BUCK: Let’s dive into this one. Biden plans to “forgive” — and will officially announce this today — $10,000 or more in federal student loan debt for tens of millions of Americans. So, this will obviously be quite an expenditure. The provision for Pell Grant recipients would push the number higher, by the way, as around seven in 10 borrowers with federal loans received a Pell Grant.
Clay, we break down the numbers here. We’ll do all of that. There’s two thoughts that I think everybody is having right now. One is this is just trying to buy votes at the last minute before the election for Democrats. It’s bribing the taxpayer, in essence, with their own money — or, rather, bribing some taxpayers at the expense of other taxpayers. Is this even legal, though? From a constitutional perspective, I mean, not that Nancy Pelosi is some kind of genius, but we’ll get to her in a moment here. She waited on this one. Why can Biden just wave a magic wand and say, “You don’t owe money anymore”?
CLAY: You can’t, and that’s what is going to be disappointing about the entirety of this coverage. First, Buck, you’re gonna see a lot of people say, “Oh, he’s canceling. Oh, he’s eliminating.”
BUCK: “Forgiveness.”
CLAY: Forgiveness.
BUCK: As just a nice thing to do.
CLAY: Yeah. You can’t do that. What he is doing is taking $300 billion of additional taxpayer responsibility. You, me, everybody out there who listens is going to take on the obligations of people who took out student loans that they aren’t going to have to repay. And there are a lot of people out there in our audience who did what I did: Took student loans out, repaid them, and now are sitting around saying, “Well, wait a minute. Why do suddenly certain segments of the population not have obligations for the loans that they took out, for the money that they accepted?
“And why are we essentially giving away $300 billion to universities which are wildly overcharging students?” So the way that this is gonna be covered — first of all, the language, pay attention to it — is fundamentally dishonest. It’s furtherance of this inability to understand basic economics in Modern Monetary Theory where money and obligations on an individual basis just don’t matter. The larger context, however, Buck, is, this is flagrantly unconstitutional.
The president, with the strike of a pen, cannot wipe out $300 billion in student loan debt for individuals and take it on to the federal government. Congress would have to pass a bill okaying this, and what the media should be doing if they were doing their jobs is saying to Joe Biden, “If this is so popular, you have majorities in the House and you have majorities in the Senate. Why not simply put this in front of Congress and have them sign off on this expenditure on behalf of the federal government that you could then sign.”
The answer is because it wouldn’t pass. Even Democrats would not stand up and pass this bill. It is a political sham. It will go to the Supreme Court. Here’s the whole layout, Buck, of how this is gonna play out. It will go to the Supreme Court. It will be struck down, much like Biden’s attempt to extend the CDC eviction moratorium. Biden will then — or whoever is running on behalf of the Democrats will then — in 2024 blame the court for striking this down and use it as evidence of the 2024 race.
So they’re gonna try the bribe in 2022. It will not work, but the bribe won’t be struck down until after the midterms. And then in the 2024 run-up, they will make promises again, “We need huge Democrat majorities because the supreme courts in an anti-democratic fashion decided to strike this down.” I just gave you the next two years of how this is gonna play out for Democrats.
BUCK: Well, hard-core right-winger Nancy Pelosi just last summer, a year ago, had this to say about debt forgiveness.
BUCK: Can I just say, we get lectures from libs all the time about our sacred democracy and undermining the Constitution. By the way, people who say those things, — democracy, undermine the Constitution — in the context of politics today have neither read nor understood the Constitution. As a basic rule. Like they have no idea what they’re doing but they’re big words that make them feel important to say. Nancy Pelosi here…
Well, that was a year ago. Last summer. She was correct, but we keep seeing this where, for example, in the Obama administration he would say, “I don’t actually have the power to do the following” and then it was, I got a pen and a phone. I’m gonna do it. Democrats will even say when it is politically expedient, “We literally do not have the constitutional authority to give the Democrat base what they want in this case.”
But then if the politics shift able to and they like really want it, Clay, you know, they really need this thing, they’re just like, “Yeah, we’re just gonna do it.” You know, they tried this with giving illegals work permits as an executive action under the Obama administration. Remember, I think it was — we looked this up a while ago — the Obama administration lost, was it 12-for-12 or 13-for-13 challenges when it came to executive overreach and abuse of executive authority? They do this stuff all the time. We know this is an abuse. We know your legal analysis on this issue is correct. They know it, Clay; they just don’t care.
CLAY: Well, the perfect example of this is Joe Biden — what was it — back in the fall, when he extended the eviction moratorium on behalf of CDC guidance, and even said…
BUCK: Perfect example. Yeah.
CLAY: We may be able to find that audio. Biden even said himself that he knew it was unconstitutional but it might buy a few months until it went back to the Supreme Court. To refresh for people out there who may have forgotten about this, the eviction moratorium went all the way to the Supreme Court. And since they had let it expire, they said it was kind of moot and they didn’t take the time to strike it down. And then the Biden administration extended it again.
It went back to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said, “No, you can’t do this,” and Joe Biden was right. It did buy him — I don’t know — six or eight weeks because that case was already pending before the court. This particular move, make note of the timing. They are doing it right before Labor Day. It’s all part of their midterm plan. They a hundred billion percent know that this is not constitutional.
But they are counting on the media being complicit and also dumb and not covering this. They are counting on the fact that many young voters are not gonna be sophisticated enough to understand this. They will claim, again, that the court is striking it down, and that’s unfair. But the easy way to think about this is, you have a majority in the House; you have a majority in the Senate.
