This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian

is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow

here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A Tishish Professor of Law at NYU and his

senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. And Richard, I imagine you have some

pretty happy former students because President Biden finally followed through on one of his campaign promises to forgive some student loans.

Now some details, the White House announced today that the Department of Education would forgive up to $20,000 in student loans to students who had Pell Grants and $10,000 for non- Pell Grant recipients.

But don't worry, no one in the top 5% will benefit because the cutoffs are for income are $125,000 if you're single and $250 if you're married.

Richard, this is an astronomical price tag that's estimates at $300 to $ billion dollars in costs, which if you recall, the

Inflation Reduction Act had some new tax revenues to pay for it, which totaled about that much.

So any new taxes from the inflation reduction of act have just been

wiped out. Now the way I understand the Constitution is that tax and spending

decisions are authorized by Congress but it's President Biden

who just unilaterally made this happen.

So I've got to know, legally,

how has this been being done and who can challenge it

and is it a done deal?

Well, you're asking all of the hard questions to which I do not have the obvious answer. The one thing I can say is that many of my former students owing to their great abilities are in fact in that top 5% so they will not benefit it.

Many of my students have long since paid off their loans so they will not benefit as well.

The obvious situation is there going to be a fluent who tend to vote Democrats, who have

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