Schumer Slams ‘Fat Cats’ Who Don’t Want To Cancel Student Loans | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Ben Zeisloft.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) argued last week that student loan cancellation is "not a problem that concerns the wealthy."

    The comment came as Democratic lawmakers continue to evaluate policies that would scrap large amounts of student debt. The Biden administration is reportedly considering a plan to cancel $10,000 in student loans per borrower, yet Schumer argued last July that "all President Biden has to do is flick his pen" rather than passing legislation through Congress to erase up to $50,000 per borrower.

    "Let's dispel one awful myth right here: This is not a problem that concerns the wealthy or the Ivy League," Schumer said last week. "All of these fat cats, and people who never want to see help for working people and poor people come up with these myths."

    In an interview with The Daily Wire, Cato Institute policy scholar Neal McCluskey explained that debt cancellation would be "regressive" - benefiting wealthy borrowers to a greater extent than those in other income brackets.

    "Wealthier people are more likely to go to college and in particular, more likely to go to graduate school than lower-income families," McCluskey said, noting that roughly half of student debt was incurred by the 25% of borrowers seeking graduate degrees.

    Likewise, many debt cancellation policies fail to consider the human capital investment that student loans represent.

    "If you estimate the amount that people will end up earning as a result of the degrees, you can see that people who take on student debt are really going to end up well off on average," McCluskey remarked. "The average person with a bachelor's degree makes about $1.2 million more over their lifetime than someone with just a high school diploma. If you go to somebody with a professional degree - like a medical degree or a law degree - they end up making about $3 million more over their lifetime than somebody with just a high school diploma."

    McCluskey pointed to Brookings Institution data showing that one-third of student debt is owed by the wealthiest 20% of households, while 8% is owned by the bottom 20%. "Wealthy people do take on debt, and a lot of that debt is for graduate school," he added.

    McCluskey said that without meaningful reforms to the federal student aid process, action to cancel debt - especially via executive order - would only serve to raise costs.

    "It would clearly have negative, unintended consequences going forward of encouraging even more rampant price inflation than we've seen in college over the last several decades," he said. "Anybody going forward will say, 'You know, I should really be willing to take out a lot more debt because how could the federal government cancel all this debt before but then tell me they're not going to do it?' And that also means that colleges have a greater incentive to increase their prices, because they say, 'There's no way the federal government will not forgive the debt of the students who we take on.'"

    Between 2002 and 2022, average tuition and fees at private universities increased by 144%, according to data from U.S. News and World Report. Average private university tuition is currently $43,775, while average in-state public university tuition is $11,631.
Go Back

HbAD0

Latest Op-Ed & Politics

Be careful what you wish for, you may get it
America needs to wake up and get its priorities right
Former President Donald Trump suggested this week that if he becomes president again, he might allow Prince Harry to be deported.
It's a New Year, which means it's time to make resolutions — even for prominent evangelical leaders. The Babylon Bee asked the following well-known figures in the faith what they hope to accomplish in 2024:
Vice President Kamala Harris will visit a Minnesota Planned Parenthood clinic, reportedly the first time a president or vice president has visited an abortion facility.
An eight-mile stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville has been temporarily closed due to a string of “human and bear interactions,” the National Parks Service announced.
University of Wisconsin tried to punish conservatives for the fact that liberals regularly commit crimes to silence opposition
most voters think EU officials not doing a good job on illegal immigration
Come from behind by GOP candidate is a blueprint to 2024

HbAD1

Biden spending and energy policies to blame
Tuberculosis carried by illegal invaders has already infected Texas cattle
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said this week that the only campaign promise President Joe Biden has delivered on as president is the complete dismantling of the U.S. southern border.
Hamas is reeling after losing two of their most cherished leaders on the same day: military commander Saleh al-Arouri, and Harvard President Claudine Gay.
President Joe Biden’s brother told the Internal Revenue Service that Hunter Biden told him he was in business with a “protege of President Xi,” referring to the leader of China, according to notes by an IRS investigator that were divulged during a congressional interview of Jim Biden.
Gov. Roy Cooper seeks a temporary restraining order to block a law changing the composition of the State Board of Elections.
X owner Elon Musk mocked a news segment from ABC News this week that promoted President Joe Biden’s talking points about the Democrat-led Senate’s failed border bill, which critics and many experts have said would make the situation on the border worse.
That’s the question Marguerite Roza of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab sought to answer in a recent webinar on the topic.

HbAD2

 
Back to Top