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Is CNN actually making a legitimate attempt to present a balanced look at the news?
I ask because over the last couple of days CNN had both hosts and guests talking about how if it goes through old Joe's promised student loan debt forgiveness[1] will result in increased inflation among other things.
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For instance, on CNN's At This Hour, Chris Wallace pointed out that if Biden's plan went through the chances that inflation will rise are increased:
"There is also the concern about inflation. Larry Summers, who's probably been more accurate about projecting inflation than anybody says, look, these people who are going to be spending that -- paying off their student loans, that's more money in their pocket, they're going to go out and spend, that raises demand, that raises prices, that raises inflation. Which may well be the number one concern. Certainly, the number one economic concern of most Americans, according to the polls. So it didn't deliver for them."
This was shortly after he pointed out another concern for old Joe's plan -- whether or not it is even legal[2]. Wallace observed that[3],
"in 2021, both Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi said that the president didn't have the unilateral power to forgive student loans. So, you know, there’s a big jump from that to what the President ended up doing yesterday. And as a result, you're going to definitely see court challenges to this sooner rather than later."
This brought agreement from the host, Kate Bolduan
"For sure, because the legal basis behind this the Department of Education put out, is -- gets back to an act that was passed post 9/11 to help in times of war and emergency and they're trying to attribute this to pandemic, to apply to this as well. So, there’s 100 percent going to be legal challenges to this."
Another thing he commented on was that "if you're a working-class person who never went to college, you're not going to get any of this $300 billion it’s going to cost the government."
Aside from it probably having been better, and certainly more correct to say "tax-payers" rather than "government at the end, it looks like in all those years at Fox he appears to have paid attention to business journalist and anchor Neil Cavuto.
It's just that it was said on CNN
But that's not the only instance. An outlier that slipped through.
Earlier, on the Tuesday edition of CNN Newsroom, Marc Goldwein, an economics professor at John Hopkins University and Senior VP and Policy Director of Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), is
going to make the Fed’s job harder and that means it’s gonna increase the risk [that] they’re going to have to drive us into recession to get inflation under control."
Mostly he focused on Wallace's last point, declaring that
"What we really need to do is make college affordable, not send a $10,000 gift to people that already have in many cases advanced degrees."
He responded to claims from liberals that canceling student loan debt won't increase inflation saying it was a "baseline trick" because the student loan repayment pause
"was always meant to be a temporary pause. If it’s a permanent pause it’s not student debt: It’s student grants."
As well as noting that
"disproportionately student debt is being held by people that have advanced degrees and pretty good income."
Goldwein concluded by observing that even accepting the promises made about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act reducing the deficit on face value, those reductions will be obliterated by the effects of this student loan bailout
"The Inflation Reduction Act saves, maybe, $300 billion dollars in the first ten years. If we do cancel $10,000 in debt and just extend the policy a few months, we’re gonna be at about that much in terms of new costs. So all the deficit reduction is gonna be wiped out. At the same time, we’re probably going to do more to increase inflation from debt cancellation than any inflation reduction from the Inflation Reduction Act."
Finally, yesterday, on Don Lemon Tonight of all places, CNN economics commentator Catherine Rampell, while not commenting on the inflation-increasing aspect of old Joe's idea, sharply criticized it as a waste of money, saying that the way it was structured it bails out wealthy people with MBAs and medical degrees who are capable of paying their loans back:
"the way this plan is structured, you also get student debt forgiveness for households making up to $250,000. Not only that, you get debt forgiveness for people who just graduated from an MBA program and are about to start their investment banking job. Do we really want to be spending all of this money? God bless the work that doctors do, but are they the neediest population here?"
Rampell added that
"this is a very, very expensive way to deal with a problem that ends up giving a lot of money to people who don't really need it."
Finishing with
"This is my issue with a lot of Progressive policy approaches right now, that this approach of just sort of like, spending a lot of money, and hoping some of it ends up in the right hands of the needy. But you end up making programs cost a lot more than they need to. And you end up giving away a lot of cash to people who don't. And it's not like there are unlimited resources in the world."
So is this a sign that CNN is going to at least make an attempt to change?
1. which would cancel between $10,000 and $20,000 in student debt per borrower
2. the possibility that they don't care if the courts overturn it because they can always claim that they did it and the mean old Republicans got it thrown out, can not be overlooked completely.
3. Vive la différence:
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