WaPo Editorial Board's take on Joe Biden canceling student loan debt might not be what you were expecting

Sarah D | 12:02 PM on August 25, 2022

The Washington Post Editorial Board has an opinion about Joe Biden’s flick-of-a-pen student debt cancellation … and it’s not what you might have expected:

WaPo ed board:

"Biden’s student loan announcement is a regressive, expensive mistake"https://t.co/FsC0lA4w5N

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) August 25, 2022

The Editorial Board writes:

The loan-forgiveness decision is even worse. Widely canceling student loan debt is regressive. It takes money from the broader tax base, mostly made up of workers who did not go to college, to subsidize the education debt of people with valuable degrees. Though Mr. Biden’s plan includes an income cap, the threshold does not reflect need or earnings potential, meaning white-collar professionals with high future salaries stand to benefit. Student loans, moreover, are a poor proxy for household income: An analysis by policy researcher Jason D. Delisle found that, in 2016, students from high-income and low-income families were just as likely to take on debt for their first year in an undergraduate program — and students from high-income families borrowed the largest amounts.

Mr. Biden’s plan is also expensive — and likely inflationary. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that extending the loan pause to the end of the year would cost $20 billion, while forgiving $10,000 for households making less than $300,000 would cost $230 billion. Together, these policies would nullify nearly a decade’s worth of deficit reduction from the Inflation Reduction Act. Moreover, it is unclear that the 1965 Higher Education Act even grants the president the legal authority to take such a sweeping step, given that it was historically understood to permit only more targeted relief.

…

Mr. Biden’s student loan decision will not do enough to help the most vulnerable Americans. It will, however, provide a windfall for those who don’t need it — with American taxpayers footing the bill.

With just a handful of exceptions, the Washington Post has been content to live quite cozily and quite far up into Joe Biden’s butt. To see them take the Biden administration to task over something the Biden administration deserves to be taken to task over is actually refreshing, and we genuinely love to see it.

To be clear, the piece could’ve gone at Joe Biden harder (in the first paragraph, the Board writes that “President Biden has generally embraced sensible reforms over flashy gimmicks,” which is not even remotely true), but we’ll take what we can get. Especially since WaPo knew that they’d be pissing off some of their devoted readership:

Always take the Opinion column of the paper owned by the world's richest man with a big helping of rock salt.

— Anthony (@AnthonyScoma) August 25, 2022

What a disgrace this rag has become.

PPP was the biggest theft in the history of the country, but helping actual people is regressive?

— Mark Green (@MisterGreen024) August 25, 2022