Live from Music Row, Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, I’ve been looking at this student loan forgiveness from a variety of different levels. Let me just kind of list them. This isn’t in any particular order, but if you just borrow the money, which is what Biden is doing, he’s just borrowing the money.
And so the cost per taxpayer in terms of debt service is $2,085 per taxpayer because there are 158 million taxpayers, and this is at least $300 million. If you include the Pell Grants, it’s $500 million. So it gets up to over $3,000 a taxpayer. But here’s what’s interesting.
You see, because he doesn’t tax anybody to do it, he just adds to the deficit. Now, just a year ago, Nancy Pelosi said that regardless of who the president is, the president does not have the authority to forgive student debt. Only Congress can do that.
She made that statement, and now she doesn’t care. The Biden administration is claiming that they’re doing this under the Health Emergency Act, but they argued in court two months ago that the Health Emergency Act is now over and not necessary because they wanted to get rid of that Title 42, or whatever it is on the southern border.
So two months ago in court, they said that the health emergency is over, but now they’re claiming the health emergency exists. And so what you’re seeing here is essentially a usurpation of the legislative branch. And the legislative branch is saying nothing.
Now, I want you to just imagine let’s flip it the other way and say that a president decided we are in an educational emergency, which they could very well make that case and just take over the colleges and universities. This gets to my second reason.
The main reason for this forgiveness of debt is the Biden administration thinks they’re going to pick up some votes. That’s one. But the biggest one is the payoff to college administrators. In 2020, college administrators as a group gave $300 million to Democrats running for office, and they gave $30 million to Republicans, which is 10 to one.
And the reason that they’re doing it is that once the federal government took over “student lending,” then the colleges and universities were able to increase their tuitions and thereby increase the pay of the full-time college administrators.
And so it’s really you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back phenomena. But at the end of the day, it’s the taxpayers and the burden on the country that are affected by it. There are so many problems that it’s very hard to focus on one of them.
But the biggest concern that I have is that the politics of it will end up outweighing the tremendous harmful effects. But once again, you have a precedent that if the Republicans do regain power, this is a precedent that they could use this to do what they think is best.
Listen to the Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
