Billy Long: I'll eat a big old steak tonight and send you the bill

(From Seventh District Congressman Billy Long)

Some people mistakenly believe the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. They do not. 

They can postpone, they can delay but they do not have the power to forgive debt. It would literally take an act of Congress to forgive student debt. 

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said virtually the same thing at a press conference, not in 2007 under George W. Bush or in 2020 under Trump but in July of 2021, when President Biden was in office. She clearly says that the president does not have the authority to cancel student debt, and yet a little more than one year later, that is exactly what President Biden did, and Speaker Pelosi is hunky-dory with it, calling the President's move a “bold action.”

Speaker Pelosi was actually right the first time on this. President Biden is using an obscure law from 2003 to cancel $10,000 in student loans for anyone making less than $125,000 a year. The law in question, the HEROES Act, allows the President to cancel student debt ONLY when there is a war or national emergency. It was passed at a time when America was fighting two simultaneous wars. 

President Biden is claiming that the COVID pandemic falls under this category. The only problem is his administration’s inconsistency on COVID. There will likely be legal challenges to this debt cancellation, and the Biden Administration will argue in court that the pandemic is a national emergency, while at the same time arguing in court that Title 42, which allows illegal immigrants to be immediately deported because of COVID concerns, should be repealed. 

So they believe there is a national emergency so dire that they must cancel student debt, but not so dire that we should continue pandemic prevention measures on our Southern Border. It should also be noted that the Biden Administration waited 18 months to take this action. If they believed that this was a pressing issue, why did they wait so long?

Not only is the plan most likely illegal, it’s also expensive and inherently unfair. The Penn-Wharton Budget Model, one of the leading models on analyzing the budgetary impacts of legislation, estimates that this student loan cancellation will cost anywhere from $300 billion to $980 billion. 

This cost will be passed down to the taxpayers and also to future college students. If colleges and universities know that the government will simply pay for the loans, what is stopping them from jacking up the price even further? 

And don’t forget, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody is going to have to pay for this bailout and it’s going to be the taxpayers. About 87% of Americans don’t have student loans, so why are they now having to foot the bill for the 13% who do? 

Why should an electrician who didn’t take out student loans have to pay for this bailout? And what about those who already paid their loans? Many like my folks paid into MOST accounts for years to make sure money was there to pay for their grandkids’ college education. 

Do they get their money back or the kids that worked three jobs to pay as they went to college with no debt? Shouldn't they be refunded all of their hard-earned tuition money? Fair is fair.

Is President Biden going to cancel mortgages and car loans next? The plan is ridiculous. When you take out a loan you should be required to pay it back. If not society will break down and no one will ever be held accountable for anything ever again. Don't like where you are? Just stand up and flip the chess board over and start again. It's insanity on steroids.

Ever since announcing this plan last week, the Biden Administration has been on the defensive. Whoever runs the White House official Twitter account decided it would be a good idea to attack Members of Congress who called out the plan, by advertising how much they took in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans during the pandemic. This false equivalency is bizarre. 

There is absolutely no correlation between taking a loan to protect your employees when the government forces your business to close down and forgiving student loans which were taken out with the understanding that they must be paid back. 

The White House brain trust is shakin' like a bird dog trying to pass a peach seed nervous about trying to justify their radical plan, as they maliciously attack people who took out PPP loans to keep people employed and keep their businesses afloat while their own government was trying to sink their ship.