Student Debt Relief Was Never Supposed to Happen
Student debt forgiveness is about to become official US policy by a stroke of Joe Biden’s pen. It’s a good time to remember that, just a few years ago, the idea was denounced as hopelessly utopian, a left-wing pipe dream — and that was the liberals talking.
President Joe Biden delivers a press conference on his student debt cancellation executive order, August 24, 2022. (Bonnie Cash / UPI / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Sometimes it’s good to take stock of how far we’ve come.
It wasn’t too long ago that a host of broadly popular policies were routinely written off as silly, laughable, impossible, obviously ludicrous — all because they fell outside the tiny circle of acceptable debate in the US establishment, and because they happened to come from the Left. Take student debt cancellation — a needlessly conservative version of which was just enacted by President Joe Biden by executive order.
After Biden made the announcement to much fanfare, an extract of a 2016 clip from John Oliver’s HBO show, Last Week Tonight, circulated online, reminding us all how quickly ideas can change from pie-in-the-sky lunacy to political reality. Oliver and his show can be funny and even informative, but in 2016, he was still afflicted by the unfortunate tic of that era’s liberal intellectuals to resort to knee-jerk dismissal of anything that had a whiff of radicalism.
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