Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images, Samuel Corum/Getty Images, Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Biden announced a student loan relief plan, which would forgive up to $20,000 per borrower.
Several GOP lawmakers were critical of the relief program.
Here’s the difference in tuition then and now critics graduated from undergrad.
Several Republican lawmakers have criticized President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, largely calling the move unfair.
Biden on Wednesday announced plans to cancel up to $10,000 in student debt for federal borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year and $20,000 in student debt for Pell Grant recipients.
Republicans swiftly blasted the plan, arguing the debt cancellation is unfair to other borrowers, future taxpayers, and working-class families. But some of the most vocal critics of student loan forgiveness are Republicans who graduated from universities that had a significantly cheaper cost to attend compared to recent years.
Earlier this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren called out Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for calling the policy “astonishingly unfair,” noting school cost under $400 a year when he graduated from who graduated from the University of Louisville in 1964.
McConnell called President Biden’s student loan forgiveness “a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
In response, Warren, who has long advocated for $50,000 in student-loan forgiveness, said: “Senator McConnell graduated from a school that cost $330 a year,” Warren wrote on Twitter. “Today it costs over $12,000. McConnell has done nothing to fix it — and is irate that the President is stepping up to help millions of working Americans drowning in debt. He can spare us the lectures on fairness.”
“Biden’s debt transfer scam will make inflation even worse and does nothing to stop the runaway cost of college for most families,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, said in a tweet. “Americans cannot afford Democrats’ radical agenda.”
Many Americans can’t afford college, which has become increasingly expensive.
—Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) August 25, 2022
McCarthy graduated from California State University, Bakersfield in 1989. At the time, the university’s tuition for in-state students was $795. The tuition for the 2020/2021 school year was $5,742 for in-state residents. That cost does not include room and board and other fees.
And this is not unusual.
Since 1980 the cost of undergraduate education including tuition, fees, room, and board, increased by 169%, a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also told NewsMax that it’s “not fair” for taxpayers to pay off student loans.
“And taxpayers all over the country, taxpayers that never took out a student loan, taxpayers that pay their bills and maybe even never went to college and are just hardworking people, they shouldn’t have to pay off the great big student loan debt for some college student that piled up massive debt going to some Ivy League school. That’s not fair,” Green said in the interview.
—The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 25, 2022
Greene graduated from the University of Georgia in 1996. When she graduated tuition and fees at the school were $836 for each term for in-state residents. In comparison, for the 2022/2023 academic year, tuition and fees for in-state residents come to $11,180.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)
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Greene was among several Republican lawmakers the official White House Twitter account called out for having other loans forgiven themselves while bashing student-loan forgiveness. Her business had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven, which included the original loan of $182,300 and accrued interest, according to data from the Small Business Administration that was compiled by ProPublica.
In the aftermath of Biden’s order, Rep. Matt Gaetz reposted a July episode of his Firebrand Podcast where he said: “Instead of wiping away student loan debt with a presidential executive order, we ought to allow people who are victims of predatory systems to declare bankruptcy.”
Gaetz graduated from Florida State University in 2003, when tuition and fees were $2,684.40 for in-state students for the academic year. Now, it’s $5,656.