Yes, Biden Can Cancel Student Loans (Script & Sources)

Good Morning, good news! President Biden has the legal authority to forgive ALL federal student loan debt with just an executive order, and WITHOUT the approval of Congress. In doing so, he would unshackle an entire generation from an unpayable $1.7 trillion dollar deadweight. The people who are saying that it can’t be done are LYING to you, because they have a direct financial interest in maintaining a predatory loan system that was created through greed and collusion to take advantage of literal children who were convinced that to avoid a life of poverty they had to go to college, and in doing so, take on lifelong crippling debt.

I’m Dan From the Internet with Good Morning Bad News, and let’s talk about how student loans are a pyramid scheme that generates billions of dollars for people in power who have the absolute legal authority to cancel them, but are pretending they can’t.

The basis for student debt cancellation comes from the Higher Education Act of 1965, which says the executive branch via the Secretary of Education has the specific and unrestricted right to quote, “enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release” any student loan debt secured by the federal government. Over $90 billion dollars of loans and interest have already been forgiven in the last year via executive action.

Simply put, Congress has ALREADY given the executive branch explicit and unilateral permission to cancel student loans. It is actually outrageous that there are politicians pretending that Congress needs to give additional permission when there is absolutely no legal basis to support that. And when you dig deeper, it’s clear that they’re doing it to perpetuate widespread financial fraud that benefits them directly.

Joe Biden could cancel student loan debt on his way to the bathroom in the morning and it would be legal, constitutional, and binding.

Consider this: In 1978 the average yearly cost for tuition, room and board at a 4 year university was $2,917 with a national minimum wage of $2.30 which comes out to about 31 weeks of full time work. In 2016, that cost rose to $26,593, with a minimum wage of $7.25 and THAT adds up to 92 full time weeks of work - which is 40 more weeks than there are in a year. So, unless you have a job that pays almost twice the minimum wage, while working full time, AND attending school, you’re forced to take out a student loan, get financial aid, or just be rich.

And 1978 is a key year, because that’s when Congress passed a bill that said anybody of any income class was eligible for financial aid and student loans. It seemed like a good idea at the time; nobody should be prevented from getting an education just because they can’t afford it. Except colleges realized that now students could pay an unlimited amount of money for tuition, and banks realized they could loan that unlimited amount of money, which students could never not owe them, since two years earlier, Congress passed another bill that said student loans could never be discharged in bankruptcy.

So banks and colleges colluded to raise the bar so high, that today many students are saddled with unpayable loans that grow bigger and bigger with absolutely no recourse, in exchange for a college degree that, as a result of these unbridled loans, is worth less than the paper it's printed on, and it’s astonishingly cheap paper.

The cost of an education is not decided through free market supply and demand, but through unethical collusion between the people lending you money and the people you’re giving that money to. And they’ve spent billions of dollars bribing politicians in both parties, so that when we talk about releasing an entire generation of students from the damage caused by this financial fraud — which is unambiguously legal and possible — you get people in positions of power claiming without proof that it isn’t.

Former Trump Education Secretary Betsy Devos, who is directly invested in privatizing federal student loans, claimed that student debt cancellation via executive action is NOT legal, and that it MUST be done through Congress. Meanwhile, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been arguing against cancelling student debt for the same reason.

PELOSI: People think the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not.

Not coincidentally, this sudden austerity from Pelosi comes immediately after pushback from a billionaire mega-donor, Steven Swig, who is a real estate mogul in Pelosi’s district, and who worked on her re-election campaigns as fundraising treasurer. Despite not being a lawmaker or lawyer, the mega-donor circulated a memo throughout Washington, claiming that student debt cancellation via executive action is not legal, and that it has to be done through Congress.

Again, this is simply not true!!

The trick that they’re playing is that Congress is completely gridlocked, and will NEVER pass debt forgiveness, so they're just pretending that there’s a legal requirement to go through Congress (which again, there isn’t) as a way of politely saying they have absolutely no desire to cancel student debt.

It’s not hard to see what’s happening.