Two Democratic lawmakers – Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Maryland) and Rep. Alma Adams (North Carolina) – have proposed the "Parent PLUS Parity Act," which would extend the Parent PLUS program and allow parents to take out loans to pay for their undergraduate students' loans totaling $100 billion in 2023. The Act is endorsed by several left-leaning groups, including the National Education Association and the NAACP.
Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow at The Daily Signal, isn't a fan of the proposal because "hundreds of billions of dollars over time would be simply forgiven after 20 or 25 years' worth of payments – and the payments would be tied to the income of the parent," he notes.
A recent commentary at The Daily Signal argues that Van Hollen, Adams, and others sponsoring the measure are ignoring the Supreme Court rulings that blocked the Biden administration's previous attempts to shift hundreds of billions of dollars in outstanding college student loan debt to working Americans.
"With the gross federal debt now an inconceivable $35.3 trillion, the last thing politicians should do is pretend they’re in a position to ask taxpayers to take on more debt," writes Jonathan Butcher and David Ditch, "especially when two-thirds of those taxpayers don’t hold bachelor’s degrees themselves and 80% of Americans don’t have any student loan debt."
Kissel concurs: "If [the sponsors] somehow make it through the House and the Senate with this awful bill, then it'll be the law of the land – and it will be a very, very expensive transfer scheme, which nobody should want to do," he tells AFN.
American Enterprise Institute's tracker of the administration's loan write-offs is currently over $406 billion, amounting to around $3,100 per household.
