Mitch Daniels:

The col­or­ful Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes once likened George Rom­ney’s run for the pres­i­dency to “a duck try­ing to [make love to] a foot­ball.” I wish he had been around to put a la­bel on the fed­eral stu­dent-loan pro­gram. In the sad cat­a­log of its fail­ures, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has set a new stan­dard. Pres­i­dent Biden’s debt-can­cel­la­tion an­nounce-ment rep­re­sents the fi­nal con­fes­sion of fail­ure for a ven­ture flawed in con­cept, botched in ex­e­cu­tion, and draped with du­plic­ity.

The scheme’s flaws have been well chron­i­cled. It’s re­gres­sive, re­ward­ing the well-to-do at the ex­pense of the less for­tu­nate. It’s grossly un­fair to those who re­paid what they bor­rowed or never went to col­lege. It’s grotesquely ex­pen­sive, adding hun­dreds of bil­lions to a fed­eral debt that al­ready threat­ens our safety-net pro­grams and na­tional se­cu­rity. Like so much of what gov­ern­ment does, it’s ia­tro­genic, in­flat­ing col­lege costs as schools con­tinue to pocket the sub­si­dies Un­cle Sam show­ers on them. And it’s pro­fanely con­temp­tu-ous of the Con­sti­tu­tion, which au­tho­rizes only Con­gress to spend money.