While economists and analysts are still calculating the costs associated with President Biden’s dangerous student loan cancellation —with some estimates going as high as $1 trillion dollars —the American Federation of Teachers is celebrating another debt canceling initiative.
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.
From The Daily Wire:
In a move that is separate from the widely-publicized $10,000 loan forgiveness but in many ways more radical, the Biden administration used a “waiver” to stop enforcing the rules of an existing program that allows people to have all remaining student loans forgiven after 10 years of working for the government or a nonprofit.
The lack of enforcement expanded the pool of those eligible so dramatically that it forgave $9 billion in the last year, compared to $1 billion total in the program’s previous history. The program arose from a 2007 law and is called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program.
New Biden Administration rule: no rules —and you don’t have to pay anything back. AFT President Randi Weingarten, who’s made many radical attempts to grow the AFT’s influence in the political realm since coming to power, says her union is to thank for the debt cancellation.
“The AFT is a leader in helping borrowers escape crushing college debt,” Weingarten said in her Labor Day message. “Our union has offered hundreds of student debt clinics. We sued loan servicer Navient to stop its misleading loan practices. We sued former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to fix the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, and we worked directly with the Biden administration on the latest PSLF fixes and the recent game-changing announcement on student debt cancellation. Through the AFT’s advocacy around PSLF, $10 billion of student debt has been forgiven for 175,000 public service workers so far. Here’s just one example: This summer, we helped an AFT member in California wipe out her $450,000 student debt.”
“Wipe out?” But it doesn’t get wiped out, does it Ms. Weingarten? Someone is paying.
Weingarten made $534,000 in 2020, according to her tax filing —a year where most teachers weren’t required to provide any in-person education. Maybe she can spare some cash for her fellow educators instead of passing the burden on to the taxpayers.
