They knew the haters were gonna hate, so the Biden administration is coming out guns blazing.
The White House is taking on Republican critics of the recently announced student-loan forgiveness policy, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, by highlighting how much they themselves benefited from federal debt cancellation during the pandemic.
This week, the Biden administration announced that it was going to cancel student-loan debt for certain borrowers, which has long been a proposal that progressive Democrats — and even the president himself — have been pushing.
As MarketWatch’s Jillian Berman reported, specifically, the federal government plans to erase $10,000 in debt for borrowers earning up to $125,000, and provide an additional $10,000 in relief to borrowers who received a Pell grant when they went to college.
The administration also announced it would extend the pause on student-loan payments, collections and interest through Dec. 31. The freeze was scheduled to expire on Aug. 31.
The White House said the announcement would cancel the debt of roughly 20 million borrowers and said that nearly 90% of the relief would go to households earning less than $75,000 a year. No household in the top 5% of incomes would receive relief.
Republicans have taken to cable news networks to criticize the move, for various reasons.
Common criticisms in the past of such a broad forgiveness policy include concerns that such a policy could be inflationary, or that it could benefit the rich more than the poor, or that it could cause moral hazard and students will take out bigger loans in the future in hopes of another debt jubilee.
The White House on Thursday evening quickly shut down those arguments by noting that these particular critics have little standing to oppose loan cancellation, since, in fact, they’ve already been recipients of a similar but different program.
In a series of tweets posted from the White House’s official Twitter account, staff highlighted Republican members of Congress who had taken out loans via the Paycheck Protection Program from the U.S. Small Business Administration during the coronavirus pandemic, only to have those loans forgiven later:
The progressive think-tank Center for American Progress tweeted out a handy, condensed list of Republican PPP beneficiaries, for those who don’t want to parse through the Twitter thread (the numbers are slightly different though):
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