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June 1, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
40:43
Biden’s next move to entice voters before November
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
I am going to hit a topic today that's going to make some of you happy.
It's going to make some of you infuriated.
It's going to make some of you think that I'm out of touch, don't know what I'm saying, an old guy who just doesn't understand.
Well, let's just come to grips with something that has been on the back burner for a long time.
But it's becoming more and more because Joe Biden is in need of a political quote victory.
He's in need of something that can solve the problems when people are looking around at 450, 460, 470 gas prices, diesel prices higher than that.
When you're looking at supply chain shortages such as the baby food formula that can't be found anywhere, and then trying to make Americans feel better about the fact that we're importing it from Europe and other places, although the Biden administration was at fault, at least partly, for shutting down the baby formula factory.
Now, most of you know I do the Doug Collins podcast here, and I actually, I'm glad that you've downloaded it.
You've got it now.
Please share this with four or five other people.
You'll want to hear this because today's going to be very practical stuff.
And we talk about it, but I also do a radio show.
And I had somebody actually argue with me the other day on TV when we discussed the baby formula.
And they didn't want to take responsibility.
The Biden administration didn't want to take responsibility when they don't look long-term at the effects of their regulatory process and what's going on.
And then tried to blame it on the monopolies that run baby formula services.
Again, folks, you've got to have real answers to real problems.
And the Biden administration is just not giving real answers.
And I thought it was really interesting.
That all along in the Biden administration, one of the things that he talked about in the presidential run was that he was going to do something with student loan debt.
Student loan debt is one of the biggest issues out there right now, especially among young people, because it not only affects their buying power, it affects their debt ratios, it affects a lot of things in the economy, that if did not have, per se, the student loan debt, they could spend money other places or You know, make a better living, get an earlier start in life.
Now, student loan debt has increased all throughout the years.
Now, this is something that I want to lay out today for you because in the midst of all of the tragedy in the school shooting in Uvalde, we go back to Texas, we go to Buffalo.
But again, just as I'm taping this after the Memorial Day weekend, more people were killed in cities, especially in a lot of our minority areas, especially Simply through gang activities and handguns, in which all the solutions being talked about now are aimed at a very small target of the gun crime that is going on right now.
And we'll talk more about that in another episode.
But I thought it was interesting, and I picked this out of the Biden, sort of what we'll call the, let's throw it out there while other things are going on, and then we can work it out.
And that is in student loans.
So what has happened over the last couple weeks, to catch you up to date, Is that the Biden administration is preparing to, it looks like now, to cancel up to $10,000 in student loan debt.
Now, they're going to put this in the context of the fact that if you're limiting it, if you're under more than $150,000, you're not going to get it.
If you're under $300,000 per married couple, you're not going to get it filing jointly.
It's unclear...
Also, there's another issue to this that we're going to talk just briefly about.
I've got to bring this up.
They have paused all these payments during the pandemic and the administration's going on.
It is set to not only forgive this $10,000, but also set to reinstate the interest in payments for student loans if you currently have student loans.
So if you have more than $10,000, that $10,000 may be forgiven if you meet the criteria, but the other parts of your student loans will now be brought back into play Come the end of summer.
So it's a mixed bag.
And they know this is going to be coming right before the election season.
They're trying to get ahead of this.
And what I want to do is point out today, look, understand student loan debt is affecting every Problem that we have, okay, as far as younger people, and it's the dominant thing in their process.
Does it truly affect everything?
Probably not, but when you're a young person who just got out of college, you got your first job, you're actually making, you know, maybe for the first time you're making a full-time wage, you're out there, you're excited, and then all of a sudden you see $400, $500, $600, $800 a month going to a student loan repayment.
It really cuts into your buying power.
And that's understood.
But this whole process starts well before you get there to college.
And I think we're going to talk about some of those issues this morning.
And I want to just simply say that there are...
There are ways that you can reduce your student loan debt.
Now, if you already have the student loan debt, then we're going to have to deal with it a different way.
But I think this is what the culture and society has gotten us into.
And now the Biden administration is trying to make political hay out of it to move forward.
Now, let's just take real quickly here.
