President Joe Biden’s remarks in Wisconsin last year on the issue of student debt forgiveness spurred the White House to try and appease the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, according to an excerpt from an upcoming book by two New York Times reporters cited by Fox News.
When asked by a member of the audience at a Milwaukee town hall on 16 February 2021 to forgive at least $50,000 in “crushing” student loans for Americans across the country, Biden, seeking to draw a line between public colleges and Ivy League graduates, responded:
"I will not make that happen… It depends on whether or not you go to a private university or public university. It depends on the idea that I say to a community, 'I’m going to forgive the debt…' — the billions of dollars in debt for people who have gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn… I think everyone — and I’ve been proposing this for four years — everyone should be able to go to community college for free”.
According to the book "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future", penned by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, Biden’s statement fuelled a “tug of war” between Democratic moderates and the progressive wing of the party, which has been calling for him to forgive more than the $10,000 he originally promised.
Thus, Biden's chief of staff Ron Klain attempted to alter what the president said. Klain, according to the book’s authors, spoke in private "with several congressional supporters of debt cancellation to assure them his boss had not intended to take such a firm position".
"One lawmaker who spoke with Ron Klain recalled him saying gently that sometimes Biden gets a little tangled up in his public statements. When a group of House progressives raised the subject again with Klain in a meeting several weeks later, the trusted aide alluded to Biden's comments as an error", the book, set for released on 3 May, stated.
"We corrected that the next day, right?" Klain reportedly said in reference to Biden's statements at the CNN Town Hall with Anderson Cooper, according to a lawmaker's recollection featured in the book.
As 43 million Americans collectively hold $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, with the average borrower owing $39,351, Joe Biden, facing a tough November midterm election, has been hesitant to budge on the problem.
In March 2020, the administration of then-president Donald Trump issued a moratorium on student loan repayments in an effort to help borrowers who were struggling to make payments due to COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. The moratorium has been extended multiple times by the Biden administration, costing the government $5 billion a month.
During his election campaign, Biden promised to immediately eliminate the first $10,000 of student debt for each debtor. He has since been pressured by members of his own party to consider forgiving $50,000 in student debt or even erasing it entirely.
Earlier this week, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said that the POTUS would make a decision on student loan forgiveness before the current moratorium ends on 31 August. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, indicated that Joe Biden was getting closer to taking the action the progressives were seeking.
"I’ll keep urging the president to take this important step. And I say to my colleagues, I think the president is moving in our direction", Schumer said from the Senate floor mid-week.
However, speaking at an event promoting the latest round of billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, President Biden weighed in on the issue of student loan debt as he took questions from reporters.
“I am considering dealing with some debt reduction. I am not considering $50,000 debt reduction, but I’m in the process of taking a hard look at whether or not there will be additional debt forgiveness”, Joe Biden stated on 28 April.
This announcement, disappointing to millions of student loan borrowers, comes as Joe Biden has been steadily sinking in his approval rating among young Americans.
Just 41 percent of adults aged 18-29 approve of Biden's job performance, according to a new Harvard Institute of Politics survey released on 25 April. The figure is down from 46 percent in autumn 2021.