The student loan debt crisis is reaching a tipping point and as the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, Obama’s fixes haven’t helped.

Telling Students to Earn Less

Obama now calls for reforming his bleeding college loan program.

The federal student loan program is becoming so costly to taxpayers that even President Obama is pretending to fix it. Readers will recall Mr. Obama as the man who has spent much of his Presidency expanding this program, creating new ways for borrowers to avoid repayment, and then campaigning about these dubious achievements on campuses nationwide.

Now Team Obama is acknowledging that his policies are turning out to be more expensive than he claimed. Participation in federal debt-forgiveness programs is surging. In a mere six months the number of borrowers who’ve signed up for such plans has increased to more than 1.3 million from less than a million, with total balances rising to $72 billion from $52 billion. Maybe the White House didn’t understand that when you give people an economic incentive not to repay a loan, more people won’t repay.

axpayers can suffer in many ways from federal education lending, because most loans are issued regardless of a borrower’s ability to repay. So loose is this form of credit that in the slow-growth Obama economy it has become a vehicle to fund basic living expenses, with tens of thousands of borrowers consuming aid even when they’re not enrolled for courses.

But the immediate taxpayer S.O.S. concerns Mr. Obama’s Pay As You Earn program. We’ve warned for years about the risks of this program as Mr. Obama has worked to expand the number of eligible borrowers and sweeten its terms.