When it comes to bribes, Joe Biden likes to go big.

This is about the only way to explain his economically insane plan to hand out $10,000 in student loan debt "forgiveness" to any borrower making up to $124,999.99 a year.

That's a gift, but not one he'll pay for.  He'll have you pay for it — to the tune of $300 billion, minimum, but quite possibly $980 billion — while he claims to be Mister Bountiful.

It's nothing but a bribe to a voting bloc he's counting on to help his flailing Democrats in 2022 and a payoff to secure his re-election in 2024.

According to Bloomberg:

Forgiving student loan debt will cost between $300 billion and $980 billion over 10 years, according to a new analysis, with the majority of relief going toward borrowers in the top 60% of earners. 

The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimate was released Tuesday ahead of President Joe Biden's long-anticipated decision as soon as this week on whether to forgive some student loan debt. White House officials have been trying to combat critiques that such a move would add to rampant inflation that's become a political liability for Biden and his fellow Democrats. ...

The group estimated that between 69% and 73% of any debt forgiven would accrue to households that rank in the top 60% of the US's income distribution.

Bloomberg also reports that there's a debt repayment pause in the works, as well as talk of even higher amounts of "debt forgiveness" to student borrowers with lower incomes who took Pell grants.

Worse still, his $10,000 "gift" will be going primarily to the rich.  He'll get the money to "pay for" it by auditing the landscaper and the taco truck operator through the 87,000 IRS agents he plans to sic on them.

Not exactly the "preferential option for the poor" that his Liberation Theology buddies like to bruit about.  For President Devout Catholic, it's a preferential option for the rich, and he can put his name on it.

But this is not the half of it.

It's not just IRS agents targeting bodega-owners for that unreported $600 bank transaction, or the waiter who forgets to report all of his tips on his taxes, who will be paying for this Biden "gift" to the rich.

It's actually everyone, because an extra $1 trillion in government spending is a surefire inflation-generator.  And despite what the Bidenites say, inflation hurts the poor more than anyone.  Sound like a good time to be adding to the already huge fires of inflation that Biden has created through profligate government spending?  Joe thinks so, or rather, doesn't care.

Here's former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, also a former president of Harvard University (who knows the story on both ends of this fiasco), commenting about what's going to happen with this hare-brained bribery scheme:

"Student loan debt relief is spending that raises demand and increases inflation," Summers added. "It consumes resources that could be better used helping those who did not, for whatever reason, have the chance to attend college. It will also tend to be inflationary by raising tuitions."

Summers understands that the federalization of student loans done under the Obama administration, combined with the inability of borrowers to discharge these loans in bankruptcy, has given colleges across the country, particularly the private ones with huge, often billion-dollar, endowments, the incentive to raise tuition rates sky-high, since Uncle Sugar is always going to shell out for them, and students are always going to sign on. 

Summers even offers a sensible solution to the problem of indebtedness for some borrowers to keep both lenders and borrowers accountable, tweeting:

I think the best way to relieve student debt would be to allow it to be discharged in bankruptcy. I'd support this reform. It would also penalize other private creditors, unlike government debt relief that would in part subsidize them.

According to a Forbes/Zenger News piece from pre-Bidenflation 2020, the inflationary effect of these policies has been going on for a while:

The average cost of attending a four-year college or university in the United States rose by 497% between the 1985-86 and 2017-18 academic years, more than twice the rate of inflation.

The cost of attending a traditional four-year university has been rising more than twice as fast as inflation, and two-year community colleges a third faster.

It doesn't matter that the diplomas the schools hand out are for useless womyn's studies degrees or hard sciences; the universities get paid no matter what.  All that guaranteed federal cash is what enables them to hire administrators and diversity specialists over professors who actually teach, actually outnumbering them now, another bad effect of the federalization of student loans.

Now that each borrower gets $10,000 in student debt relief from Big Dollar Joe, the schools have just gotten a new incentive to raise tuitions at least $10,000 higher and hire even more diversity specialists, to "capture" those federal dollars and the future earnings of those who graduate from those institutions.  Oh, and they just happen to be some of Joe's most enthusiastic campaign donors.

The only people who get burned here are the poor.

But Joe doesn't care about the poor; he's down in the polls and now looking for votes from whoever he thinks will give them to him, if not for love, then, well, free money.

Anecdotally, the one thing I always see on his Twitter feed among the slew of almost exclusively negative comments is rants and raves from youthful Bernie Sanders voters calling for full student debt forgiveness.  It's obvious that this is Biden's Democrat base, and they're the loudest voice pressing him.

It calls to mind that Joe's lost huge chunks of his voter base — among Latinos, blacks, suburbanites, young people, the working class — over his disastrous handling of the economy, justice, crime, immigration, and foreign policy — but he hasn't lost all of them.  His $10,000 bribe to the student debt crowd is a desperate bid to ensure their votes for him and his party in November 2022 and, soon enough, November 2024.

It's a bribe, like what Hugo Chávez used to do, handing out washing machines to secure votes, except that Joe likes to hand out bigger amounts since his "shantytown dwellers" have bigger appetites as denizens of places like Martha's Vineyard.  It's the same bribery, though, and amounts to a grotesque corruption of democracy.

It isn't surprising, given that this is Joe Biden.  He's never had a solution to any problem other than to throw money at it, and on the corruption front, House Biden, as seen in the abandoned Hunter Biden laptop, was a multi-billion-dollar affair.

Joe goes big because he doesn't go anywhere else.  Now he's handing out bribes in a desperate bid to get someone, anyone, to vote for him, and it's a slap in the face to all the people who live within their means and pay their bills.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.