President Joe Biden left the White House for Camp David on Feb. 12.
On Tuesday (Feb. 16), President Biden rejected a Democratic proposal pushed by Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts. The proposal seeks to eliminate up to $50,000 in debt for each student loan borrower. Biden was immediately opposed by progressives in his party.
“I’m not going to let that happen,” Biden said of the proposal to eliminate $50,000 in student loan debt. Instead, he told an audience at a CNN town hall meeting that he believes loan forgiveness “depends on whether you go to a private college or a public college. It depends on what I said to one community: ‘I’m going to forgive the billions of dollars of debt owed by people who went to Harvard, Yale and Penn.”
Biden added that he would rather “use the money to provide early Education for children from poor families, but I do think that everyone, and I’ve been proposing this for four years, everyone should be able to go to community college for free.”
Biden said he supports and has the authority to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt, but is not willing to increase the debt forgiveness to $50,000.
According to a Feb. 4 press statement, the Democratic loan forgiveness proposal “calls on the president to use his executive authority to cancel student loan debt and ensure that federal student loan borrowers are not subject to tax obligations as a result of debt forgiveness.”
The Democratic president said he also supports a policy that would allow any Family earning less than $125,000 a year to send their children to state universities for free.
Biden opposes full student loan forgiveness, a position being opposed by those on the far left of the party, including Democratic progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of New York, and Massachusetts Democratic Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D). They called on the federal government to provide free college education and 100 percent student loan forgiveness for all.
Rep. Omar agreed with the tweet that Democrats should “fight like hell” for student loan forgiveness. Republican Rep. Ocasio-Cortez also called Biden’s position weak and urged her followers to keep pushing for the policy.
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “Who cares what kind of school a person goes to? Entire generations of working class kids have been encouraged to take on more debt under the guise of elitism. This is wrong. No one is saying we have to trade early childhood education for student loan forgiveness. We can have both.”
She said, “The opposition to student loan forgiveness looks increasingly precarious. We’ve gotten support from the Senate majority leader for $50,000 in forgiveness. Biden has reservations about it. But many of the arguments against it simply don’t hold up under close scrutiny. We can and should do this. Keep up the good work.”
On Tuesday night, Warren renewed his call for loan forgiveness for minority students.
Warren tweeted, “We tell African-American students that college is the surest way to build a future – but for many systemic reasons, they are being overwhelmed by student loan debt. African-Americans know: we need President Biden to use his power to cancel student loan debt.”
Presley echoed Warren’s sentiments, saying, “A survey of registered African-American voters shows that 40 percent of voters are considering staying Home in the next election if the student loan debt issue is not addressed. #CancelStudentDebt, all that debt.”
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