House subcommittee holds hearing on negative implications of Biden student loan policies
On Mar. 23, the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development held a hearing regarding President Biden’s student loan policies.
The hearing primarily aimed to explain the negative implications of Biden’s agenda to create free college at taxpayers’ expense and of pausing student loan debt.
On Mar. 23, the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development held a hearing regarding President Biden’s student loan policies. The hearing primarily aimed to explain the negative implications of Biden’s agenda to create free college at taxpayers’ expense and of pausing student loan debt.
The hearing, titled “Breaking the System: Examining the Implications of Biden’s Student Loan Policies for Students and Taxpayers,” began with an introduction from Republican House Representative Burgess Owens and continued with witnesses Marc Goldwein, Dr. Adam Looney, Dr. Carlo Salerno, and Sameer Gakaree.
Goldwein’s testimony stressed that pausing and/or canceling student debt would worsen inflation and increase the risk of recession. He explained that “[b]y allowing borrowers to spend more money in the economy rather than paying down their debt, the student debt pause has boosted overall consumption. In an economy already operating above potential, this higher spending will mostly translate into higher prices.”
In his testimony, Dr. Looney argued that “recent executive and regulatory actions are costly, poorly targeted to help Americans who struggle financially, provide substantial benefits to highly educated and well-off borrowers, and exacerbate negative incentives in the market for institutions of higher education.”
”Ultimately, the blunt tools available to the executive branch are insufficient to implement nuanced and targeted policies and fix the misguided incentives that caused this crisis,” he went on to emphasize.
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Dr. Salerno, in a similar vein, argued that “[e]xcessive focus on debt relief intuitively feels like it should provide borrowers clarity and comfort. Instead, it sends a mixed signal to millions of former, current, and future borrowers that their student loan debt obligations are someone else’s responsibility.”
Driving his point home, Salerno declared, ”In the absence of meaningful program reform by Congress, it is near certain that loan balances, loan delinquencies and loan defaults will increase, not decrease, in the coming years.”
The Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development contains 10 Republicans, 16 Democrats, and is a subcommittee of the Committee on Education & the Workforce.
The Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, the Committee on Education & the Workforce, Rep. Owens, and Marc Goldwein did not respond to comments requested by Campus Reform.
Best efforts were made to contact other parties mentioned.
