Legal expert and political commentator David French said, “It’s entirely understandable that folks who sacrificed to pay for school feel played.”
“The order itself is on very thin legal ground,” French continued. “It’s a giant benefit to the educated slice of America—folks who tend to do well anyway.”
“The issue isn’t ‘is loan forgiveness bad?’ It can be very good in the right context,” French later tweeted. “The issue is with *this* program, which is regressive, expensive and benefits a class of Americans who do very, very well economically at the expense of many folks who struggle more.”
Nevertheless, not everyone agreed with these assessments.
For instance, some were quick to point out that some of the more staunch critics of Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan had been beneficiaries of pandemic era Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan forgiveness initiatives.
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Bethlehem College and Seminary received $499,870 in loan forgiveness. CBMW received $28,635. The Journey Church in Lebanon, Tennessee, of which Erik Reed is the founding and lead pastor, received $168,240.
“This isn’t the gotcha you think it is,” Reed responded to a posted screenshot of the amount of debt his church had been forgiven under the PPP program. “It was April 2020 and the entire world was put on indefinite shutdown, and I had a staff to try to protect jobs for. It was a program offered.”
“That’s apples and oranges from college loans people voluntarily took out,” he added. “But you know that.”
Some brought up the racial implications of the student debt relief plan.
“Black and Latino students [incur] far more loan debt than their white counterparts, so the fact that republicans are using loan forgiveness as a rallying point is not politics. [It’s] wicked in that it once again shows the only thing they are against is a black/brown person coming up,” said New Jersey pastor Lance Mann.
