ATLANTA — Republicans have slammed President Joe Biden for announcing forgiveness in student loans – worth as much as $20,00 per student in some cases.
In Georgia, some of those critics have denounced the loan forgiveness – yet Democrats accuse some of them of benefiting from federal loan forgiveness.
THE QUESTION
Have individual members of Congress, critical of the president’s college loan forgiveness program, benefited from similar federal loan forgiveness?
THE SOURCES
- Marjorie Taylor Greene’s house website
- Small business administration website, which publishes information on paycheck protection act loans.
THE ANSWER
11Alive can verify that their companies did. That’s a bit different from saying they personally benefited. How much different? You decide.
WHAT WE FOUND
We know that the White House tweeted this week that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene benefited from a forgiven loan under the paycheck protection act.
On the cable channel Newsmax, Greene said this: “Taxpayers who pay their bills and maybe never even went to college and are just hardworking people – they shouldn’t have to pay off the great big student loan debt for some college student that piled up massive debt to go to some Ivy League school. That’s not fair.”
Greene’s House website shows that she and her husband founded a company called Taylor Commercial in 2002.
A spreadsheet downloadable from the SBA site reveals Taylor Commercial of Alpharetta got a loan of $182,300 from the PPP program – and it stated the government forgave the entire loan.
There was nothing special about that – the SBA site said the government forgave 95% of the value of all its PPP loans.
11Alive News previously reported that U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s food services company Renaissance Man got PPP loans totaling $182,800 – and that the government forgave most of that.
Our research also found the same thing with Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde. On Twitter, Clyde badmouthed student loan forgiveness.
On the SBA site, we found the government forgave a loan of $154,950 to his gun store: Clyde Armory.