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Media Fall Hook, Line, and Sinker for White House Spin on Biden’s Student-Loan ‘Forgiveness’

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President Joe Biden speaks to members of the media before boarding Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., August 26, 2022. (Leah Millis/Reuters)

The White House accused GOP critics of hypocrisy for accepting Covid-loan relief — and the media ate it up.

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Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we dissect the recent battle over student-loan “forgiveness” and hit more media misses.

White House Embarrassingly Defends Loan ‘Forgiveness’

Last week, President Biden overstepped his authority and “canceled” up to $10,000 in student-loan debt for Americans making less than $125,000 a year. Having come under fire from Republicans and even some Democrats for the decision, the White House took to Twitter to “clap back” at critics who had received loans from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which aimed to save businesses that were forced to shut down during the pandemic.

But while Biden’s loan “forgiveness” at the expense of American taxpayers was enacted via executive action — a move that House speaker Nancy Pelosi previously suggested was unconstitutional — the PPP program was enacted through congressional legislation and intended to ameliorate the effects of an intrusive government action.

The program aimed to avoid an unemployment crisis after strict Covid-19 mitigation rules shuttered businesses for months. PPP loan recipients were offered forgiveness if they could prove the loans had been used for business expenses.

Despite the differences between the programs, the White House tried to attack its detractors on Twitter by posting the amount they had forgiven through the PPP program:

The mainstream media were delighted by the White House’s petty display. Vanity Fair wrote, “White House Twitter Account Tells Republican Hypocrites to Sit Down and STFU,” the New York Times wrote that the White House “snaps back at Twitter critics,” while Forbes added that the “White House Topped Twitter by Trolling GOP on Loan Forgiveness.” Axios said the White House “claps back at MTG and other GOP lawmakers calling student loan plans unfair.”

However, Democrats did not stop there; several Twitter users accused NR’s own Charles C. W. Cooke of benefiting from a forgiven PPP loan for his podcast with Kevin Williamson, Mad Dogs & Englishmen. The “gotcha” was short-lived, however, when Cooke pointed out that it was actually a Tampa-based restaurant that had received the loan and not his podcast:

The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro was also a target of the false PPP allegations, with The Humanist Report sharing evidence that a Los Angeles realtor with the same name had received a PPP loan and falsely suggested the recipient was the conservative commentator:

The apples-to-oranges comparisons did not end with misplaced attacks on Republicans.

Warren Gunnels, a senior policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), shared a series of cost comparisons from 1973 and 2022 that he claimed were evidence that Baby Boomers are wrong to ask why “slackers” can’t pay for college and pay off their loans like generations before them. And while tuition prices have risen astronomically over the past 50 years, the figures he shared were not adjusted for inflation and therefore do not create an accurate picture.

The unadjusted figures listed average weekly wages at $873 in 1973 and $813 in 2022, as well as the median home cost at $30,200 in 1973 and $433,100 in 2022. Tuition and fees at University of California were listed at $150 and $13,104 respectively, as well.

After pushback to his tweet, Gunnels shared the adjusted figures, though he subbed out the average weekly wages in favor of the real minimum wage, which was $10.70 in 1973 and $7.25 in 2022, while the real median home price was $201,976 in 1973. The adjusted tuition and fees at the University of California came in at $1,043 in 1973:

Yet despite rising prices, Democratic senator Michael Bennet of Colorado said, “While immediate relief to families is important, one-time debt cancellation does not solve the underlying problem.” He said the administration should have further targeted the relief and proposed a way to pay for the plan.

Even Biden himself opposed the forgiveness as bad politics and bad policy, according to a Washington Post report. However, he was ultimately swayed by allies of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), the report says.

The total estimated cost for Biden’s one-time cancellation is $300 billion, not including the Pell-grant-recipient additional expenditure, according to a study released Tuesday by the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania. The cost would increase to $330 billion if the program continues over the standard ten-year window, the study showed.

Asked whether the administration believes that the loan “forgiveness” is fully paid for, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confusingly replied, “We do believe it will be fully paid because of the work this president has done with the economy”:

Republicans, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, have called the policy an act of disrespect toward Americans who either worked to pay off their loans or never went to college and accrued debt.

“Democrats’ student loan socialism is a slap in the face to working Americans who sacrificed to pay their debt or made different career choices to avoid debt. A wildly unfair redistribution of wealth toward higher-earning people,” the Kentucky senator said.

Headline Fail of the Week

After last Tuesday’s primary election in Florida, which saw Charlie Crist capture the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, ABC News declared that the “Center holds for Democrats in Florida primaries.”

On Wednesday, Crist has told supporters of incumbent Ron DeSantis not to change their minds and vote for him because they have “hate in their heart” and on Saturday, he picked a Fidel Castro–admiring teachers’ union lackey as his running mate. It didn’t hold for very long. . . .

Media Misses

— Vice News suggested that Florida governor Ron DeSantis has an “anti-LGBTQ stance” and has worked to “crackdown on books” in the Sunshine State in a caption for a video that seems to poke fun at voters who support what the governor has done to protect parents’ authority over their children’s education:

— Representative Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.) attacked Rich Lowry on Sunday over a New York Times guest essay. In the essay, Lowry argued that the various investigations into Trump, including the probe into his January 6 conduct, are unlikely to produce clear-cut evidence necessary to responsibly undertake the destabilizing exercise of prosecuting a former president.

Kinzinger replied:

Look, I had a lot of respect for Rich Lowry. I still read him on occasion. It’s been amazing to watch his pivot from kind of intellectual conservative to, like, this anti-anti-Trumper. So he’s against people that are against Trump. He’s not necessarily for him. And so he’s constantly with this, ‘Well, there may be not precedents.’ Of course, there’s not precedents. We’ve never had a president of the United States attempt a coup against the United States of America. So there’s no precedents. And if we need a new law, let’s get a new law. But I’m quite sure that some of the laws can cover this. The DOJ seems very convinced of it.

— Various outlets, including TMZ, jumped down the throat of actress Sydney Sweeney because of the clothes on attendees of her mother’s 60th-birthday party,

Life must be excruciating for anyone whose threshold for “disappointment and shock” was met by this.

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