There is a problem.
And we're going to talk about a couple of problems toward the end in dealing with this, as far as how they're going to identify these people, how they're going to do this in a executive order format.
But this is where we're at right now.
That in the midst of everything going on, you have Ukraine, you have inflation, you have shortages in supply chains, you have a summer employment season, which I just read, for those who like to go to pools and beaches and places like that, we have a crisis of people who are not wanting to be lifeguards.
They can't hire lifeguards.
City of Phoenix, I read a story about this.
They were talking about that they cannot open 50% of their public pools in Phoenix, Arizona, which is the pools of the places you go to get away from the heat of Phoenix, Arizona, because they don't have enough lifeguards and even offered a $2,500 bonus for people to come forward as lifeguards.
Folks, we've got a severe shortage of these employment Issues going on in our restaurant industry, in our service industries, and especially our hospitality industries.
There's a lot of things going on in the world right now that the Biden administration could be focusing on.
But the one thing they keep coming back to almost as a is the is the crux of their whole argument to gain young people to keep their at least momentum where they believe they separate that it's out is in the student loan offering.
Now, the other areas they're dealing with, but not very well.
Student loan is at one place sort of like the stimulus from last year, the covid stimulus, which got us into the inflation problem to start with, where they believe that they can give money.
They can give the away something.
People will say, well, all this other stuff, we'll just forget.
Folks, you're smarter than that.
And if you're listening to the podcast this morning, I want you to encourage you to share this podcast.
This is going to be practical, real-world stuff, and just being honest about this issue of student debt forgiveness.
Now, look, would it be great to have all student loans forgiven?
Yeah, but it just doesn't exist.
And for all these people out here who are saying, well, it'll be free anyway.
College education ought to be free anyway, basically run by the government.
Do you really want that?
Look, we're already seeing academic freedoms in our schools, in our universities and colleges right now being severely restricted by those on the left who don't want to hear anything from people like me on the right who have a conservative opinion.
We can see it in our council culture.
We see it in student groups such as Turning Point and many others who are being kicked off of campuses, not giving charges for campuses.
We're seeing Republican or conservative groups not being allowed by their student union association to have opportunities to be on campus.
We're seeing this all across.
And then don't even get into the underside of what we're seeing with some of the anti-Semitic rhetoric, which has grown tremendously on college campuses.
And you're wanting to throw the government into this, where basically the government funds education for everybody?
Not to mention the cost that would entail.
And also, basically, let's just forget that the federal government should not be involved in any way, shape, form, or fashion in this.
To start with Bernie Sanders.
Okay, come on.
Let's just get back to what we should be doing as a government and not interfering in all these other places.
But this is something that we've got to deal with.
And it's something I want us to lay out here in an honest argument.
So as we deal with this, let's look at what student loan actually does by the numbers.
Let's just go by the numbers on how big of an issue this is and really what the Biden administration is trying to do.
Number one, student loans.
Americans owe $1.75 trillion in student loan debt spread out among 46 million borrowers.
Now, I want you to hear that number one more time.
1.75 trillion.
That's the Build Back Better price tag.
If you're trying to make a comparison here, that's the price tag of the failed Build Back Better program that they're still trying to revive now.
I think they're trying to revive it as a Manchin Build Back Better because Joe Manchin holds the keys there.
But they're desperate for anything right now to spend money to gain people to say, look, we're doing something in Congress.
But 1.75 trillion in student loan debt over 46 million borrowers.
That's about...
Put this in perspective.
If you're listening to me today and say, well, Doug, is that really a lot?
I mean, really, there's a lot of people going to college.
It's $440 billion more than the total U.S. auto loan market.
$440 billion bigger than all the cars that are out there, loans.
This is a real issue.
Some other statistics that I want you to look at.
And students accumulated debt.
55% of bachelor degree recipients graduating from a four-year public or private non-profit college in 2020 had student loan debt.
55% carried debt.
The average debt at graduation from four-year public and private non-profit colleges was $28,400 in 2020. Now think about that.
$28,400.
Low-end car or car.
Down payment for a house.
You know, other things that could be into the economy.
