EDITORIAL: Democrats flee as student loan fiasco gets worse

Prediction markets have proved an effective means of forecasting the outcome of events. Similarly, one can get an accurate appraisal of the political ramifications of President Joe Biden’s student loan giveaway by watching how vulnerable congressional Democrats reacted.

Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who has been a reliable foot soldier for the White House and faces a tough re-election battle, finally found a policy question on which she takes issue with Mr. Biden. “I don’t agree” with the president’s decision, she said in a statement, “because it doesn’t address the root problems that make college unaffordable.”

NBC News noted that “When President Joe Biden announced student loan debt relief … his allies celebrated.” It added, “But a string of Democrats in tight races across the country want little to do with it.”

The news got worse in the days following the announcement. White House officials claimed their latest giveaway would cost $300 billion. On Friday, however, analysts at the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model announced the cost was at least $518 billion in loan forgiveness alone, with the total price tag as high as $1 trillion. Recipients will also be exempt from income tax liability on the amount of waived debt.

John McCormack of National Review Online puts this in jaw-dropping perspective.

“One trillion dollars — $940 billion to be precise — was the Congressional Budget Office’s official 10-year cost estimate of Obamacare when Congress was debating the massive expansion of government in 2010,” he wrote Friday. “Now, President Biden is possibly taking that much money from U.S. taxpayers with a lawless stroke of a pen to provide a bailout that will overwhelmingly benefit Democratic voters a couple months before an election.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Education is at sea as it tries to figure out how all this will work despite the fact that the president had 18 months to ponder the details. Axios reported that the government’s financial aid website struggled under the traffic it received following the announcement and that many observers believe the agency will struggle to handle the intricacies of debt relief. The administration doesn’t know how many Americans will qualify or even when they can expect to see the ledger adjusted.

This all has the makings of another Biden fiasco (“There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way, no serious economist.”). Sen. Cortez Masto and other Democrats can run for the hills, but the Biden economy they helped create remains wrapped around their ankles like a lead weight.