Don’t Cancel $10,000 of Student Debt. Cancel Every Penny.
The Biden administration has been floating the possibility of a means-tested cancellation of $10,000 of student debt. There’s no reason not to cancel every penny instead.
College students put up a sign in front of the White House calling on President Joe Biden to sign an executive order to cancel student debt. (Paul Morigi / Getty Images for We the 45 Million)
Reports have been circulating claiming that the Biden administration is planning to announce the cancellation of $10,000 in student debt for borrowers earning less than $150,000. This has brought out the usual chorus of nonsense claiming that student loan forgiveness is “regressive,” that it’s unfair to those who have already paid back their loans, and so on.
A better objection is that loan forgiveness shouldn’t be either means-tested or capped at $10,000. We should stop shaking people down for the right to get an education, whether they’re enrolled in college now or they graduated (or dropped out) decades in the past. All student debt should be canceled — every penny — because “student debt” is a grotesque concept. From preschool to graduate school, education should be free.
Cancel Student Debt, Abolish Tuition
When Mitch Daniels was invited on CNBC to discuss the reports that Biden was considering a $10,000 cancellation, Daniels attacked it as a “very regressive suggestion” because “71 percent of the money goes to the top half of the income distribution.” It’s a “giveaway,” he claimed, “to people who don’t need it and freely took these obligations on” as well as an “unfairness to all those millions of people who paid their debts back.”
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