Late night host Bill Maher slammed President Biden’s student loan forgiveness scheme as guests agreed the political ploy hasn’t turned around his struggling poll numbers.
The comedian, 68, said the forgiveness plans are particularly offensive to him amid rampant anti-Israel protests occupying college campuses across the nation, as he sees them as ‘supporting Jew hating.’
‘So, college’s constantly raise tuition, then the kids take out more loans, then the government comes by and pays those loans,’ he said.
‘So, my tax dollars are supporting this Jew hating? I don’t think so.’
On his HBO show ‘Real Time with Bill Maher,’ the comic noted that Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan is estimated to cost between $870 billion to $1.2 trillion.
The White House redoubled its efforts again this week, announcing on Wednesday it cancelled $6 billion in debt for borrowers who attended the Art Institutes between 2004 and 2017.
That brought the total forgiveness so far to $160 billion for 4.6 million borrowers ahead of November’s election.
Biden’s debt forgiveness drive is seen by some analysts as an attempt to turn the tide on his slumping poll numbers, particularly among young voters where Donald Trump has taken a surprising lead in several polls.
In November, Trump took his first lead over Biden among young voters in an NBC poll, where he led the incumbent 46 percent to 42 percent among voters aged 18-34.
Maher and his guests, former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway and Bloomberg National Correspondent Joshua Green, agreed that they don’t have high hopes for the debt forgiveness scheme to work for Biden.
‘You can’t have plumbers and pipe fitters paying for the student loans of doctors and lawyers,’ Conway said. ‘It’s not fair.
‘I’m all for the government trying to help people who need it, but he did that as a political play, and everyone knows it.’
Green interjected that the tactic ‘hasn’t worked.’
‘If you look at issues young people care about, Gaza is like 15th out of 16, and the only thing that comes in lower than Gaza is student loan forgiveness,’ he said.
‘So, it hasn’t worked as a motivator for the youth vote, half of which are out there chanting “Genocide Joe,” so it’s backfired not just in terms of public policy, but in terms of the politics too.’
Referring to a recent CNN poll, Maher said: ‘Yeah, I mean, Trump is winning the youth vote by I think 11 points, that’s pretty astounding to me.’
Green said that this may be down to the media focusing on anti-Israel protests far more than issues that may be damaging to Republicans, such as Donald Trump’s New York trial.
‘What I make of that a lot of it is if you turn on your TV today, you see young people protesting, angry, fighting with cops,’ Green said.
‘All of these stories that could potentially be damaging for Republicans to help Joe Biden have fallen by the wayside because all of the attention is on these protesters and on these fights, on their behavior, and on the fact that a lot of people don’t like what they see on the television.’
He noted that Biden was ‘elected to push aside the chaos and the havoc of the Trump years’, with Conway chiming in that Trump’s chaos was ‘in a tweet… now it’s chaos and crisis everywhere we look.’
‘At the border, on our college campuses, by the way, in our halls of Congress, 31 Democrats voted against the resolution last October 18 to condemn Hezbollah and Hamas,’ she said.
‘And the resolution clearly said, Bill, that they were concerned about institutions of higher education allowing sympathies for Hezbollah and Hamas, which our own government, Biden’s government, Trump’s government have declared terrorist groups.
‘They specifically said in there it was going to hurt, make uncomfortable, if not worse, Jewish students with all this antisemitism.
‘That was October 18! Thirty-one Democrats including the most well-known young ones, the Squad that doesn’t do squat, for example, all voted against that resolution.’
