Fresh off of testing negative for COVID-19 after her “rebound” case, First Lady Jill Biden headed up a “Meeting to Strengthen the Teaching Profession” at the White House Wednesday, where she was hit very early on with a query about President Biden’s student loan relief plan, which he unilaterally implemented last week.
At some point prior to handing over the meeting to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, Jill Biden was confronted by a Daily Mail reporter who asked her to explain how Biden’s plan, which was heavily pushed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Raphael Warnock in part on grounds it would help them come election time, would lower the costs of higher education as the President himself has repeatedly asserted will happen.
“Dr.” Jill was clearly surprised by the question, as evidenced by the bumbling answer she gave.
“He said he was going to have loan forgiveness during the campaign,” she stated. “I heard him say it over and over again and he followed up on his promise and he kept to it.”
Watch her non-answer below:
Her cringe response was “very doctoral” according to some Twitter users who, like me, were not impressed.
I mean, I’m not really defending Jill Biden here but in her defense, she didn’t have an answer because there isn’t one – or, rather, there is one but it’s rather inconvenient to be telling the truth about how your husband’s plan actually will not do what he promises it will do, especially when he enters the room for a brief visit as the pow wow is going on:
The truth of the matter is that tuition rates are going to increase, it’s just a matter of how much:
Brian Riedl, a senior fellow in budget, tax and economic policy at the Manhattan Institute told FOX Business that he expects the handout to cause a spike in tuition costs.
“Students will likely feel liberated to borrow more money on the resumption of future loan forgiveness, and universities will take advantage of the additional borrowing by raising tuition,” Riedl said. “This is pretty similar to the fact that historically 60% of all student aid increases have been captured with tuition hikes, and this will be treated like an increase in student aid moving forward, which suggests that 60% will be countered by tuition hikes.”
Relatedly, Fortune wrote a fantastic piece Tuesday detailing the “giant loophole in Biden’s student-debt relief that could make college even more expensive.” Here’s the gist of it:
Under the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan, IDR [income-driven repayment] borrowers will now pay just 5% of their income for undergraduate loans and 10% for postgraduate loans for a period of 10 or 20 years, depending on how much is owed. The plan will also increase the amount of income that isn’t subject to the IDR from 150% above the poverty line to 225% and eliminate any accrual of interest under the plans.
The issue here is incentives. The IDR plan makes it so that no matter the loan amount, student borrowers make the same payments–5% or 10% of their postgraduation income annually for a period of 10 or 20 years–thereby incentivizing students to borrow as much money as possible, critics say. This, in turn, incentivizes universities to charge as much as they can because they aren’t worried about borrowers being unable to make their payments.
So the answer to the question that Jill Biden couldn’t (or wouldn’t) answer was a simple two words: It won’t.
Flashback: ‘Dr.’ Jill Hits a New Low as Biden White House Close to Hitting Rock Bottom