The American Plutocracy Wants Workers Trapped in Debt
The US government wrote off almost all the money it lent businesses during the pandemic. Now it’s wrecking credit scores and threatening to garnish paychecks to collect student loans. Debt can be forgiven easily enough — just not for the working class.
With a one-page form, the federal government wrote off roughly 92 percent of the money it lent businesses during the pandemic. But student loans? Not so fast. In the case of workers, it’s apparently impossible to make debt disappear. (Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)
In May 2026, the White House’s top economist went on Fox Business to make an argument that would probably have gotten him laughed out of any economics seminar twenty years ago. Kevin Hassett told Maria Bartiromo that “the consumer is really, really firing on all cylinders,” pointing to a fresh surge in credit card spending as proof that the economy was thriving. Days earlier, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued that according to banks and credit card companies, “all quintiles of the distribution group is [sic] very strong.”
The reality couldn’t be further from that picture. Subprime auto delinquencies had just hit a thirty-two-year high, while farm bankruptcies were up 46 percent on the year. Personal debt had pushed past $18.8 trillion. None of that made it into Hassett’s or Bessent’s accounts.
Consumer Credit and the Purposeful End of SAVE
In January 2026, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he wanted a one-year cap limiting credit card interest rates to 10 percent, declaring that the public was being “ripped off” by companies charging 20 to 30 percent. Analysts estimated that the cap, if enacted, could save consumers roughly $100 billion a year in interest. Soon after, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon responded that such a policy “would be an economic disaster,” since it would restrict access to credit for the vast majority of Americans and hit small businesses hardest. Dimon also added that, no matter what, credit providers “would survive it by the way.”
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