During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Bernie Sanders proposed cancelling all student loan debt. The underlying principle was clear. Bernie doesn’t think that student loan debt should exist because he doesn’t think that higher education should be a commodity. No one should be saddled with debt for a service that should be paid for by progressive taxation and made free at the point of service.

New York senator Chuck Schumer is no one’s idea of a Berniecrat, so it’s no surprise that he isn’t on board with Sanders’s idea, but he did recently propose that when Joe Biden takes office he should wipe out the first $50,000 of student debt for every borrower by executive order. By the time the president-elect himself chimed in with a version of the plan, it was watered down so much further that it read like a cranky leftist’s parody of what a centrist president would do. “Up to” $10,000 are canceled under the Biden plan, but — wait for it — only “private, nonfederal” student loans. Oh, and the whole thing’s going to be means-tested.

Yet even this considerably-less-than-half-measure was enough for the resurgence of the argument that sparing graduates currently hobbled by student loan debt would be unfair to those who had to go through the same ordeal in the past. Let’s break that down.