The White House released a new estimate Friday for the total cost of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, just days after not being able to supply that number.
Bharat Ramamurti, director of Biden’s National Economic Council, joined White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre at Friday’s briefing in outlining the rough cost at $24 billion per year for the next 10 years.
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“Our estimate is that the debt relief proposal will reduce average annual receipts in the student loan program by about $24 billion a year over the next 10 years. So the way to think about this is that, because we are providing debt relief, reducing the outstanding balance for some people, eliminating it for other people, that means we’re not going to be collecting a certain amount of payments that we otherwise would have been collecting,” he explained.
Ramamurti added, “for context,” $24 billion “represents 1.5% of the deficit reduction that we are projecting for this fiscal year before the announcement, and it is far less than the $350 billion plus that we’ve already done in PPP loan forgiveness since last July.”
He reiterated the White House‘s past position that the plan “pays for itself.”
“This is paid for and far more by the amount of deficit reduction that we’re already on track for this year,” Ramamurti stated. “We’re using a portion of that, a very small portion of it, to provide relief to middle-class families consistent with the president’s plan.”
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You can watch Friday’s briefing in full below.