This is $28,000 that they're saddled with coming out of college in 2020. Latest statistic.
2019, this was a $400.
It was actually a little bit of a decrease.
We had a lot of some folks dropping out during the COVID crisis as we go forward.
66% of graduates from public colleges had loans, borrowing an average of $26,000.
1,000 from 2016 data and 2019 data.
These were the latest available.
When you look down at what is going on here, statistics between students and parents.
This is an interesting statistic.
Well, $95.9 billion in 2020 to 2021 academic year.
13% of those were private or other non-federal loans.
48%.
Here's an interesting statistic for you.
48% talking about borrowing back or defaults on student loans.
48% of borrowers who attended for-profit colleges defaulted within 12 years compared to 12% of public college attendees and 14% of non-profit college attendees.
This is amazing.
Private student loan debt, which is not counted in this public sector that Biden is wanting to talk about, is $12 billion in 2021. Why do we point this out?
Look, it's a real fact that these are issues among those who are going to college now, but there's some things that I want to discuss that are never really wanting to be discussed in the context of the costs surrounding colleges.
This is where we've got to understand that the legacy universities, the public school system, are all stuck in a model of a traditional education in which you go, you sit in a classroom, you have the brick and mortar buildings, you have the professors, you have the...
The infrastructure around, which a lot of people still go to.
It is the experience of the life for many to go to colleges and do.
But we've not looked at it.
And being from a state legislator perspective, where most of this is funded, okay?
State legislators fund most of universities and colleges along with tuition payments, okay?
This is tuition and state funding are the two determinants many times in college.
I know here in Georgia that was as far as how much tuition We've based based on how much the state was willing to kick in and then they balanced it off on other ways that colleges and universities can raise money from alumni and others to sponsor scholarships and the like.
Now, in looking at all of this, what has happened over the past 25 years is the escalation of these costs due to facilities maintenance, facilities cost, having to have the bigger and best in our college campuses to attract students to come to their universities.
It's interesting and As we go forward in looking at this, I'm going to give you a unique situation that happened in the state of Georgia.
Georgia has the Hope Scholarship Program.
Hope Scholarship Program is a great program.
It's a wonderful program.
And it was designed back in 1992 by then-former governor, in the 1992-93 timeframe, by then-former Governor Zell Miller.
Zell Miller came into office.
One of the things that was happening in Georgia was that we were losing some of our best and brightest students to out-of-state schools in University of Georgia, Georgia Tech.
They were going there, but a lot of them were going out-of-state.
And a lot of people were having trouble Going to college.
They were trying to find ways so they could go.
What they performed was a two-bay system based on the Georgia Lottery and Hope Scholarships.
All of the Georgia Lottery money is funded into Hope Scholarships or scholarships for college education or pre-K programs.
That's the only thing that money can be spent for.
So it's one of the most successful lotteries in the country, one of the most financially stable lotteries in the country, and it's always done what it said.
So it's always been sort of a bubble around the HOPE Scholarship Program here and the lottery here in Georgia because it goes to education.
It started out as a great thing.
What happened was, and this goes to my point on understanding the cost of the economics behind student loans and why we've gotten to the cost that we have now.
There's astronomical difference in the cost of tuition and other things going on for universities, mainly of their own choosing.
Here's what happened in Georgia.
Not only did you have the state legislature every year who appropriated however many millions of dollars to the University of the Board of Regents system here in Georgia, which they then distributed a We're good to
go.
Then, of course, they would always have the tuition and fees.
That is what the students get on the cost of going to class.
They would have their fees attached to that.
That was the way that the university many times raised a great deal, if not most of their funds coming through the tuition and fee system.
What happened, though, in Georgia when we added the HOPE scholarship is all of a sudden we basically added a third funding source.
And that was that parents didn't...
Really take it into account that they were already getting money from the state, the tuition fee was part of it, but then if they quote wasn't paying it, then you have the parents were not as concerned about cost.
It's just a natural occurrence.
If you're not having to worry about your child if they got the HOPE scholarship and it was paying 100% of tuition, you really didn't care how much tuition was.
We began to experience problems because these universities saw that there was not the pushback from increases in tuition because for a lot of the students with a B average or better, they were getting their tuition paid.
