Student Loan Forgiveness is Widely Popular, but Maybe not so Much in the Supreme Court.

Student Loan ForgivenessPhoto byPublic Use

President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan delivers on a campaign promise that would cancel $10,000 in federal student loan debt for those making less than $125,000 or households with less than $250,000 in income per year. Pell Grant recipients would get an additional $10,000 in debt forgiven.

Six Republican-led states — Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina — and lawmakers in Congress are opposed to the plan, pointing to its price tag and calling it a violation of Biden's executive authority. The Supreme Court has heard the case and is expected to rule by June.

An analysis found that the CBO's projection would put the cost per taxpayer at roughly $2,730, or $91 annually over the next three decades. The calculations used the 157.5 million tax returns filed in 2020 to estimate the total number of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) taxpayers in the United States.

A new poll shows 62% of Americans support some sort of student loan forgiveness, nearly identical to a poll last year.

A majority of the Supreme Court’s Conservative justices did express varying degrees of skepticism — and, at times even hostility — toward the initiative and Biden expressed doubts that the Supreme Court would uphold his student loan forgiveness plan saying, “I'm confident we're on the right side of the law, I'm not confident about the outcome of the decision yet."

Four justices on the court seemed to agree with the Biden administration’s arguments that those challengers who brought the suit lack standing — the ability to demonstrate that they would suffer a concrete injury as a direct result of the program. Several other justices were vague or silent on the issue of standing.

If a majority of the Supreme Court concludes that the challengers lack standing, they may uphold Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, even if they disagree that it should be implemented.

About the writer: Matthew Woodruff is an Independent Journalist and Author who believes in Freely Accessible, Honest and Open Reporting. Visit at MattWoodruffAuthor.com.