The president who was supposed to bring back “civility” is instead taking cheap shots at his political opponents. The Biden White House is on the warpath against Republicans who are opposing its latest attempt to force taxpayers to absorb people’s student loan debt, calling them out for perceived hypocrisy.
From White House social media channels with millions of followers, Team Biden is trolling Republicans who are opposing the president’s latest bailout by pointing out their “hypocrisy” for their businesses having had Paycheck Protection Program loans “forgiven” during the pandemic.
This might understandably sound like a “gotcha” to an everyday person at first glance, but those of us intimately familiar with the details of both policies, as the White House surely is, know that it’s a completely unfair comparison between two policies and situations different as night and day.
To start, one of Republicans’ main criticisms of President Joe Biden’s latest attempt to “cancel” student loans is that it’s unconstitutional because he’s trying to do it unilaterally via executive action. (Congress repeatedly considered his student loan proposals and rejected them.) Under our constitutional system, Congress, not the president, is supposed to have the power to spend or allocate taxpayer money, also known as “the power of the purse.”
The COVID-era stimulus initiative the White House keeps invoking, the Paycheck Protection Program, whatever one thinks of it (and I’ve been a critic), was properly passed by Congress and was perfectly constitutional.
On those grounds alone, it’s entirely legitimate to support one and oppose the other. But the differences don’t stop there.
From the very beginning, Paycheck Protection Program “loans” were, quite openly, never intended to be paid back. They were only formally structured as “loans” rather than “grants” so if businesses used the money improperly — it was required they use most of it on preserving jobs — the government could demand the money back.
Student loans, on the other hand, were very much expected to be paid back.
These programs are also starkly different in context. Student loans are a form of federal benefit offered to young people so they can obtain a degree that, on average, will earn them a million dollars more over their lifetime. It’s a voluntary, optional pursuit that will, presumably, benefit the individual.
Meanwhile, the Paycheck Protection Program money was a form of compensation for the harm that was done to businesses by the government’s closure of the economy during the pandemic. They couldn’t opt in or opt out of lockdowns!
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For all these reasons, these two programs are as different as night and day. Comparisons between them truly are apples-to-oranges comparisons.
It’s understandable that people not familiar with the details might not understand these distinctions. But for the White House to weaponize that knowledge gap to attack its opponents is political cynicism at its worst.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
