(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Left-wing activist Stacey Abrams was revealed to be one of the prime forces pressuring the Biden administration to forgive student loans, Red State reported.
In a recent podcast, the Washington Post‘s James Hohmann and the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes discussed the Biden administration’s plan to “forgive up to $10,000 in student loan debt for anyone making up to $150,000 per year ($300,000 for married couples).”
“I’ve asked a lot of people in the White House this question, and essentially the answer is that this is the fault of Stacey Abrams,” Hohmann said.
Hohmann confirmed what many already suspected: that the motives for the move were entirely political.
“Stacey Abrams has been browbeating the White House on this, and says that this is the only way she could win—that this is going to be a base turnout election,” Hohmann said.
“And so there are a lot of people very close to [President Joe Biden] who privately understand that this is a complete disaster for them,” he continued. “But [Biden] is being pulled really hard by these woke leftists who … believe it’s all about the base.”
It is unclear whether Abrams, whose personal finances came under scrutiny during her failed 2018 run as Georgia’s Democrat gubernatorial nominee, retained any debt of her own that she hoped to have wiped clean.
Critics have argued that the blatant effort to pander for support ahead of the 2022 midterms is likely to backfire since it amounts to a redistribution of wealth from poor, working-class taxpayers to privileged elites.
“Such a policy would … give the biggest benefits to those with high incomes,” noted Red State’s Joe Cunningham.
“That’s partly because lower-income people are less likely to have gone to college,” Cunningham added. “Additionally, many borrowers with the largest loan balances attended graduate and professional programs (medical, business and law school) that lead to higher earnings.”
He pointed to a recent study from economists Sylvain Catherine and Constantine Yannelis, which found that “student-loan forgiveness of up to $50,000 for every borrower would work out to an average of $700 for people in the bottom income decile and nearly $5,000 for those in the top decile.”
Sykes made a similar observation during his talk with Hohmann.
“I mean, seriously, where does Joe Biden think this groundswell is going to come from, except for this small group of highly-entitled college graduates who dominate the staffing and the inner workings of the Democratic party?” he asked.
