NOTE: the following article is satire, not a statement of fact. Treat it as such.
President Joe Biden just resumed student loan forgiveness after the Supreme Court told him he couldn’t, canceling billions of dollars of debt for government bureaucrats and liberal arts majors who couldn’t manage to land a career or find a job after spending prodigious sums on their education.
Making why he did so crystal clear in a recent speech, Biden said he made the decision so that he could bribe the college-age crowd into voting for him. Beginning, he said:
Turning to student debt relief. When I ran for President, I vowed to fix our broken student loan program. Because while a college degree is still the ticket to a better life, that ticket has become excessively expensive. Americans who are saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for a college degree has become the norm. Since, my administration has taken significant action to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. That starts with making sure the existing system works in the way it was supposed to work for student borrowers.
We fixed what’s called the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which was designed originally to make sure schoolteachers, firefighters, social workers, and other public servants can get their student loans forgiven if they make 10 years of payments and do 10 years of public service. By the time I took office, that program had been placed for — in place for nearly 15 years, but because of red tape, only 7,000 borrowers had been helped. Well, today, thanks to the reforms, more than 700,000 borrowers have had their debts forgiven.
Just the other day, I spoke with Tanya and Chad, a married couple in their 50s who both work at a public high school in Milwaukee. For years, they paid over $800 a month toward their student loans. It meant they couldn’t pay — put away any money away for their retirement. And this summer, thanks to fixes we made to the debt relief program for people in public service, Chad and Tanya’s remaining balance was forgiven.
Then he jumped in with the bribery comment, telling the gathered crowd of reporters, “And look, folks, look. Why did I do it? Why spend all this, you know, the thing, on…ummm…on the debt forgiveness? Well, heck, is it really that hard to understand? It’s because I gotta do so to bribe ’em!”
“Folks hate that, particularly the extreme MAGA Republicans, but look, I gotta bribe ’em somehow. These kids think I’m old, boring, racist, whatever. That’s what they think! Well, heck, I gotta get em to vote for me! So this was a no brainer. Makes total sense. Maybe the Republicans shoulda just done it and gotten popular instead of just handing me the opportunity. Duh. Seems like common sense. But they ain’t the brightest, folks.”