There has been lots of noise about canceling student debt recently.
That’s worse than closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.
It’s like buying a new horse but leaving the barn door open!
If all student debt was gone tomorrow, we would be right back where we started when a whole new crop of students graduate.
Last month, the administration unilaterally extended the pause on paying back student loans for all borrowers until the end of August, regardless of need.
It doesn’t matter that all Americans are back to work now if they want to be.
It doesn’t matter if the borrower is making six figures and can afford to pay off their loans.
The latest extension will bring the cost of this student loan payment pause up to $150 billion.
For context, the entire Department of Education budget for this year is about half that – $80 billion.
Higher education advocates have been calling for a doubling of the Pell Grant.
That’s the program that targets aid to those with the most financial need.
It’s a noble goal to double the Pell Grant, but of course Congress needs to find the money somewhere to do that.
Instead, the Biden administration is spending billions of dollars to allow high-earners with graduate degrees to not pay their loans with no say from Congress.
If you want to help those who owe more in student loans than they can afford to pay, we need to fix the student loan program on the front end.
We need to change the incentives and give colleges a reason to bring down tuition.
Right now, a high school student looking at college is often in the dark about what they will pay.
It’s no wonder that prices rise when students don’t even know what they are, and students are encouraged to borrow the maximum even if they don’t need it.
That’s why I introduced three bipartisan bills to give students the information they need to make the choice that works best for them.
My bills would make it easier for a student to see how much each college would cost, what aid they’re getting, and what their average salary versus student loan payment would be.
The answer isn’t to cancel student debt only after students have gotten in-over-their-heads.
It’s to stop them from getting in that situation in the first place.
And it certainly shouldn’t be done unilaterally from the White House with no say from Congress on a $150 billion program.
Even worse, the benefits of just canceling or pausing student debt are mainly going to those at the top of the income range.
Graduates with the most debt also tend to be those with the longest degrees, and they are now doctors or lawyers.
Doctors and lawyers might have plenty of debt now, but people with a graduate degree are also much more likely to have a higher salary and much higher lifetime earnings.
Are the two-thirds of Americans without a college degree somehow less deserving of a free $10,000 or $50,000 in canceled debt than doctors and lawyers?
I’m sure many Iowans would be happy to have their car loans or mortgages paid off.
Canceling debt is not the solution.
Instead, I have been glad to see many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle join my bills to prevent excess student debt in the first place.
We need to help students by giving them the information they need to find the best college for their needs at a cost they can afford.
Forgiving student debt is a slippery slope to a lot of other interests wanting debt forgiveness.
When I was a 2020 US House candidate in IA-02, forgiving student loans was on my website. It was a baited hook to catch some support out of the liberal bastion of Iowa City. Sure, I could agree to forgive student loans but there was a caveat, a catch. Those wanting forgiven loans must also agree to abolishing the federal Department of Education. The federal government has no constitutional authority of being involved with education.
I’m sure in hindsight more folks can now see the disaster of this than what I was trying to convey in 2020. Education is no longer, nor ever has been, about education. We are only dealing with the power of indoctrination. Even Adolf Hitler saw the importance of controlling education. The young teenagers in 1930s Germany, Hitler’s Brown Shirts, became the German Wehrmacht in the 1940s. Today, we have Antifa, BLM, climate change experts like Greta Thunberg, and all kinds of anti-American sentiment effervescing from “education” centers around the country.
Local control of K-12 schools is the only safe place for education. Going back to pre-1980 federalization of education is the only viable solution to ending Marxist control of education. We should even reverse engineer schools all the way back to before the Scopes monkey trials of 1925 and reevaluate Engel v. Vitale (1962), and Stone v. Graham (1980). Putting the teachings of Jesus back into schools would solve many, if not all, of the problems and societal issues created by liberal atheists. A Christian can just no longer listen to the concerns of an antichrist bias. They don’t work for producing life.
No, it’s past time to take the proverbial bulldozer and level public education. We don’t need a scalpel to forgive student debt and let the main problem still live. Take it all out by the roots. Remove the federal governments grip as surrogate parents on children. It, the government of Marxist atheists, has proven they are worse than any problem they asserted using their vaunted Hegelian Theary. We just need to come to acceptance that God’s plan for life, his way of creating parents, male and female within the boundaries of marriage, is the only petri dish where children should begin growing their education. Anything outside of our Creator’s biblical order belongs to the devil. Anything outside of the Constitution belongs to Marxists, the devil’s children. Now, think of the First Commandment written in stone and we discover America’s problem!