By 2010, 2011, this became a problem because they were connected.
We had to go in, and I was part of doing this, that we had to go in and we had to decouple tuition from the HOPE Scholarship.
What that then provided was is that the tuition will be paid on a percentage scale and not just automatically increased as we went along.
I give you all of that information to understand that the funding mechanisms for college and universities are multi-pronged, but they're dependent on getting students in, working through degrees and working through the traditional model of education.
Again, brick and mortar, housing, maintenance, all of these costs, tuition, tenure, every bit of it.
And many of the universities have begun, since COVID in particular, have begun to adopt new, cheaper alternatives, but yet their tuition prices have not gone down.
That's another topic that we can deal with on another day, but you have to have that understanding and basics of these numbers to understand why we're in a position right now in which student loan debt has become basically untenable.
For those that have taken them on.
Now, one of the things we're not going to find here is that is the understanding that, you know, there's some people that are really, frankly, going to get left out of this.
And it's just true.
And, you know, we hear the word fairness all the time from the left.
As politically viable as this solution is, as politically apt to get votes as this is, and also in the understanding that this will help the economy and they'll be able to pay more and they'll be able to buy things, there's a circular notion here.
But then I just have a question and I'm going to spend the rest of this podcast in just a few minutes talking about what are the downsides of this?
Again, political solutions applied to real-world problems rarely work.
They work for some.
They may work to make you feel good for a little bit, and this has become the problem in politics.
We want to find a solution that's very difficult, give you an easy answer to it, and make you feel better about it, whether it actually works or not.
Whether it actually works or not is irrelevant.
And student loans are an issue now that the Biden administration is taking on because number one, it polls very well.
Number two, they believe all these benefits that are going to come from it.
But the problem is, is it's a one-time solution and fix.
Where do we go from here?
And I think this is the concern that I want to have.
So I just want to share a few.
And Forbes, many others have written about this.
I've taken this out of several, you know, Ideas on these folks that are going to really look at this and say, well, it's great for those, but what about me?
The first group, and we may not talk about this very often, but think about it.
How many people out there, and there's a lot, who because of either their own economic situations where they come from, they could not get scholarships or they could not find grants to go to college.
Number one, how is this fair, if you use the word fair, as a lot of people on the left talk about, to those who never go to college?
Why is the Biden administration all of a sudden giving a benefit to those who went to college, but for those who never went to college, They never did.
You know, how is this fair to those?
I mean, for wide-scale student loan forgiveness, not only feels like wealth distribution, but it also feels like a slap in the face to working class, working Americans who have financial struggles.
For others, the targeted loan forgiveness they may understand, but these numbers do not bear out for those who never had a chance to go to college and never had.
What in their life are they going to be forgiven?
I mean, is there an issue that they may be forgiven that they had a car loan or a house payment?
You know, again, they're not getting the same money.
And guess who pays for this?
They do.
Their tax dollars pay for this.
So again, as you just put it out there, the first aspect of student loan forgiveness is what about those who never participated in this?
They never went to college.
Maybe they couldn't afford to go to college.
Maybe they didn't want to take on the debt.
Maybe they couldn't.
They chose that they were going to work a while in life and then go back when they had the money after a few years of saving and doing these things.
Again, just an interesting number of questions here for those.
If you're looking at fairness, and I hear this thrown around all the time in fairness, it's not fair that I have so much student loan.
Well, was it fair that you signed the document that said you're going to get that money?
We're going to talk about that a little bit more later.
Number two, is it fair or how is this going to play with people who don't have student loans?
Now, we determined 55% of those under undergrad program have taken out student loans.
What about the 45% who have not?
And don't tell me right off the bat that, oh, that's just rich people who can pay for it.
No, it's not.
There are a lot of people who go to college and they work jobs, they pay their college as they go.
For those of us who did that when I was back in, and granted, I will not compare my costs back when I was in college in the 80s to what the costs are today, but it was still substantial for that time.
And I worked at a grocery store and worked my way through college.
My dad helped and mom helped in areas where they could with some of my tuitions, but I picked up all the rest and graduated with no student loan debt that I had.
