July 1, 2023 - Epoch Times
11:47
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| Earlier today, in what can really be called a major blow to both Joe Biden and his administration, well, the U.S. Supreme Court officially struck down the federal student loan debt elimination scheme. | |
| And the impact of their ruling will have tremendous ramifications over the next year, specifically as we're heading into the 2024 election. | |
| However, let me back up here and explain how we got to this point. | |
| To start with, if you rewind the clock back to July of 2021, that was when Ms. | |
| Nancy Pelosi, who was at the time still Speaker of the House, that was when she was asked by a reporter about student loan debt. | |
| Specifically, she was asked about the power that the U.S. President has in terms of eliminating that debt. | |
| And her answer was essentially that the President has no power at all. | |
| People think that the President of the United States has the power For debt forgiveness. | |
| He does not. | |
| He can postpone. | |
| He can delay. | |
| But he does not have that power. | |
| That has to be an act of Congress. | |
| And I don't even like to call it forgiveness because that implies a transgression. | |
| It's not to be forgiven. | |
| Just freeing people from those obligations. | |
| So the question of who gets forgiven, to use the term of art that is out there, is a debate. | |
| Do we use whatever money there is for the broadest base of support of those with more people with even less debt or fewer people with more debt? | |
| That's a policy discussion. | |
| But the difference between the president... | |
| The president can't do it. | |
| So that's not even a discussion. | |
| Not everybody realizes that. | |
| But the president can only postpone, delay, but not forgive. | |
| However, that was 2021. | |
| And if you fast forward one year, well, you suddenly find yourself in the midst of the midterm election cycle, which naturally changes things quite a lot. | |
| And like clockwork, just a few weeks before the actual election, Joe Biden went ahead and he signed an executive order committing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to wipe out the student loan debt of millions of Americans. | |
| And the result was exactly as you would imagine. | |
| That decision made national news, with many of the quote-unquote mainstream media outlets in our country touting it as a major win for the administration right before the election. | |
| Even Nancy Pelosi herself, who, as we just saw, was extremely clear-headed about the president's lack of authority in this particular respect, Well, she completely changed her tune, and she released a statement saying this, More working families will be able to meet their kitchen table needs as they continue to recover | |
| from the challenges of the pandemic. | |
| Importantly, this action will help those most in need, easing a financial burden, disproportionately harming women and people of color. | |
| It's quite amazing the difference that an election cycle can make. | |
| Regardless, this election season plan would have effectively wiped out a large portion of student loan debt for millions of Americans. | |
| And it would have cost the American taxpayers a cool $379 billion over the span of 10 years. | |
| That was the estimate that was put forth by the Department of Education. | |
| However, at this point, you might be asking yourself, Roman, regardless of the price tag, if it was a well-known fact that he did not have the authority to do this, how did Joe Biden legally justify this debt elimination scheme? | |
| Well, essentially, in order to justify having the power to eliminate the student loan debt, the Department of Education made the claim that the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, otherwise known as the Heroes Act, gave them the authority to cancel this massive amount of debt Basically, | |
| that specific law enables the Secretary of Education to quote, This particular law was passed as a result of the attacks on September 11th, as well as the subsequent military operations over in the Middle East. | |
| However, the Biden administration argued that since there is a COVID pandemic national emergency, this September 11th law can be used as the justification for eliminating the student loan debt for millions of Americans. | |
| Which, just as an aside, might actually help to explain why Joe Biden extended the COVID national emergency several times over, even after he publicly said that the pandemic was over. | |
| Regardless, setting that aside, what wound up happening, to no one's surprise, was that within a short span of time, lawsuits began to be brought forth accusing the administration of not having the legal authority to take the action that they took. | |
| Among the lawsuits that were filed was a fairly large case that was brought forth jointly by six different states. | |
| It accused both Joe Biden, as well as the Secretary of Education, of canceling student loan debt illegally. | |
| And just as an aside, in terms of semantics, it really is not accurate to refer to this scheme as canceling debt or forgiving debt, because that's not really what was being proposed. | |
