The Biden administration has proposed a new student debt forgiveness plan that could provide assistance to an estimated 30 million Americans. As the 2024 presidential election in November draws closer, Yahoo Finance’s Senior Columnist Rick Newman joins Wealth! to discuss how these proposals could impact voter decisions.
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Editor’s note: This article was written by Angel Smith
Video Transcript
RACHELLE AKUFFO: As you heard there, President Biden’s new student debt relief plan could end up covering over 30 million Americans, if implemented. But would it also help Biden’s chances at the polls? For more, “Yahoo Finance’s” Rick Newman here to discuss more.
Hey, Rick. So never one to shy away from your thoughts. How do you think this is going to be received?
RICK NEWMAN: I’m sure the Biden administration hopes it helps– it gains them some credibility with younger voters and people who are struggling with this problem. Biden clearly is backsliding with younger voters. And he needs them to win.
Remember, he won by a very small margin of popular votes in just a handful of states back in 2020. So he cannot afford to lose that margin. And, also, worth pointing out, some of these benefits will go, if these proposals actually get enacted. And I think that’s a very important caveat here, not necessarily to younger voters, but to people who have been paying on their loans for 20 years or even more.
And the administration says, this new batch of programs would help about 25 million people. So that is a substantial number of people. Just to put this in context, Rachelle, the original debt cancellation plan, which was sweeping would have helped about 44 million people. The Supreme Court, obviously, shot that down last year.
So in the meanwhile, the Biden administration has been rolling out these targeted debt relief programs that have helped a few million people so far. So if this stands, it would be a big increase in debt relief for these people. But important to emphasize here as the secretary pointed out, these are proposals at this point. none of these are in place yet.
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And my guess is that some– one or two of these might be in place by election day. But, probably, these are still going to be proposals come election day in November.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: And you raise an interesting point here, because, obviously, this is for people who’ve been paying for 20, 25 years. That isn’t that younger voter demographic that the Democrats are hoping to tap into. But then what happens to student debt, if Trump takes office in November?
RICK NEWMAN: Who knows. Since the Biden administration is doing this basically by regulation rather than legislation, that means Trump could undo it, if he wanted to.
So I’m sure now that Biden has rolled this out, people are going to be asking Trump, well, what are you going to do, if Biden rolls this out. and you actually win in November? I don’t think Trump is going to say, I disagree with this. I would kill this the moment I get into office.
But he could kill it without saying so, because you can slow roll regulations. You can keep regulations on the books, but not enforce them. You can not finalize the process. And I think this is something where we’re going to hear Joe Biden as the candidate trying to distinguish himself from Trump, saying, we’re going after this aggressively.
Trump was president for four years. And he didn’t try to do this at all, which is true. Trump didn’t do any debt cancelation. And I don’t– I’m not sure he ever even talked about it.
But Biden, look, he’s tied– he’s pretty close with Trump. And he’s losing in some of the polls. So there’s definitely a political element here. He’s trying to gain some credibility with voters. And if he plays it right, he might be able to.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: You never know. Some division there of people who already paid off their student debt, saying, what about me? But that is how some of these regulations work.
So appreciate you getting us up to speed. Our very own, Rick Newman.
RICK NEWMAN: See you, Rachelle.