The Patriot Post® · Student Loan Bills Come Due

In a recent article from NBC News, titled “Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ is bringing a big set of student loan changes,” the Leftmedia outlet frets about the fact that the Trump administration is ending Joe Biden’s legally dubious student loan debt forgiveness program.

As the article’s teaser reads, “Starting Wednesday, many student borrowers may tackle higher repayment requirements, fewer program options and greater loan limits.”

NBC’s apparent intent is to blame the Trump administration, particularly the Department of Education, for aggressively over-the-top measures to force student loan debtors to repay their federal loans. You know, the loans they voluntarily took on to attend college. Oh, the horror.

The article relays the sob story of one single mother holding some $200,000 in federal student loan debt. She took out loans to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in legal studies, but years later, she ended up earning just $60,000 a year as a personal assistant to a real estate agent. Now 57 years old, she complains, “I would have hoped that I would be making a decent living on the education that I paid such a dear price for. But I was sold a dream. It feels like now, if you are a normal, average person just trying to make it, you’re not going to.”

That is indeed a very hard situation. But it’s not Donald Trump’s fault.

For whatever reason, likely due to her own choices, she is not working in the legal field and therefore is not making the kind of money she had dreamed of. How exactly is that the fault of the American taxpayer, to whom she still apparently owes at least $200,000?

Furthermore, how in the world is it unjust for her to be required to make payments on what she owes?

Indeed, the Trump administration’s efforts to get student loan borrowers to actively repay the money they owe are not even remotely “oppressive.” The administration has put forth a means of collecting owed money that works with borrowers to help them make payments, including incentivizing enrollment in automatic billing by offering a 1% interest rate reduction on their loan.

But Leftmedia outlets like NBC News frame this as over-burdensome and supposedly pushing more people into poverty.

Interestingly, The Washington Post has an article that unintentionally exposes the root of the problem. In “Student loan pause may have had a surprising impact, Post analysis shows,” the Post notes that the temporary pause on student loan repayments initiated in response to the COVID pandemic near the end of Trump’s first term, which was then subsequently extended multiple times during the Biden administration as part of a failed effort to promote loan cancellation legislation, has resulted in people taking on more debt.

“The three-year pause did more than provide temporary relief,” the Post reports. “It reshaped household balance sheets. In many cases, people appear to have used the breathing room to take on other forms of debt — car loans, home mortgages and credit card balances — often on the assumption that some or all of their student debt would eventually be forgiven.”

Where did people get the idea that some or all of their loans would be forgiven? That was the promise made by Joe Biden and others to get more Democrats elected.

But irrespective of Biden’s failed and legally unjustified promises of student loan forgiveness, these college students, who are supposedly the brightest among us, knew they were taking on loans. They understood that they were borrowing money they would be required to repay — albeit at a lower interest rate, thanks to the American taxpayer.

By what right do they now complain?

This is akin to someone taking out a loan to purchase a car, failing to make loan payments, and then complaining after their vehicle has been repossessed. How am I going to get to work to make money to pay my bills? they ask. Answer: pay what you owe, and this won’t happen.

Furthermore, it turns out that giving people a “free” pass on repaying their student loans incentivizes them to take on more debt.

As we have repeatedly observed, more often than not, a government “solution” ends up causing more problems than the original “problem” politicians were claiming to fix.