To watch the reaction, you’d think this is the first loan forgiveness program in human history. You’d also think it’s absolutely vital to determine whether every last recipient will be morally deserving of this assistance, and whether any good people anywhere might fail to qualify for it. The more you examine these arguments — not only from Republicans but also journalists and a few Democrats — the weirder they seem.
At the most basic level, loan forgiveness isn’t novel or even unusual. Our bankruptcy system allows people to discharge loans every day — yet perversely, the law makes it extraordinarily difficult to get released from student loan debt even if you’re bankrupt. Some well-known people have used the bankruptcy system to eliminate their debts [including a former president, six times].
The government, furthermore, bails out people, companies and industries all the time when it decides that doing so is worthwhile. In the Great Recession we bailed out banks, insurers and auto companies. D____ T____ handed out tens of billions of dollars to farmers hit by his pointless trade war. Pandemic relief distributed hundreds of billions of dollars in forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans to businesses.
Some of those forgiven loans — remember, taxpayer money, from truck drivers and waitresses — even went to the same Republican members of Congress who now rail against forgiving student debt, as the White House eagerly pointed out. If you’re a struggling blue-collar worker, are you mad that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had $183,000 in loans forgiven, or that Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) had $1.4 million forgiven, or that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) had $482,000 forgiven?
If not, why does student loan forgiveness make you mad?
This leads to one of the most bizarre arguments against this program: Sure, it helps some people, but what about people it doesn’t help? What about people who never went to college, or who already paid off their loans? Why should they chip in to help these other people?
That argument could be raised against almost every government program in existence. This is the nature of paying taxes and having a government: Your money goes to all kinds of things that don’t benefit you directly or that you don’t like. You pay to maintain national parks you might not visit, and to find cures for diseases you’ll never contract. You support schools even if you don’t have kids. You build roads in states you don’t live in. You support wheat farmers even if you’re on a gluten-free diet.
How many people complaining about loan forgiveness have campaigned against the mortgage interest deduction? It costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year, and its recipients — homeowners who itemize their deductions — are disproportionately wealthy. Where are all the cries of “How does this help people who rent, or people who already paid off their mortgages???”
The flip side of that argument is one we’re also hearing, that some people who will get this assistance might not truly need it. Journalists are searching for supposedly undeserving recipients, no matter how small their numbers. What if there’s an engineering major who just graduated and hasn’t gotten a job yet, but next year she’ll be working at Google? My God, are we going to forgive her loans when in 10 years she could be a billionaire?
The answer to that question is, who cares? Seriously. As a taxpayer (and as someone who, yes, took out student loans and paid them off), I don’t mind if some people get relief who might do fine without it, because tens of millions of lives could be transformed by this policy. The question is how much good the program as a whole does, not whether it helps someone somewhere who doesn’t really need it. The overwhelming majority of recipients will be middle class and because it gives extra to Pell Grant recipients, people from poor families get the most help.
Finally, some people warn that the program could worsen inflation, because it will put money into the economy. The truth is that the effect on inflation will likely be minuscule, but you could raise the same objection to literally anything the government spends money on.
For instance, earlier this summer, the House passed an $839 billion military spending bill for the 2023 fiscal year — that’s one year, not over a decade. Will pumping that much money into the economy be inflationary? And if so, should we just stop funding the military?
The fact that this question probably sounds ridiculous to you is revealing: Nobody ever worries about the inflationary effect of military spending, because people make that kind of objection only to policies they don’t like.
And that’s what’s at the heart of the objections to Biden’s loan forgiveness: Most of those making them are perfectly happy to have the government help some people, just not these people. And if that’s your argument against student loan forgiveness, you haven’t shown why the program is bad; all you’ve done is reveal yourself.
Unquote. Now from Mr. Bouie’s newsletter (no link available):
The Republican response to President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program is to try to turn the issue into a culture war…. Republicans would say that they are simply speaking up for those Americans who won’t benefit from the program. But they’re working under faulty assumptions.
First, a few details on the program itself. Under the plan, Biden will direct the federal government to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans for recipients of Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from low-income families), and up to $10,000 in loans for other eligible borrowers. It is restricted to individuals with incomes of up to $125,000 a year and households with incomes of up to $250,000 a year.
If every single recipient earned $124,999, it would lend credence to the Republican argument that this is some kind of war on working-class and blue-collar Americans. But they don’t. In fact, the biggest beneficiaries of Biden’s policy are exactly the people Republicans claim to represent with their rhetoric. As my newsroom colleague Jim Tankersley notes, “the people eligible for debt relief are disproportionately young and Black. And they are concentrated in the middle band of Americans by income, defined as households earning between $51,000 and $82,000 a year.”
If you want to haul freight for a living, you’ll need a commercial driver’s license, which means you’ll need training, which means you’ll need school. This schooling can cost thousands of dollars, and students can pay their tuition with federal student loans. So, too, can people who need training to work as medical technicians or home care workers or physical therapists or restaurant workers, among many other trades and professions.
Millions of people with blue-collar jobs owe thousands of dollars in federal student loans, and they may not have the income needed to pay them off. Biden’s plan helps them as much or more than a graduate of a four-year college with debt on the ledger. It also helps the millions of Americans who took out loans, attended college, but for one reason or another could not complete their degrees and are in the worst of all financial worlds as a result.
Like the “welfare queen,” the lazy, profligate and irresponsible student loan borrower of Republican rhetoric is a myth. And the point of the myth, as I said earlier, is to spread cultural resentment.
The fact of the matter is the Republican Party does not have anything to offer the millions of working- and middle-class Americans who labor under the burden of student debt. For all the talk of “populism,” the party is still hostile to the social safety net, opposed to raising the minimum wage, hostile to unions and worker power and virtually every economic policy intervention that isn’t tax cuts and upward redistribution from the many to the most fortunate few.
To debate the reality of student debt relief is to make that more than clear to the public at large. Republicans, then, are trying to make this a debate over culture, to try to reduce issues of class to a question of aesthetics, with traditional blue-collar workers on one side and the image of an ungrateful and unproductive young person on the other. And they’re hoping, as always, that you won’t notice.
Unquote.Â
That should be the Republican Party’s epitaph: THEY HOPED YOU WOULDN’T NOTICE.
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 