President Joe Biden, through the White House X account, is attacking as hypocrites recipients of federal COVID aid who now oppose his steps to wipe out student debt of former college students.

These attacks, targeted at beneficiaries of the Paycheck Protection Program, are either ignorant or dishonest, but Biden has been making them for years.

1. The PPP loans, unlike student loans, were designed to be forgiven.

This is not a matter of opinion but a basic established fact. If the average reader doesn’t know this, it’s because the White House has tried to obscure this fact, and the major media have played along with the White House games.

Here’s a whitepaper that became PPP. It says, “We are essentially talking about making grants to businesses” in the form of loans because banks can get loans out the door more quickly than the federal government can get grants out the door. “The loans would be guaranteed by the federal government, then forgiven at the end of the period” as long as employers use the money to keep workers on payroll.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) explained the provision in the floor debate this way: “These loans would ultimately be eligible to be forgiven, provided that the employers kept the workers on their payrolls. That is the key provision.” Then-Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander said, “In other words, it is a grant.”

Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) said, “Let me be clear: These loans are fully forgivable if firms keep their workforce on the payroll during this crisis.”

I explain this at length here.

Student loans, in contrast, were made with the explicit expectation that they would be paid back.

2. The PPP was restitution for government actions against businesses.

In 2020, at the urging of federal health officials, state and local governments forced all sorts of businesses to shut down or otherwise deprived them of income. When companies are instantly deprived of income for indefinite periods of time, a rational reaction is to lay off employees or at least furlough them.

With no money coming in and no clear sign of when money will come in, it’s hard to keep paying payroll.

The point of the PPP was to keep employers being employers, even if they couldn’t be restaurateurs, manufacturers, or car dealers.

This was a truly exceptional time, and it yielded exceptional bipartisanship for an exceptional aid bill.

Student loans are an ordinary, everyday thing. They are not restitution for government harm done to anyone. Neither is student loan forgiveness restitution for government harm. It’s not comparable.

3. The logic of this accusation has absurd implications that Democrats, specifically, should reject.

Biden is charging Republican PPP recipients with hypocrisy. The logic of this accusation is absurd, and it implies all sorts of things that nobody, especially not a Democrat, should be fine with.

Given the near-total lack of similarity between the PPP and student loans, as documented above, the hypocrisy charge rests on this: Both were government aid programs.

So, the logic of Biden’s charge is that you are a hypocrite if you benefit from one government aid program (even an emergency aid program) while opposing any other government aid program.

So, if your home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, you got federal aid. Under Biden’s logic, you are then a hypocrite if you oppose any other government aid program, whether it be TARP, airline bailouts, or crop subsidies.

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If Biden actually believes what he is saying, then he thinks that he’s buying your political obedience if he gives you aid.

If you are a liberal who wants the government to help people, do you really want to attach to all government aid the condition that “you may never criticize any government spending after this”?