Is There a Christian Case for Biden’s Debt Relief Plan?

Yes, but it’s not persuasive.

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This week has illustrated, better than most, the promise and peril of biblical arguments over public policy. It all started on Wednesday, when President Joe Biden announced his student debt forgiveness plan. 

The plan is relatively simple. All student borrowers who possess household incomes of less than $125,000 for single people and $250,000 for married people would be entitled to $10,000 of debt relief. Those who went to college on Pell Grants would receive $20,000 in relief. In addition, the plan would cap monthly loan payments at an amount equal to five percent of the borrower’s monthly discretionary income and forgive remaining loan balances after 10 years of payments, provided the remaining balance is $12,000 or less. 

Biden also extended the pause on student loan payments—first granted during the COVID emergency—through the end of the year. Student borrowers would resume payments in 2023. 

Importantly, Biden’s plan is not a legislative proposal. He’s not asking Congress to enact this reform. He’s initiating it through the executive branch only, asserting that the so-called HEROES Act, passed after the 9/11 attacks, grants him the authority to forgive student debt “in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”

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  1. Mathias

    Perhaps one facet of this plan which is overlooked is that it isn't actually debt "forgiveness". Forgiveness is granted by the party to whom the debt is owed. A third party cannot forgive what was done against someone else.

    In the words of C.S. Lewis, "We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct."

    A prescient man, Mr. Lewis.

    So if the taxpayers had personally loaned money to college students, then taxpayers swallowing the bill would be forgiveness. (And for it to be true forgiveness, it would have to be voluntary; or if compelled by law, the forgiveness would of necessity be granted by each taxpayer individually, not corporately.)

    Or if the colleges chose to forgo the monies they were owed and to retroactively waive the tuition fees, that would be debt forgiveness, and would be unobjectionable in the Christian view on the same grounds as the parable of the vineyard owner in the Gospels: "May I not choose to do with my own property as I wish?"

    But when the federal government announces that it will pay the fees of the delinquent students (pun intended), that is not forgiveness at all. That is redemption, taking up the debt which is owed by another and shouldering the burden of paying it yourself. And while redemption is a noble and selfless act when done of one's own free will, it is grotesque when it is enforced by someone else. The federal government is demanding (when all is said and done) that taxpayers act as the redeemers of the debt owed by the students.

    Put this in the context of judicial punishment: If a man offers to act as redeemer to a criminal, to take on himself the punishment which is due to another, he is engaging in the highest form of self-sacrifice. But if a judge decides to acquit the guilty and drag in an innocent man off the street to suffer the penalty for the crime in his stead, that judge is engaging in the worst kind of injustice.

    That is what the president is doing: claiming to 'forgive' a debt which is not owed to him, and placing the burden of that delinquency on those who never incurred it. It isn't forgiveness; it is merely a twisted parody of the redemptive act. And that is about as unbiblical as you can get.

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  2. KJG

    Why are so many discussions regarding this topic failing to note what to me is extremely vital: federal student loans CANNOT be eliminated even if the former student files bankruptcy. Mortgage loans, car loans, etc can all be claimed under this, allowing a person to start over, yet student loans are always there. Personal experience speaking. Still owe twice as much as my original loans due to accumulated interest, pushing 60 years old, started over following divorce and rebuilt my credit. Thankful for any help as I have always worked in Social Services and never made more than $40,000. Bachelor degree required. State university, not Ivy League.

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  3. Kara

    My husband asked me if I felt like a sucker for having paid off the last $60K of our student loans off in 2020. We sold a condo and bought a house. We had enough equity for a substantial downpayment and to pay off the loans without increasing our total mortgage debt. I still feel relieved to have the student debt gone even though it looks like we would have received $30K in student loan forgiveness under this policy (I had received a Pell Grant as an undergrad). So, no. I do not feel like a sucker.

