Bob Good, being a Republican, can’t see that his criticism of the Biden administration’s latest effort to target student-loan debt are the height of hypocrisy.
“People who choose to take out loans should be responsible for paying them back. President Biden should not force taxpayers further into debt to pay the loans of others. It’s as simple as that,” said the Fifth District Republican said on Twitter.
Good was quickly reminded on the Twitter thread of the millions in COVID-era PPP loans taken out by fellow House Republicans that were forgiven – or, using Good’s framing, chose to take out loans, should have been responsible to paying them back, but forced other taxpayers to go further into debt to pay off their balances for them.
It’s as simple as that, indeed.
Good’s tweet was a political pushback against the announcement by the Biden administration that it was undertaking an additional $7.7 billion in forgiveness for undergraduate loan holders.
This brings the total relief from Biden’s efforts to bring down student-loan debt to $167 billion for more than 4.75 million Americans.
According to Education Department data, nearly 90 percent of affected borrowers earn $75,000 a year or less.
The PPP program, per data from the National Bureau of Economic Research, largely benefited the upper 20 percent of income-earners, whose average income is $130,545.
The NEBR data tells us that 72 percent of the PPP loans went to those high income-earners.
The total amount of the PPP loans that have been forgiven: in the neighborhood of $800 billion.
Sixth District Republican Ben Cline took a different approach to his criticism, highlighting how the Trump- and McConnell-packed U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Biden’s efforts to cancel student debt are unconstitutional.
“The Biden Administration ONCE AGAIN announced a student loan giveaway, canceling $7.7 billion for 160,000 borrowers. Biden ONCE AGAIN is defying the Supreme Court ruling that deemed this action unconstitutional. He is blatantly ignoring our Constitutional separation of powers,” Cline tweeted this week, ignoring the obvious politics behind the Supreme Court ruling.
So, to the likes of Good and Cline, and the scores of other congressional Republicans who have issues with student-debt relief, it’s OK for the government to dole out money to the already wealthy to help see them through the COVID slowdown, but to give it to working-class and lower-middle-class kids trying to build a better life for themselves, that’s somehow an unpardonable sin.
And we haven’t even accounted yet in this analysis how much of that PPP money went to actual House Republicans who have raised actual issues with student-loan forgiveness who have had actual hundreds of thousands and even millions of their PPP loans forgiven – people like Brett Guthrie ($4.4 million), Carol Miller ($3.1 million), Vern Buchanan ($2.3 million).
Free money for we, basically, but no free money for thee.
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Chris Graham
