You've probably heard about President Joe Biden's attempt to do an end-run around the courts that are now considering the legality of his executive order for lump-sum student debt forgiveness. He is now trying to shrink or eliminate payments for students who are in repayment.
This means, for example, that an unmarried graduate making $40,000 at his first job would go from a maximum monthly payment of $172 to a maximum monthly payment of $46. Plus, those loans will be completely forgiven at the end of 20 years, so there are no consequences to the borrowers, and no upside for the taxpayers, for such low payments.
But here's the worst part. The student loan program was nationalized in 2010 as part of Obamacare. This was done for a very specific reason: Student loans are money-makers, and the Democrats trying to ram Obamacare through were desperate for revenues to cover the program's costs and make them look less ludicrous. So they hypothecated the student loan program's profits to pay for Obamacare.
Let this be a lesson about trusting the Democrats when they say that a given new revenue stream is going to be used for a specific purpose — say, education or roads. For now, Biden is just going to give away all of the program's profits, Obamacare funding be damned, and give them away to the most privileged people in America. This sort of irresponsible governance is the reason we're coming up against the debt ceiling yet again.
Hopefully, neither of these attempts to buy the votes of student borrowers will succeed. It isn't Biden's money to bribe people with.