KEEP ENABLING ADVERSE SELECTION. YOU'LL GET MORE OF IT.

First mortgage servicing fees, then credit card late fees, why not student loans too?  "Biden's Student Loan Plan Could Cost Twice as Much as Projected."  That's not the usual low-ball estimates of how much money will go into a boondoggle, whether it's a war or medical care or the interstate highways.  It's called adverse selection, and I sometimes fear Democrats pray for more of it.

A new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that Biden's so-called income-driven repayment plan will cost at least $230 billion over 10 years—with an additional $45 billion in costs likely coming if the Supreme Court invalidates the White House's student loan forgiveness scheme. That means the final tab could be more than twice the $138 billion price tag attached to the proposal by the Department of Education, which is overseeing the program's rollout.

Under current law, federal student loan payments are capped at 10 percent of an individual's "discretionary income," which the Department of Education defines as income that exceeds 150 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. In practice, that means a single borrower with no children starts making payments on income that exceeds $20,400.

Biden wants to lower that threshold to 5 percent for undergraduate loans and impose a new limit of 10 percent for loans put toward a graduate degree. Biden's plan would also wipe away outstanding student debt after 10 years of payments for those who borrowed $12,000 or less—and a maximum payment period of 20 years no matter how much was borrowed.

But if you cap monthly payments at a lower level and also shorten the allowable repayment time, there will be a lot of loans that never get paid back in full. That cost ultimately falls on the taxpayers, and that's what the dueling estimates from the CBO and the Department of Education are all about.

There might be a "cloud of uncertainty" over the extent to which people who might otherwise think twice about attending college will see in less restrictive loan conditions an incentive to give it a shot.

The CBO points out that the Department of Education did not account for the "behavioral effects" of the new policy—in other words, it did not include estimates for how many additional students would take out loans if the repayment method was altered.

The CBO, however, did. It found that reducing what student loan borrowers will eventually have to pay back unsurprisingly caused more students to take out loans—including loans that they would be unable to pay off in full. Overall, the annual volume of student loans would increase by about 12 percent, the CBO estimated, with both undergraduate and graduate students seeking more loans.

"Students who would be expected to take out federal loans would borrow more," Leah Koestner, a CBO budget analyst concluded in a presentation on Wednesday. And "some students who would not be expected to borrow under current law would take out loans."

Undoubtedly, though, the Jarrett regency will point to the increased college enrollments as a positive, and use the expense of the loan forgiveness as yet another reason to accuse productive people of not paying enough taxes.

Eventually they will run out of productive people to tax.