| It should correctly be understood as socializing the debt, meaning that every taxpayer in the country would be footing the bill. | |
| And back when this scheme was first proposed about a year ago, I crunched the numbers, and I figured out that if you divide the $379 billion price tag by the number of Americans who actually effectively pay taxes, which is about 74 million people, it winds up costing every single taxpayer about $4,959. | |
| So that's all to say that the plan was never to cancel the debt, The plan was always to nationalize the debt and have everyone pay a nice fat chunk of it. | |
| However, that is not going to happen. | |
| Because after about a year of legal back and forth, well, just earlier today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Biden administration finding their scheme to be illegal. | |
| Now, the court ruled 6-3, with the conservative wing, including Justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, all ruling against the Biden administration. | |
| Here is specifically what was written in the majority opinion, which for your reference was penned by Sam Alito. | |
| Quote... | |
| The HEROES Act allows the Secretary to waive or modify existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, but does not allow the Secretary to rewrite that statute to the extent of canceling $430 billion of student loan principal. | |
| But this gets a lot deeper, which we'll get into right after I introduce the sponsor of today's episode. | |
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| American with an N20. And as such, with this decision from the U.S. Supreme Court now in place, the student loan cancellation plan is officially dead. | |
| Furthermore, besides not having their loans canceled, the students in this country are about to, once again, have to start making payments. | |
| That's because after a three-year-long pause due to the pandemic, payments on student loans will resume in October, and the interest on those loans will, once again, start accumulating in September. | |
| Which actually brings me to the crux of the issue, which is that if you really think about it, the people who will suffer the most from this whole attempted debt cancellation scheme will not be the politicians. | |
| The politicians will not suffer, but rather the students themselves will. | |
| Because think about it. | |
| Joe Biden, he achieved everything he could possibly hope for. | |
| Because even though he knew that this plan was outside of his authority, he still, for one, got the illusion of a political victory right ahead of the midterm elections. | |
| And secondly, now that the Supreme Court has struck down his executive order, he can then turn around and shift the blame on the radical MAGA Supreme Court that's roadblocking his agenda. | |
| For him, this really is a political win. | |
| However, the students themselves, who were under the illusion for almost a year that their student loan debt was canceled, are the true losers of this whole debacle. | |
| That's because, during the three-plus years of the COVID pandemic, student loan payments were suspended, and the interest on those loans was not accruing. | |
| And what many people across the country did was that they took this golden opportunity to pay off their student loan debts as soon as possible. | |
| Because even though people technically did not have to make the payments, if they chose to pay anyway, they were able to pay off the student loan debts much, much faster because during the pandemic period, the interest was not accruing. | |
| So if they continued paying for their student loans during the pandemic, they could pay them off very quickly because they were only paying for the principal, not the interest. | |
| And that's what many people across the country did. | |
| They paid off their student loan debts very quickly within the span of three years, and they saved tens of thousands of dollars. | |
| However, the students who are under the illusion that their debts were canceled by the federal government, they naturally stopped paying anything because they assumed that the debt was erased. | |
| But now that the Supreme Court has burst the executive order bubble, and now that the pause in student loan debts is expiring, well, these young people are once again going back to making their monthly payments in October. | |
| And unfortunately, they lost the golden opportunity to quickly pay off their debts and avoid the interest. | |
| That is, at least in my opinion, the most unfortunate consequence of this whole saga. | |
| I'd love to know, do you agree with my assessment? | |
| Leave your thoughts in the comments and let me know your thoughts on whether the students are the ones who actually suffer the worst. | |
| Otherwise, if you'd like to go through my research notes for today's episode, I'll throw all the research notes down into the description box below, including the PDF of the actual Supreme Court judgment. | |
| And by the way, that is that little description box right below those like and subscribe buttons, which I hope you take a moment to smash so that this video, as well as this information, You can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times. |
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