Reporter to KJP: You Keep Saying Student Debt Forgiveness Is Fiscally Responsible But You Can't Say How It Will Be Paid For

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre at Tuesday's briefing was pelted with questions about how the Biden administration plans to pay for its student loan forgiveness proposal. <blockquote>KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, WHITE HOUSE: No problem. I'm going to take -- I'm going to take two more. I'm going two more. Matt and then I'll go back one more. Yeah. QUESTION: You -- you said said a couple of times that this is a fiscally responsible way of doing this. But can you explain a little bit about how you guys think it is fiscally responsible? Because you can't say how much it's going to cost. You can't say exactly how it's going to be paid for. And you can't say exactly who is paying for the cost. I get how you're arguing that it helps certain populations, but how is it fiscally responsible? KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: I mean, the way that -- the way that we are talking about it and what we're trying to say is we -- the -- the actions that we have taken -- and you see this with the way that the deficit has been reduced. We have taken just the last 19 months. I see that look that you're giving me there. QUESTION: I see the argument that you have taken, previous fiscally responsible actions that believe you -- you give you more wiggle room to be less [inaudible] KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Right. It gives us -- no, no, no, no, no. We're -- we -- I mean, we see this -- we do not see this as irresponsible. We see this as a fiscally responsible, balanced approach to doing this. And I remember people have said, "Why don't you do 50,000?" We don't want to do that because we want to make sure that we do this in a fiscally responsible way. Again, not pleasing everyone but making sure that we keep that promise but also do it in a smart, fiscally responsible way. Again, I'm going to use that word because that is what our process has been. And I use the example of the -- of the 350 billion in deficit reduction and the 1.7 trillion reduction in deficit with everything that we've been able to do. The American Rescue Plan, right? The Bipartisan Infrastructure Legislation, and we are still, by the end of this fiscal year, will be at $1.7 trillion in deficit. All of those things matter. And -- and that's the way that we look at it. I'm going to take one more. QUESTION: But that's just several policies from this [inaudible] KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: No. But I'm just saying that we have -- this is the actions that we have taken to show that we are taking this very, very seriously. I'm going to -- I'm going to go around. Matt [ph], we can go -- we -- we can -- we can -- we can go back and forth on it. We can go back and forth on it. I was supposed to go to Chris [ph] in the back, and I skipped him. So, I'm going to go back to Chris [ph].</blockquote>