President Biden plans to cancel student loans through executive action, probably $10,000 per debtor. Left-wing Democrats are demanding $50,000 in Loan forgiveness.
There’s no campaign to write off truck drivers’ debts. Photo: Alex Surd/Pexels
The idea is getting a lot of push back — and not just from the right. People have figured out that loan forgiveness favors the privileged at the expense of the working class.
Only 13 percent of Americans have College debts, writes Jerusalem Demsas, an Atlantic staffer who’s still paying off her student loans — or will once the pandemic moratorium expires.
College graduates are disproportionately affluent and white, and make an ever-larger share of the Democratic electorate, she writes. “Student-loan forgiveness may seem like the classic tale of a political party transferring a valuable benefit to a crucial constituency.
College graduates dominate the media and academia, Demsas writes. They set political agendas. But they risk fracturing the Democrats’ already shaky coalition.
Why should working-class voters cheer a gift to people who earn more than they do — and look down on them?
Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) of the American Enterprise Institute tweets:
There are 350,000 owner-operators of semi-trucks in the U.S. The cost of a rig ranges from $70-$150K; loans take up to seven years to pay off. Why no talk of debt forgiveness for working-class Americans whose jobs are essential to every American household?
No hard-working American without a college degree should have to pay for others’ student loans. Period.
Derek Thompson (@DKThomp), an Atlantic editor, also on Twitter:
So every careful analysis that’s like “student debt forgiveness makes little macroeconomic, distributional, or long-term policy sense” is immediately met with a bunch of pretty valid personal comments like “consider, however, that I personally would like $20,000.”
Thompson nails it, writes Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. College graduates want more money.
“College was expensive” is another way of saying, “I spent a lot of money on a service I wanted, and now I would like other people to pay for it instead.”
Most college graduates are working and earning more, thanks to their degrees. The people who owe the most earned graduate and professional (medicine, law, business) degrees.
Furthermore, “thanks to Covid-19, nobody with federally held student loans has had to pay anything toward their debt for two years,” Cooke writes. “And that high inflation rate that is screwing the poor? Slowly, but surely, it is eating away at college graduates’ debts, allowing them to pay loans that were already below the market interest rate with dollars that are now worth less than they were when the debt was contracted.”
Texas Public Policy Institute also lays out the case against forgiving student debt.
This post first appeared on Joanne Jacobs — Thinking And Linking By Joanne Jacobs, please read the originial post: here
