U.S. President Joe Biden said on Wednesday his administration had approved $4.8 billion in student debt cancellation for 80,300 people.
"This brings the total debt cancellation my administration has approved to $132 billion for over 3.6 million Americans through various actions," Biden said in a statement.
Unfortunately these were debts that already had the potential to be cancelled due to existing rules. Turns out, just nobody has been following the rules and actually cancelling those debts for all these decades.
It kinda sounds like they wouldn't have been canceled if he hadn't made the effort. That's no difference from any other debt forgiveness that's within his power.
This is actually a remnant of his larger plan for cancelling student debt being blocked. So if it should have been done anyhow, we're now...celebrating presidents for... doing their jobs?
No, I'd prefer if a president did his job to begin with and didn't try to take loud credit for a program that wasn't his when he finally gets around to doing his job.
Yeah, doing the bare minimum shouldn't be newsworthy. "Hey boss, I showed up on time and got my day's work done"? He'd probably say "Okay good? You want a cookie or something?"
Is forgiving $132 billion in student debt the bare minimum of the job?
Because if that's your bar, then Biden is the only president in history who has done the bare minimum. If that's your standard, I'd think you'd be jumping for joy that a president has finally, in the entire history of the US, done the bare minimum.
Sigh, it's the people that don't vote. One day, they'll start reading the articles, and they'll slowly form constructive opinions, and make a choice that's actually a choice. But until then they'll stick to how everyone is bad because it's easier than learning the truth.
That's how you end up with things like the rail unions where nobody knows that the administration worked behind the scenes after the legislation to get the workers what they wanted from the companies -- and they successfully did that.
The Executive Branch has checks and balances over both of the other two branches of government. Part of that is discretion.
The Executive is not, at all times, bound to the direction provided by Congress (see: lack of enforcement of Marijuana laws). This frustrates many when the wrong decisions are being made. And we love it when the right ones are.
So someone had stopped performing debt relief as instructed by Congress. Discretion, good or bad. Then Biden directs that the instructions be followed.
He kind of didn't have to do that. I'm glad he did and I think it's the basics of doing his job... But he could have just not done it and reminded entities that running a campaign is expensive or that he'll be retiring at some point.