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- Donald Trump Jr. slammed Biden’s plans to cancel student debt in comments to The Washington Post.
- He said the plans will bail out those with “worthless gender study degrees.”
- Republicans are ramping up criticism of debt forgiveness as Biden comes closer to making a decision.
Donald Trump Jr. isn’t shy about his thoughts on President Joe Biden potentially forgiving some student debt.
“Biden essentially wants blue-collar workers like truck drivers — who didn’t have the luxury of going to college to get drunk for four years — to bail out a bunch of upper-middle-class kids who chose to spend tens of thousands of dollars that they didn’t have on worthless gender study degrees,” Trump told The Washington Post.
According to the Post, Trump’s comments came after his criticism of student-loan forgiveness during a rally for Senate candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio last month — and he joins the growing number of Republicans worried Biden might actually cancel student debt.
The president recently indicated a decision on loan forgiveness will be made in the coming weeks, but it’s unclear what that relief will actually look like. He said he is not considering $50,000 in debt reduction for every federal borrower, and while multiple reports have suggested the relief might be targeted to those making under $125,000, Politico reported that capping relief based on income isn’t something the Education Department alone has the ability to do.
Trump’s concerns that student-loan relief will go to the wealthy is not only repeated by many Republican lawmakers — it’s one Biden himself has shared.
“The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? I don’t agree,” Biden said last year.
And top Republican on the House education committee Virginia Foxx said in a statement last month that “taxpayers have been footing the student loan bill for graduate students and Ivy League lawyers to the tune of $5 billion every month while their wallets are being drained by skyrocketing inflation,” referring to the cost of the pandemic-long pause on loan payments, now set to expire after August 31.
But when it comes to who student-loan relief will benefit, and how it will impact the economy, many Democrats believe the opposite. A report from the Roosevelt Institute found that the relief would benefit low-income earners most, and while Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told senators last week the impact of forgiveness still needs to be analyzed, she said it “could be good for the economy.”
For now, federal student-loan borrowers can expect relief to hit their account balances at some point this summer, and Democrats want to ensure it gets done right. Politico reported that three leading voices for debt forgiveness — Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and Raphael Warnock — are requesting Biden to hold off on issuing an executive order on loan forgiveness until they can meet with him one last time and push him to go big on debt cancellation.
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