Now, that took a sacrifice.
That meant that I didn't get to participate in things that maybe others got to participate in in college, but I also didn't have to worry about student loan debt when I got out because I had paid as you go.
This is still a very vital way to pay for college.
I think, you know, looking at it from an employer standpoint, when I was hiring people, if they worked their way through college, that was a bonus in my mind because they knew how to multitask.
They knew how to go to school.
They knew how to keep their grades up.
They knew how to go to work.
They knew how to budget their money.
That is actually beneficial.
Now, for some, it may not be an option, okay?
And I'll say that.
But I think in a certain point, some of it is always an option.
Instead of borrowing, say you had to borrow $20,000, how about borrowing $10,000 and working to pay cash or working to pay the other loan off?
Taking a job on campus, working ways to get out of that.
Those are questions that frankly are just not asked anymore because easy credit, people just go without thinking about what the end result would be.
You've heard the comment before, Dave Ramsey, many others, who present that you live like nobody else now so that later you can live like nobody else.
And the premise of that is live within your means.
Borrow.
Do not borrow if you can't afford it.
And really, in many ways, save and pay as you go.
And college education will be one in which you could actually see this making a difference.
If you graduate with a degree and without debt, you're far better off.
But this is simply saying, we're going to do away with $10,000 worth of debt.
The other aspect, number three, is we deal with these.
What about the people who went to community college who chose not to have these bigger loan debts?
I'm going to take this in half.
Not only those who went to community college, but what about those who have much larger debts?
In fairness, the $10,000 for them is not going to make that much of a difference.
It gives them a little bit of credit, but also those who went to community college and looking at this are going to be, again, Aspects of their life, they made choices to get an education, to do it in an economic level, but then this is basically disincentivized them to go to, at the time, the financial incentive for them to go to a four-year college was not there.
They went to a community college or one closer to home.
They paid their bills.
They got out with minimal debt.
We'll see how this works out, but for all these also hollering that this is going to make a big difference In, you know, people's lives are not taking into account that if you have $75,000, $80,000 or longer in community in debt because you chose to go to the school you chose to go to and you accumulate that debt by signing those loan documents, this is, again, it's going to be a piecemeal approach.
It's trying to make you feel good while at the same time not addressing the bigger issue of cost, the bigger issue of loans and the bigger issue of how we do and how we assess college education and where we are today.
I was at a meeting last week and one of the things we're going to have to assess is not only the college education, university education, but our high school education.
Sometimes I heard this quote last week at a meeting I was at.
They said that a high school education is still the most important thing.
It just takes you four years of college to get it.
That we've basically changed around the requirements in colleges and universities, and it's just taking longer in school, thus presenting people with issues that they need that, quote, college degree, but yet how do they attain it?
How do they finance it?
Again, a lot of problems here, but this idea that you can just forgive this debt and it not cause issues is a certain problem.
Also, I want to go back to this community college debt.
Malcolm Gladwell, an author who has written many books, has discussed this.
And he took a lot of heat early on, about four or five years ago, when he wrote a book called David and Goliath.
He was interviewed around this.
And he talked about the educational system.
And he said, look, and he did not go to a, quote, prestigious Ivy League university.
And he talked about this.
He said, what is the real value of going to a university, which the tuition is extremely high, it's the prestigious university, so to speak, as opposed to getting a getting all you could get out of a local education, whether it be a local college, a smaller college or community college.
At the end of the day, you know, it depends on the person studying.
He said, now, that's not to discount that going to Harvard opens doors for you.
It opens, you know, maybe other thought.
They have better research facilities.
They have all kinds of things that may later on affect you.
But is it worth the cost for the degree, which most of us know, once we get out of college and we go into the job market, most people do not want to know our class ranking in college.
I mean, I've had a master's and a law degree.
I don't ever get asked, well, what was your class rank in college?
No, they look at your history.
It's a door opener to get you the job.
So the question is, is where is education and how much you put into it as opposed to actually going to the name or the prestigious university, the more expensive university, and doing the way that you're then paying for something up front now that you may or may not get a return in the future.
Let's also take up another issue.
