Hope they’re all voters, because it’s very clear who is on their side and who is against them.
More Texans would benefit from President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt than residents of nearly any other state — and 1.6 million would have their balances completely cleared — according to new White House estimates released as Republicans call it an unconstitutional giveaway to the elite and seek to derail it.
More than 3.3 million Texans would be eligible to have at least $10,000 forgiven and most people in that group, 2.3 million, would have $20,000 forgiven. Texas is second only to California in the number of residents that would benefit from the debt forgiveness plan, according to the estimates, which were compiled by the U.S. Department of Education.
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Officials have said they plan to have applications available early next month, but the plan is likely to face a long legal battle.
Texas is among the red states looking for ways to stop it from becoming a reality. Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a recent interview on Fox News that Texas is “definitely looking at a strategy.”
It is the first time a president has sought to unilaterally cancel swaths of student debt and whether the administration has the authority to do so has been the point of heated debate. The administration says it can, citing a 2003 law that grants the secretary of education authority to offer loan relief during times of war or national emergencies.
But Republicans say Biden is going too far.
“The reality is, I don’t actually think Joe Biden thinks he can do this,” Paxton said. “We are absolutely looking at something we can do to protect the American people from a president that is just making up his own rules as he goes along.”
Republicans argue the plan is unfair to those who have already paid off their debt, as well as the vast majority of American adults who do not have student loans. They say the plan will cost too much — with some estimates as high as $600 billion — and will help those who need it the least.
“College may not be the right decision for every American, but for the students who took out loans, it was their decision: able adults and willing borrowers who knowingly agreed to the terms of the loan and consented to taking on debt in exchange for taking classes,” Gov. Greg Abbott wrote in a letter to Biden with other Republican governors last week. “For many borrowers, they worked hard, made sacrifices, and paid off their debt. For many others, they chose hard work and a paycheck rather than more school and a loan. Americans who did not choose to take out student loans themselves should certainly not be forced to pay for the student loans of others.”
Paxton and Abbott are gonna do what they’re gonna do, and we’ll have to deal with it as we always do. There are absolutely root-cause issues here that are not addressed, but one of the big ones is the underfunding of state universities, which is why they’re so much more expensive now than they were even 20 years ago. Remember tuition deregulation, which the Lege did under Tom Craddick back in 2003 as an exercise in budget-cutting? Not much the President can do about that, and I don’t see Greg Abbott lining up to offer solutions. Anyway, policies that offer a lot of people a tangible benefit are usually good, and certainly attractive from a vote-getting perspective. I hope everyone involved in this remembers that.