If you really believed this would pass, you would have introduced it as legislation in front of Congress. They know it’s a bad look if they do this. But this is somehow if you fell Joe Biden’s promise. That I say left-wing fevered dream. It would add inflationary pressure, it’s unconstitutional, and it will be struck down but not until after the midterms.
BUCK: And also, I think it’s offensive to a lot of people — I mean, tens of millions of Americans. I sat in and admitted students, MBA. They get a business degree, finance, who was essentially like, “Hey, everybody. If you decide to come here…” It was for people that had gotten in. “If you decide to come here,” ’cause a lot of folks were still choosing, “this is what the payback scheme will look like.”
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And, look, I had come out of the government. I had no money, okay?
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: I had, you know, a couple thousand dollars saved at this point in my life. I had no money. Business school cost $70,000 a year, give tore or take, plus living expenses. So they basically said, “You’re gonna take out $150,000 worth of loan for his two years of school,” and by the time you pay it off it will be over $300,000 you will have paid. And I was like, “I think I’m gonna get a job instead.” You know, I walked away from it.
CLAY: I went to George Washington because they gave me a scholarship. And there are a lot of people out there listening to us right now who, one, may not have continued, like you just said, your higher education, because of the costs, because of the loan requirements, or people who said, “Hey, I might have gotten into this better school but the cost is I’m gonna go to this school that’s closer to home because I don’t want to take out loans.”
BUCK: There was super common. I went to a scholarship high school; so, everybody was on a full ride. And there were kids who got — tons of them, they’d get into Georgetown or Holy Cross. Both great schools, but people think of Georgetown as maybe a little —
CLAY: You went a Jesuit school —
BUCK: A Jesuit school is a little more elite —
CLAY: — is a little more academic.
BUCK: — but if Holy Cross gave more money, they went to Holy Cross, right?
CLAY: Right.
BUCK: People are making decisions based on finances, trying to be responsible all the time. And we’re talking about choices within education. A lot of people listening this graduated high school, like, “You know what? I’m gonna learn to be a welder and I’m gonna learn to start making money right away and within five to 10 years I’m gonna be making 90 grand, you know, with no debt.” You know what I mean.
CLAY: Parents, Buck — I mean, a lot of parents out there — when they have their first kids or they their second kids they set up college funds so their kids don’t have to take out loans. Well, what about all the parents out there and the kids who got jobs to avoid having to take out loans? This is an awful look. And that doesn’t even consider that the vast majority of people with substantial loans are going on to grad school, which means — your point — all the plumbers and truck drivers and people who said, “You know what?
“I’m gonna learn a trade and go straight to work at 18 are subsidizing people who took out loans for jobs,” and we need to have a big discussion about this in general. Some of these people, Buck, are taking out… You mentioned at least you were considering going to business school. I went to law school. The salaries typically for people who come out of those advanced educational degrees are substantial.
Buck, there’s people taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans for a grad degree they’re gonna make $40,000 on when they go and start working. And they don’t understand the basic math, but how are some of these universities…? It feels to me like many of these universities are intentionally leading kids into making awful choices without any understanding of economics at all.
BUCK: Clay, people pay money to go get an advanced degree in journalism.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: You and I work in this field of media. No journalism training, folks! Journalism school, for an example, which this audience already knows, is such a waste of time that I know journalism school professors — professors — who if they’re actually friends with somebody or their family, they’re like, “Oh, no! You don’t want to go to journalism school.” (laughing)
CLAY: Just go get a job. It’s not… Journalism is not that complicated, right? You’re not operating on brains here. You’re not filing Supreme Court briefs. There is very little that you can’t learn by working at a newspaper as it pertains to journalism. But this is a big discussion, and it is testament to how much of a lie is embedded in our media that almost no one will have the conversation that we just did discussing this story at all.
BUCK: I want to hear from some folks in the audience who made the decision to not take out loans and if they’re really happy with that decision, how it worked out. I think that’d be interesting ’cause I’m sure we have so many people that started a business, learned a trade, got a new career field — and maybe they went back to finish undergrad or grad school later on.
But they looked at the cost, they looked at the price tag, and said, “No,” and so now the Biden administration saying… By the way, does anyone think it’s gonna stop with 10 grand if they get away with this? That’s the other part of this too. Of course, it’s gonna get bigger and bigger. Ten grand is just the beginning. This is the thin wedge of the edge.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: A lot of you reacting to the student loan forgiveness by saying, “Wait a minute. What if I paid off my loans? What if I chose to not take out the loans in the first place?” There’s a great viral video that some of you may or may not have heard. I believe this is from — let me look at the exact date ’cause I want to get it right — January of 2020, when Elizabeth was on the campaign trail in Iowa.
This is presumably before everyone told Elizabeth Warren that “if she had a penis, they would have voted for her,” as one of the most memorable quotes in Elizabeth’s not-so-storied history goes now. But listen to this father who confronted Elizabeth Warren about her plan to forgive student loans.
BUCK: A debt is never forgiven, Clay, which this guy knows. It is transferred from one to another entity. The money has already been spent. So it’s just are the taxpayers footing the bill or is the person that actually got the benefit — in this case, the worthless degree or not-so-valuable degree, depending.
CLAY: And it’s a perfect example of a parent who sacrificed to put through his daughter, I believe he said, without her having to deal with loans, while other parents, they decided to spend that money and have their kids take loans out. Why are you punishing people who were good stewards of their financial relationships by forgiving loans that they never took out because they worked hard enough to take out a second job, because maybe their kids went to a school that was cheaper than one that they otherwise would have gone to. And now the government comes in and tries to subsidize this? Again, that confrontation between the voter in Iowa and Elizabeth Warren goes to the essence of why this is not being put in front of Congress. Because it’s wildly unpopular.
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