Joe Biden announced recently that he will force US taxpayers to bail out college students for up to $20,000 of student loan debt and further reduce repayments—a policy that sounds superficially compassionate but which victimizes the innocent, rewards the guilty, and violates Biblical morality in a plethora of ways. Here are just four that come to mind:
1. It incentivizes the bad behavior of borrowers. The Bible tells us to fulfill our promises, but Biden’s new program encourages Americans to renege on their legal obligations. When the news of Biden’s student loan policy broke, Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow and Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham responded by tweeting two Bible verses: “The wicked borrows and does not pay back” (Psalm 37:21); and “It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay” (Ecclesiastes 5:5).
2. It rewards the bad behavior of college administrators. Although universities held out a college degree as the expressway to a comfortable life, all too often they did not deliver. One-third of all college students never make it to their graduation day, and an even higher percentage of those who took out student loans (38%) loans did not earn a degree within six years, according to progressive scholar Mark Huelsman. Of those who do graduate, 41% hold jobs that don’t require any college degree, and 73% work in a job that doesn’t require the degree they earned.
In other words, a not-insignificant percentage of students were poorly served by their alma mater. Unfortunately, current law gives the university no reason to care. Almost no student loan debt qualifies to be discharged, even in bankruptcy. Universities simply huddled as many enrollees as possible into their dorms, collected taxpayer-backed loans, and gave many students a political indoctrination, a four-year hangover, and a useless piece of paper. These young people wound up saddled with debt, while academics and administrators laughed all the way to the bank—and Biden’s student loan “forgiveness” assures that they deposit your money.
3. It discourages virtuous behavior. Biden’s college loan bailout encourages sluggards, sloth, and government dependence at the expense of thrift, industry, and responsibility (Proverbs 6:6-11). Voters grasp this intuitively. A father who pulled double shifts to put his daughter through college debt-free confronted Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in 2020 while the short-term presidential candidate stumped in Grimes, Iowa. When he asked if he would get his money back, she said, “Of course not.” He replied, “So, you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed.” Warren then laughed while the man recounted how hard he worked to earn that money, while his friend frittered his money away. Stephen Moore described Biden’s plan as “really unfair to the people who did the stand-up thing and made the financial sacrifice to do what’s right—and that is to pay back the money that they owe.”
4. It’s unconstitutional and illegal. Joe Biden’s student loan bailout violates both the US Constitution and statutory law. The Founding Fathers gave us the right to amend the Constitution, but we may never ignore it. That’s precisely what this announcement does. “The president of the United States does not have the legal authority to cancel contract, and that is exactly what he is doing. Not so long ago, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) agreed. “People think that the president of the United States has the power for [student loan] debt forgiveness,” Pelosi told the media last July. “He does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.”
The Bible has nothing good to say about those who practice lawlessness, whether they defy God’s Law (Matthew 7:23, Matthew 13:41, Matthew 24:12, Romans 6:19, I John 3:4) or man’s (Matthew 22:21, Romans 13:1-7). “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,” the Bible says (I Peter 2:13-14)—and it does not exempt the president from this divine commandment of obedience to the law.
No legal fig leaf can cover up the naked lawlessness and inverted ethics displayed by this action, which was undertaken to cover up a failure of Biden’s own making. Bad morality leads to a bad economy. This policy will only deepen America’s systemic economic failures. One non-partisan group predicts the president’s plan could cost American taxpayers $500 Billion over the next 10 years.