    I agree that overall this is an excellent article, but I will quibble with David’s criticism of the Dave Ramsey advice. I too would tell someone with a loan balance of $2,500 today to just write a check. The freedom from debt feels so good, and who knows when and if this forgiveness would actually materialize. If the balance were $25,000, I’d flip it and tell the person to wait and see what comes of the policy. If I still had student loans, I would apply for the forgiveness, even though this is a policy I oppose. It’s a complicated world and nuanced world, which is why I appreciate The Dispatch.

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    Julie from Texas

    Thank you. I was having an online conversation with a young man (whom I taught in Bible class when he was young) about this issue, and he was convinced that grace, mercy, and forgiveness meant that this policy was fully in line with Christian principles. I made a case much like yours, and now I'm going to add this article to the thread. I don't think I'll convince him, but perhaps he'll at least better understand that good Christians have reason to oppose the policy.

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    Mike from Jersey

    So.

    Let's take college educated people who end up making much more in life than non-college educated people.

    Add a dash Universities and Colleges raising tuition hand over fist (each student needs her/his own bathroom and DEI administrator dont'cha you know).

    Sprinkle in a smidgen of Corporations who "require" people to have college degrees when in many cases they don't.

    And then dump in a heaping spoonful of a Government providing loans, and then forgiving them in the end, requiring taxpayers who more than likely didn't go to college to foot the bill.

    Yep, sound like a perfect recipe for Populism to me.

    What could go wrong?!

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    Marc Frischhertz

    This is not an attack directed towards David, he certainly appears to live and breath the Christian faith; but, until the majority of claimed Christians even start to adhere to their claimed faith in any manner except the most self-serving way, please just don’t.

    Today’s Christians make the Grand Inquisitor in the Bothers Karamazov appear Christ like.

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    PJ

    Dear sweet baby Jesus, please rapture your fans soon. VERY SOON!

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  8. X-ray doctor

    Is it really taking money from the poor when 40-60% of Americans pay no income tax? It seems like it’s taking from the people that actually pay taxes. I guess one could argue that it leaves less for the poor to get in benefits, but only if the Federal Budget was run as a zero sum game, which it isn’t. (NB-I it’s a bad bad idea for a number of reasons but I’m not sure that argument completely holds up).

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    1. Pawlus

      You beat me to it. I was about to post this comment:

      "I'm a bit skeptical that this policy is really shifting a bunch of money from the have-nots to the haves. It seems like a rhetorical trick. Isn't it true that nearly half the country isn't even paying federal income tax? And aren't most of those people the ones who never went to college? And don't most college graduates pay more in federal taxes than they get back in services in their lifetime, while the opposite is true for non-graduates? Seems to me this is much more complex than the conservative critique that this policy amounts to the rich benefitting from the poor."

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    Kevin C. Smith

    Be curious if anyone writes about the morality of state university systems that subsidize higher Ed at the expense of the poor through sales and property taxes.

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  10. Lee

    To be clear, the loan forgiveness being proposed is a transparently political exercise to reward and hopefully mobilize a segment of the population that already disproportionately supports Democrats, but I'm having a hard time warming to the narrative that the expense is being shouldered by low income HS graduates. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard the argument against the wealthy "paying their fair share" - the argument being that the wealthy already pay the vast majority of income tax collected, I wouldn't still have about $4k of student loans left to be forgiven. This is bad policy and sets a bad precedent but embracing the narrative that this is being done for the wealthy at the expense of the "working man" plays directly into the hands of the populist disinformation peddlers that The Dispatch aims (and does a great job) to counter. I certainly believe David to be a man of integrity and don't mean this to be a personal attack in anyway, but it's something that's struck me as I've observed the debate surrounding this issue on some of the outlets I frequent. This will certainly benefit a lot of people who already are, or are on their way to being comfortably wealthy, but with the upper limit on incomes this is not a redistribution from the poor to the rich. If statistics from the Tax Foundation that in 2019 the top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent are accurate, then how do we arrive at the conclusion that the whole of the amount forgiven is being taken from high school graduates? What am I missing?

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