Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Biden greets people after returning from vacation to the White House earlier today.
There is an old, pre-GPS joke, in which a tourist traveling through the Midwest stops to ask a farmer how to get to Jenkinsville. The farmer replies, “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”
So it is with student loan relief. The whole system is a mess and a travesty. And there are no great options for incremental reform.
As was widely leaked and long anticipated, Biden opted for an approach that would help the most hard-pressed debtors of moderate means. He attempted to blunt criticisms that he was gratuitously adding to the deficit or inflation, or rewarding rich debtors such as lawyers and investment bankers.
The basic plan is $10,000 cancellation for most debtors, with an income ceiling of $125,000 for individuals and $250,000 for families, and a continuation of the full suspension of debt payments through the end of the year.
The administration added one very smart detail, which was not initially in the leaks. Recipients of Pell grants—a near-perfect proxy for low-income debtors—get up to $20,000 of relief. All told, close to half of all debtors will get full cancellation. According to documents leaked to The Washington Post, the White House estimates that 90 percent of relief will go to people earning less than $75,000.
The administration previously had announced a process to take student debtors out of default, which helps them restore access to other credit.
All in all, it’s a nice start. But this still leaves plenty of problems. The most serious is that when full suspension of debt payments ends early next year, more than half of debtors will experience a sudden hit to their household budgets.
Once again, Biden has played a weak hand not badly. The problems were in the cards he was dealt.
And all of this still begs the question of more fundamental reform: How to fix the debt-for-diploma system going forward, so that we do not start the debt clock ticking all over again.
Now I have to violate the rule that a column is about one thing.
People have been wondering why Trump took all those classified documents. What was his motive? Maybe to threaten to reveal classified material as leverage with prosecutors, or just as retribution? Maybe to have his own shadow foreign policy or play footsie with the Saudis or Russians?
But the reality is evidently more banal. The tip-off came in a Times piece yesterday noting in passing, deep down in the story, that two of those documents were Obama’s private letter of advice to the newly elected President Trump; and a letter to Trump from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. No grave state secrets there.
Voilà! The Grifter-in-Chief was coveting documents with a large market value that could be sold off to collectors. Just when you think Trump can’t go lower, he goes lower.
