Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) slammed President Joe Biden (D) Thursday for his plan to bail out a large number of Americans from having to pay back a substantial portion of their student loans.
Biden announced his plan Wednesday to make U.S. taxpayers pay off thousands of dollars in student loans for those making less than $125,000 a year.
The nixing of $10,000 of debt per borrower — up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients — would cost $298 billion in 2022 and a total of $329 billion by 2031 if the policy is renewed each year, according to a nonpartisan analysis from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Less than 32% of the funding would benefit Americans in the two lowest income quintiles, while 42% would benefit those earning more than $82,400 per year.
“It’s very unfair to have a truck driver have to pay back a loan for somebody that got like a PhD in gender studies,” DeSantis said. “That’s not fair. That’s not right.”
“And then you also just have the fact like, if you’re going to talk about debt, then you should look at, okay, who has benefited the most from all this exorbitant debt that’s been taken out of the last generation? It’s the universities,” DeSantis continued. “They have bloated administrative budgets, they have all this, although in Florida, since I’ve been governor, no tuition increases at our state universities, we haven’t allowed that. Because all it does, all it does is they plow it in and they will, they will expand like the DEI office or something else like that, and it has no real impact on the quality of the education when they’re raising the tuition. It just creates more administrative bloat, and that’s been going on, and the colleges and universities have gotten a free ride at this.”
“If you’re going to do some type of student loan, you know, relief, it’s not really a relief, because people are still paying for it. But the people that should pay for it, it’s not the American taxpayers, it should be the university should be responsible for that,” DeSantis added. “If they’re producing people that went deep into debt, and their degree is not worth anything, and they’re not able to make enough money to pay it back. Well, then that’s on them. And they’ve had an incentive to get more and more loans taken out, and then put it in their pocket. So we should look at these universities, but what Biden is doing, it’s going to cause more inflation, which is what, you just had one of Obama’s economists come out and say, ‘This is the worst time to do this. It’s going to fuel inflation. This is not good policy.’”
DeSantis concluded by stating that Biden “does not have the constitutional authority to do this.”
It’s unfair to force a truck driver to pay a loan for someone who got a PhD in gender studies.
Taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for student loan relief and Biden’s order isn’t constitutional.
If anything, universities handing out worthless degrees should be on the hook. pic.twitter.com/wZuH6GxPII
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) August 25, 2022