Betsy DeVos Gave Congress 1 Last Warning Before Resigning from Trump Administration
Before her exit from the Trump administration, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had one last warning for members of Congress.
In a farewell letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Jan. 4, DeVos warned of the dangers of forgiving student loan debt.
The Democratic Party has made student loan forgiveness one of its top policy priorities.
With control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, the party would have the power to pursue such a policy in the next few years.
“Importantly, I hope you also reject misguided calls to make college ‘free’ and require the two-thirds of Americans who didn’t take on student debt or who responsibly paid off their student loans to pay for the loans of those who have not done the same,” DeVos wrote in her letter, which came two days before the Jan. 6 incursion on Capitol Hill.
DeVos resigned her position on Jan. 7, citing Trump’s role in the incursion. Her position had been due to expire this Wednesday, when Joe Biden will be inaugurated as president.
“Across-the-board forgiveness of college debts is not only unfair to most Americans, it is also the most regressive of policy proposals – rewarding the wealthiest sector of our labor force at the expense of the poorest,” DeVos continued in the Jan. 4 letter. “My recent remarks at the annual FSA conference provide more on that.”
During her speech at the conference, on Dec. 1, DeVos was even more explicit with her denunciation of the left’s move to cancel student debt.
“We’ve heard shrill calls to cancel, to forgive, to make it all free. Any innocuous label out there can’t obfuscate what it really is: wrong,” she said, according to reports. “The campaign for free college is a matter of total government control. Make no mistake: It is a socialist takeover of higher education.”
“It’s fundamentally unfair to ask two-thirds of Americans who don’t go to college to pay the bills for the mere one-third who do.”
“And it’s even more unfair to those who have held up their end of the bargain and paid back their student loans themselves to subsidize those who don’t save, plan and pay.”
DeVos couldn’t be more right.
Motivated out of self-interest, many young Americans wish to abdicate their responsibilities by making their student loans magically vanish.
These are financial contracts, and the people who willingly signed them should have to fulfill their end of the bargain.
Many Americans have done the right thing, working extremely hard to pay off their loans. Why should they pay off someone else’s loans? Will they get their money back?
Will this make people taking out loans in the future assume they can simply vote for a Democrat and have their debt forgiven?
This isn’t about fairness and it isn’t about equality.
DeVos is right. For the left, student loan forgiveness is simply another vehicle they’re using to forward a socialist agenda.
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