In most states right now, and Georgia's in particular is one, you can register and take college level classes before you ever get to college through high school.
I've known people now early admittance to colleges are taking in their junior and senior years in high school, the college equivalency courses, and coming into college with a year or a year and a half, in some cases even two years of college completed before they ever get there.
Again, another way to cut costs in college while getting the college degree without taking and running yourself into debt.
Then, there's one here that I'm just going to be honest with and I'm going to offend some of you.
Many of you are sitting there with college debt, student loan debt, that you borrowed for a degree that will not get you the payback for the degree that you earned.
Now, as much as I love history and I love art and I love those things, there's only so many jobs that you can have in an art history degree.
There's only so much that you can have having a degree in the romantic languages.
It's only so many degrees that you can get in so many of the course offerings in our universities today that at the end of the day, how do you get a job sustaining yourself with that degree?
Now, I'm not going to argue the fact that it doesn't give you the maybe verbal skills, written skills, critical thinking skills.
Those are all important.
But at the end of the day, your degree itself, you will end up more than likely earning a living In something other than the degree that you went for.
A degree in French philosophers or others may be great if you're going to teach in college or you're going to teach in an advanced degree, but there are only so many of those jobs out there.
This is where we're struggling in this issue.
You're going to borrowing a lot of money in which you then go out and realize you can't find a job that helps you pay the student loan debt you have.
Nobody's addressing that question.
I have asked this of university presidents.
Why do you offer these?
Well, we got some students who want to do that.
They're the smallest of programs many times or the smaller of the program, but yet have a cumulative debt that is way out of proportion for that.
Again, finding your degree at a college that you want to go to at a price you can afford and willing to keep your student loan debt is the best possible route you can go.
Instead of taking this and moving it into a bigger realm and going and getting degrees that frankly, at the end of the day, you would have been better off Maybe even not going to college or getting a degree and just an English degree or getting something that just gets you the skills that you're looking for.
If you're not looking for some of these degrees, finding a skill and finding a set that you want to go to is something important.
But again, I mean, why are we now paying off debt in degree programs in which the outcome or the payoff of those degrees were never in sight to start with?
This also doesn't take into account the fourth issue here is private student loan debt.
This is only dealing in public student loan debt, the ones that federal government controls.
Private student loan debt is still several, multi-billion dollars out there.
This does nothing for that.
The other issue that I wanted to discuss is how does this affect future student loan borrowers?
Now, we don't talk about this, and I've asked this question to those who are in favor of just getting rid of all of our student loans.
And I asked him, I said, well, number one, what about those who have paid off their debt and now all of a sudden the government's paying it off part of their debt or all of their debt for them?
And then also, what about those in the future?
Are they going to sit back and say, I'm going to borrow as much money as I can because I know that maybe in the future the government's going to pay it off for them?
Again, I'm not sure we're thinking about this as just a one-time, quote, student cancellation fee.
How do we think about this in terms of those in the future?
Is this, again, throwing these questions out there, but the Biden administration is not answering these questions, so I'm asking them here on our podcast to say, hey, is this really a good idea to talk about as we go?
When you look at this debt process, and the ones that are affected most, you know, is the folks out there who are not going to get this one-time payment from the federal government.
How many times have you ever heard one time from the federal government when it comes to forgiving things or paying off things?
If it works politically, I'm going to guarantee you they're going to come back for more.
So for those who had no student loan to start with, who had paid off their student loans, or future student loan borrowers, I mean, going into this saying, well, I'll borrow money, the federal government will forgive it anyway.
What about those who are facing, you know, consequences for not paying off their student loan debt?
These are all questions that, in fairness, I do not believe have been answered by the Biden administration while they are looking at making this a political issue in a year in which we have everything else going on.
But I saved the best for last.
Now, here's an issue that you're going to have.
When student loan, when you borrow public student loans, the problem is it was based on potential One of the potential problems is the Department of Education and debt relief, if you're going to have debt relief here, they have to identify a person's wealth.
If you're going to tag this and say, do they make more than $150,000 or $300,000 per couple?
