VERIFY: Has President Biden proposed forgiving all federal student loan debt?
- JoeBiden: campaign website
- Neal McCluskey- director of the Center for Educational Freedom- Cato Institute
- Drew Anderson- associate economist- RAND Corporation
With President Biden signing an executive order to extend the pause on federal student loan payments with zero percent interest, there’s a lot of talk on social media about whether Biden might forgive student loans altogether.
There are currently 43 million people who are currently saddled with federal student loan debt, according to Federal Student Aid.
VERIFY: Has President Biden proposed forgiving all federal student loan debt?
Between 2007-2020, federal student loan debt has ballooned from roughly $516 billion to about $1.5 trillion, every year marking another record-breaker.
“Year after year, more student loan dollars are disbursed than are repaid, resulting in an expanding federal loan portfolio,” is how a 2017 Congressional Research Service brief put it.
Let’s start with the Biden campaign website, nowhere on the site does he promise to cancel or “forgive” all federal student loan debt.
So part of Biden’s platform was to make that program simpler, more generous, and easier to enroll in,” says Drew Anderson, an associate economist at the RAND Corporation. “It’s not like wiping out a dollar amount of your debt, but it’s capping your payments so that you never pay more than 5 percent of your discretionary income; and it, just like forgiveness, will have a cost to taxpayers, because they will we will recoup less of the student debt. (más…)