This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. The Biden administration is out with its plan to cancel massive amounts of student debt.

Neil McCluskey directs the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, he argues that the legal and constitutional footing for the administration is shaky, and a large fraction of this relief will go to upper income borrowers.

In the broadest strokes, what has Joe Biden said he is going to do with respect to outstanding

student loans in the United States?

Joe Biden has decided that he is going to do student loan cancellation plus from what he had

been talking about.

So what he proposed was partially what people expected, which was What he would

would say, I will, through executive action,

through executive action, forgive $10,000 of federal student debt to just about everybody who has it.

He said an income limit at $125,000 for to understand that $250,000 goes deep into the top 10% of earners.

So this is almost everybody with student debt.

That's what we thought he was going to do.

But he added more to it.

He added that he was going to forgive $20,000 of debt for anybody who had a Pell Grant.

That's a huge addition to what people had been discussing, what we'd heard coming from the administration.

It's going to add a huge amount of cost to this. I estimate this is going to cost us around

$430 billion. There are lots of estimates. They're widely ranging, but all in the

sort of 300 to 600 billion dollar range, except not only did he add this

Pell Grant part, he's also talking about changing how we do income

contingent repayment from where it used to be you'd pay 10% of your discretionary income to 5%.

He's talking about more loan forgiveness down the road.

So what was likely, or at least people expected to be,

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