We recently reported that President Obama is poised to sign executive orders that will limit the percentage of income student debtors must pay on student loans.

Reviews on these orders are coming in, just ahead of the formal announcement, and they are  scathing (hat-tip, Instapundit).

The order will extend the cap on student loan payments to students who began borrowing before 2007 or stopped borrowing before 2011. The cap is 10 percent of the borrower’s monthly income, and was instituted in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. The extension is supposed to go into effect at the end of next year; student borrowers already have the option to set their payments to lenders based on income.

Obama promised “action” this week on rising student debt in his weekly address, where he also pushed for passage of legislation that would have the federal government pay for the refinancing of student loans. The president framed it as a choice between protecting “young people from crushing debt” or “tax breaks for millionaires.”

Yet the president’s plan is going to create more debt, not less. Via Politico:

The economic reasoning behind the maneuver is questionable, however, [director of the New America Foundation’s Federal Education Budget Project Jason] Delisle said. The president is making the case that “we need to help [student loan debtors] with debt so they can go into even more debt,” such as taking out a mortgage to buy a home. But student loans already helped these borrowers consume beyond their means, he said.

And it’s nothing new. Last summer President Obama proposed a “scorecard” for colleges that would also be tied to loan forgiveness. As Reason‘s Shikha Dalmia explained:

One of the most under-reported aspects of administration’s scorecard is its loan forgiveness provision. Currently, “new borrowers” who obtained their first federal student loan after 2007 are eligible to signup for something called the “Pay As You Earn” program. This program caps their loan repayment at 10 percent of their income for 20 years after which the remainder is written off. (For professions such as nursing it takes only 10 years to get the write off.) In other words, students take loans according to their needs, and repay them according to their ability and hit taxpayers for the rest. The president wants to expand this socialist prescription to all students who receive federal loans.

The federal government played a key role in helping create the more than $1 trillion in student loan debt currently being carried in the U.S. In 2012 the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey highlighted a report from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, “The College Cost Crisis,” which managed to identify that nearly 50 years of federal subsidies for higher education (beginning with the Higher Education Act of 1965) have helped along tuition inflation.