The Congressional Progressive Caucus recently released its agenda for 2025 and beyond. While the proposed trillions in new spending and crippling tax increases come as no surprise, the agenda is notable for its total rejection of the constitutional and free enterprise principles that enable prosperity and have made this country great. If enacted, this agenda would undo decades of economic progress and leave millions of Americans worse off.
The name Progressive Caucus is a misnomer for a group of elected officials who embrace with open arms numerous policies of failed socialist states that are antithetical to actual human progress. While the word socialism has at times been overused, there is no descriptor more accurate to characterize an agenda that would put the federal government in the businesses of manufacturing drugs and providing consumers bank accounts while also paying people not to work. These explicit command and control industries are in addition to numerous other further government expansions into energy, broadband, health care, housing, and agriculture, among others.
This post is the third in a series highlighting the most harmful proposals in the agenda. Our posts covering the trillions in new taxes and environmental radicalism are available here and here.
I’m from the Government, and I’m Here to Pay Off Your Student Loans
Recent analysis of one of President Biden’s specific student debt cancellation programs found that the program would cost $19 billion in order eliminate debt for just 750,000 borrowers with average incomes over $312,000. This is a drop in the bucket of the overall cost of Biden’s various debt cancellation programs, which have stretched to $1.4 trillion, but it illustrates that the beneficiaries of these programs are high-income earners, with costly advanced degrees (now paid for taxpayers). This all comes in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that Biden’s unilateral attempt to cancel debt by executive fiat was unconstitutional. Instead of respecting the constitutional separation of powers, Biden leaned in and declared the Supreme Court didn’t stop him.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Biden trashing constitutional norms isn’t enough for the Socialist Caucus, and they propose further federal intrusions into areas traditionally left to state and local governments on education, on top of broader student debt cancellation than Biden’s programs. What could possibly go wrong? A lot, as it turns out. That $1.4 trillion estimate is a fraction of what it would cost for the wholescale cancellation they propose. For comparison, the cost of implementing universal pre-K, which they also propose, would be a little over half as much as what Biden’s debt cancellation is costing the country. Of course, these types of federal intervention are directly responsible for the decades-long explosion in college tuition.
To negate the need for future student lending, the socialists propose free tuition for public colleges, community colleges and trade school—the only college they don’t want the federal government to pay for seems to be the Electoral College. Similar free college tuition programs have failed in other countries by actually pushing college further out of reach for the poorest students, and there is no reason to believe the results would be different here. Maybe it’s not about the education itself; maybe it’s just about using taxpayer dollars to subsidize professional “student” activists and leftist professors. The rise in young adults with positive views of socialism should trouble everyone, with nearly 40 percent viewing it favorably. It’s fortunate that more than twice as many (87 percent) view free enterprise positively, but higher education must be failing if they don’t understand that free enterprise and socialism are incompatible.