt one of the cornerstones of the 2024 campaign,
which you would assume would be accompanied with other plans.
And you can guarantee that it'll be accompanied with proposals that if you
put us back in power, we'll do something then.
So, maybe we will see more.
>> Yeah, it's funny that you came to the same number.
I did it through the math of how many people were affected and
got to 2% for today's action.
And John's numbers are about 1.78 trillion in debt, and
39 billion was relieved today.
So that's 2.1%, gets you to the same 2% number, right?
And so for a Democrat, 2% change is considered historic and miraculous.
But anyways, I said, when you put in the earlier stuff, it's about ten.
Now, the point that John made about future stuff, that next proposal is pretty good.
It doesn't really bowl your debt.
I would definitely go further, but it would reduce your payments in half for
everyone and then wipe them out after you've paid for ten years.
That's good progress, a lot better, but not yet.
Okay, so, look, the way that they framed it, it seemed half believable
because sometimes Democrats make promises, there's no way they're gonna do that.
Total marketing gimmick, 0% chance, right?
No, the way that they explained this, the context,
made me think they might even do that, okay?
But then John dashed all my hopes when he made a great point just now saying,
they'll probably hold it till the election and, you want it?
You want it?
Elect us again, and we'll do another 2 to 10%.
So, with Democrats, you always believe it when you see it.
>> While we're talking about things that they could do through the Department of
Education with these loans.
If we're not gonna get to the point where we have debt free college,
which is what should exist, 100%, that should be where we're at.
But if we can't get to that just yet, then the Department of Education actually
has the authority to just say, okay, you know what?
We're gonna cap interest rates on student loans at 0.5% forever.
It'll never go more than that.
You know what? We're gonna cap payments.
You never pay more than $100 a month.
And then we have these programs where if you paid solidly for X amount of years,
at that point, it's forgiven.
They can do all sorts of little maneuvering through the department itself
to make this burden lessened for millions and millions of people.
And those are things that they haven't even discussed.
So, again, debt free college, no student loans,
not even existing is what we should have.
But if we can't get that,
there's 100 other things the Department of Education could do that really haven't
even been entered into these discussions for the most part.
And, so, maybe that's what they'll dangle in front of us ahead of the 2024 election.
But those are also other things that they need to be considering and
that we need to be demanding that they do.
>> Let me throw out one question, because all of
what we're talking about basically is executive orders, executive actions.
I understand why there's not a lot of conversation about what legislation could
potentially be passed.
The Republicans control the House after the next cycle.
They might well control the Senate too.
Do we think that there is anything that he could propose that would get them to
actually pass legislation to fix this.
If it was based on performance, your grades, you get the loans,
but you As everything.
Maybe we do some cancellation or a service based repayment thing,
rather than just ten years of payments.
You do two years of sort of Tennessee Valley stuff, working on infrastructure,
installing electric chargers, climate prepared.
Is there literally anything that could be proposed that Republicans would or
do they just believe that we have so
poisoned the well intentionally on what people think about higher education.
That we do not want to act as if anyone who goes to college is deserving of any
compassion whatsoever?
>> So, the answer to that question is that it's a bit of a trick question
because the question isn't the substance, it's the style.
It's the way that you try to pass the bills.
So, the suggestions that both Farron and John had are brilliant.
They're great.
And I hadn't thought of some of those suggestions, and
I think that they're absolutely terrific.
If you proposed it and then you just had a vote and you walked away,
then the Republicans have a 0% chance of voting for it, none whatsoever.
They would never do anything for the American people.
I was gonna say, unless there's a gun to their head.
One, I don't wanna do violent analogies too much, but
two, even then they might not do it.
Now, having said that, is there a way that you could pass it overall?
I think yes.
So wait, why?
What's the disparity?
Because you have to do the one thing that Democrats never do,
which is actually fight.
So, Biden proposes public option in one of the bills, it's at 84%.
And then, theoretically Republicans was actually corporate Democrats too,
all say no cuz their donors are Chamber of Commerce and
they don't want paid family leave.
So they say no.
And then Biden goes, okay, well, of course you're not gonna pass anything doing that.
If Lyndon Johnson had said, Dixiecrats, you don't want the Civil Rights Act,
Voting Rights Act, okay, well, then we wouldn't have them.
Instead, he broke half a dozen, two dozen, I don't know,
a great number of kneecaps metaphorically, but with him barely, okay?
And until he broke the Dixiecrats in his own party and
got the damn bills passed, which was awesome.
But, Biden and those guys, one, they're in on it.
They're also just as corporate as the Democrats in the Senate and
all the Republicans.
So the whole game is rigged to begin with, they're all frauds.
The Democrats do just enough to have the media say historic so
that they get reelection.
They do, always, always, a bare, bare minimum or nothing, right?
But if Biden wanted to fight,
what he would do is the Republican advantage of the House is minuscule.
You would pick four or five or
whatever the number you need is of vulnerable purple district Republicans.
And you would do a massive marketing campaign and go,
these guys don't care about students.
After they cross the bridge, they wanna burn it down so
that none of your kids have the opportunity they had.
You find out which schools they went to.
You start saying, this son of a bitch went to Harvard, but
he doesn't want your kid to be able to have an opportunity,
settle down with all this debt and albatross around your neck.
And you fight and you fight.
And these positions are actually very popular with American people until they
bleed enough in the polls.
Sorry for all the violent analogies, okay?
They're all metaphors, until you bleed them out in the polls in a purple district
and they go, yeah, I was always concerned about the students.
I was gonna do it anyway.
That's standard hardball politics.
The number of Democrats who play that is zero.
And honestly, they're either all complicit like the Biden Pelosi camp,
or they're not very smart or strong [COUGH] progressive camp.
>> I've got a plan where you could get enough Republicans on to pass it today.
It's a bad plan, but here it is.
You tell Republicans, for every 10 million people that you let us forgive student
loans for, for every 10 million, we lower corporate and wealthy taxes by 1%.
So you give us 50 million, we'll lower taxes by 5% for the same amount of years.
So 50 million people get debt forgiven, 5% lower in taxes for the next five years.
You go to 100 million, they get 10% for the next ten years off their taxes,
you get every Republican saying, all right, fine, we'll do that.
The donors love it.
Yeah, we're gonna suffer in the revenue department, but
people are gonna have more money.
So, that's the only way I think they could really get these Republicans
to go on board is if they somehow tie it to cutting taxes,
cuz that's all these Republicans know how to do.
>> Yeah. >> That's devastating.
And I probably would not take that deal.
It'll bankrupt the country.
But Farron is absolutely right.
They would then immediately pass it.
>> Okay, what about this?
For every 10 million that have debt canceled,
you can lock up one member of the extended Biden family.
>> [LAUGH] >> How about this?
Cousin, niece, whatever, it'll be great.