Forgiving all student debt wouldn’t be a maximally progressive allocation of limited resources. But nothing Congress does ever is. EricLevitz writes
Bern it all, and let the Senate sort it out. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Imagine that you’ve just been accosted by a street-corner socialist . He presses a pamphlet into your hand and tells you that his movement has a big, bold idea for rectifying the inequities of late capitalism, and restoring faith in the concept of public goods. You look down at his manifesto. It reads:1) Give it to a disproportionately upper-middle-class subsection of U.S.
And yet, it is also the case that forgiving all student debt wouldn’t be especially progressive in its distributional implications, or especially coherent as a means of redressing the harm done by our collective failure to treat higher education as a public good. I’m not sure that these facts matter much, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute. First though, let’s look at what the neoliberal wonks get right.
Sanders himself made this argument Monday, when justifying his decision not to place any income restriction on his debt jubilee, according to the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein: There are coherent policy arguments for drastically reducing the costs of professional and graduate schools, if not for eliminating those costs entirely at public institutions. If U.S. doctors didn’t need to take on so much debt to practice medicine, it would be easier to bring their salaries down to international norms. If U.S. lawyers did not need to take on so much leverage to secure their degrees, perhaps fewer of them would lease their skills to concentrated capital.
These are fine objections to the position that no student-debt relief whatsoever should be enacted. But they don’t actually explain why we should choose to design our student-relief program in a manner that compensates Harvard MBAs with outstanding debt, but does nothing for public-college graduates who were adversely impacted by debts that they have nevertheless paid off.
There is no law that says our only options are to forgive all outstanding debt, or do nothing about the student-debt crisis. It is an active choice to design the program in a way that lavishes benefits on upper-middle-class professionals who are on pace to comfortably pay off their debts — but withholds all aid to lower-middle-class college graduates who have already paid off their debts through costly sacrifices.
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