So in essence, if a husband and wife both have $10,000 or more of student loan debt, they're going to have that $10,000 paid off only if they earn less than $300,000 or if it's an individual.
They earn less than $150,000.
So under $300,000 for a couple, under $150,000 for a single.
Here's your problem.
The Department of Education and the loan programs run these programs have no way of accessing income.
They don't right now.
Because the IRS, who holds that data, is banned from sharing its information with other federal agencies or private agencies.
They can't share that information.
So again, I'm anxious to see what the actual wording on this executive order is here.
Otherwise, we're going to get into some problems that we saw in the COVID relief and others where everybody was getting a student loan reduction.
I mean, this will be a student loan reduction, but everybody was getting either stimulus checks or benefits, even if they, quote, didn't meet the criteria.
Now, some of it was given out without any criteria.
They just gave the money away.
But this is something that when you can't verify this, how is the Department of Education going to carry this out?
Are they just going to trust everybody that says, hey, I meet these parameters, just take out my $10,000 and just forgive my debt, and I'll be okay?
You know, I've always believed in trust but verify.
This doesn't even give you the ability to do that.
And then if we take it to the step further, how do you verify that income that you have, improve it, that you can get this, then you're going to have to go to the IRS to confirm it, and the IRS is banned from doing so.
And really, do you want the IRS giving out that information to other federal agencies or Private organizations, if they open it up here, where else could they open it up?
But then you get to the last problem.
And this is the biggest problem that most of us have.
If Congress wants to come out and do this in some form, if they want to come out and pass legislation that forgives all or part or every bit of student loan debt and then say from here on forward, all college is free, that's within Congress's power.
That's within their purview.
They could come and do it.
They could start in the House, start in the Senate, pass it, let the President sign it.
Everything would be legal.
But I just have to remind you, the executive branch has no generalized power to forgive this debt.
Joe Biden has no statutory authority to forgive this debt.
And if we let it go here, what else are we going to overlook?
That they can just do other things that are not by law?
And if you don't believe me, if you just think I'm a Republican conservative hack who just doesn't like the president, let me let you hear this.
These are the direct quote.
The president can't do that.
That's not even a discussion.
You know who said that last year?
Nancy Pelosi.
Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, that's not even a discussion.
You can't do this.
So, you know, you know it's got to be illegal when Nancy Pelosi comes out and says, look, we can't do this.
This is illegal.
The Department of Education themselves have came to the same verdict, determining the executive branch does not have the statutory authority to cancel, compromise, discharge, or forgive on a blanket or mass basis principal balances of student loans and or to materially modify repayment amounts of terms thereof.
So folks, here we go.
If you think the crazy season of election year politics is behind you, you're sadly mistaken.
In the midst of all of the other problems that we've talked about in this podcast, from inflation to Ukraine to gas prices to food shortages with baby formulas, with everything else going on, Again, they're looking to skirt this in underneath the radar when a lot of people aren't paying attention and with it sounding really good, oh, we're just helping those who have $10,000.
We're going to help relieve their financial burden so that they can get on and have that burden relieved from them.
Folks, what sounds good is not always what works good.
And remember, anytime they say they're forgiving a loan, the government says they're forgiving a loan, that loan will still have to be repaid in some form and they're going to do it out of your pocket.
This just doesn't all effectively disappear.
You can't take these banks and others who have given this money, who have been backed by the federal depository, they can't just give this stuff away and not replace it somehow.
That is just not happening.
And besides, even Nancy Pelosi said this is illegal.
Folks, if you don't think the election year politics are getting started hot and heavy, you have just seen the start of it.
We just made it past Memorial Day, and this is an issue that is going to Be happy for some, but the long-term consequences are not going to be what we envision because we don't even take into account the state issues and the issues of funding of our higher education.
It's time we rethink education in this country, which will be a topic for another podcast, but just simply making people happy in an election year is not a good way to run a country.
Great way to try and win votes.
Terrible way to run a country.
That's just my opinion on the Doug Collins podcast.
Please download the podcast, share it with others.
Maybe they need to hear the truth about student loan forgiveness and maybe we need to make some better choices as we enter college and universities as we look for the future.
Thanks and we'll see you again next time.
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