April 19, 2024
Student Loan Forgiveness: Morally Reprehensible and Legally Invalid
By Warren Beatty
Barack Obama set the stage in 2015 for the student loan forgiveness fiasco when he announced the 'America's College Promise' proposal to make two years of community college free. On the proposal's web page is this: "Students should be able to get the knowledge and the skills they need without taking on decades worth of student debt." (emphasis mine)
Obama's idea has now been extended to include four-year colleges. His lackey, that joke who currently occupies the Bully Pulpit, is simply forwarding his boss' idea. The problem for Biden is that Obama's idea is neither legal nor morally acceptable.
An article in The Conversation makes a good moral case for not canceling student loans: "Canceling debt also seems to violate the moral principle of following through on one's promises. Borrowers have a moral duty to fulfill their loan agreements, the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued, because reneging on promises is disrespectful to oneself and others. Once people have promised to do something, he noted, others rely upon that promise and expect them to follow through. In the case of federal student loans, a borrower signs a promissory note agreeing to pay back the government and, ultimately, the taxpayers. And so student borrowers seem to have a moral duty to pay their debts unless mitigating circumstances like injury or illness arise."
Robert Farrington provides five excellent reasons why student loans should not be forgiven.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/student_loan_forgiveness_morally_reprehensible_and_legally_invalid.html
