Biden just cancelled 9 billion in student loan debt.
Why Dems think that people who borrow money, esp. for expensive private colleges like Boston U, should not pay back their loans really baffles me.
If you mischaracterise a person's motives, then it's not surprising that their actions appear baffling.
Dems don't think that people who borrow money, in general, shouldn't pay it back. They think that people who want an education shouldn't have had to borrow money in the first place.
There are two poles of political opinion with regards to education funding.
On one side are people who see the objective of education to be the enrichment of the individual who obtained that education. In this view, it is reasonable that the student should pay in full for his tuition, and that if he cannot afford to do so, he should borrow the money needed, and then pay it back once his education has made him wealthy.
On the other side are people who see the objective of education to be the enrichment of humanity. In this view, it is reasonable that the student should pay nothing upfront for his education, and that instead the cost should be bought by progressive taxation, so that those who currently benefit most from the fruits of an educated society, are asked to pay the most for its continuance. Those students who become personally wealthy as a consequence of their education will pay more taxes in the future to sustain the system; Those who benefit peripherally from education (eg the shareholders in corporations that benefit financially from the ideas and inventions of the educated) will also pay their share, with personal income as a proxy for the degree of benefit accruing to any individual (no matter how poorly educated) who benefits from their membership of a widely educated society.
Between these poles are a whole spectrum of opinions about who should pay for education, and to what extent. Most nations fund education by both students paying upfront fees, and through taxpayer funds that reduce those fees to manageable levels.
Loan forgiveness is, in this context, an attempt to redress an error - the Dems are essentially saying that the balance was historically unfair as it placed a disproportionate burden on individual students; And they are acting in an attempt to correct that error.
Their actions say nothing whatsoever about their position on the question of whether, as a general rule, loans should be repaid by those who borrowed money to begin with.
If every taxpayer currently benefits from the existence of an educational system, and from the productivity of those who have received an education, then it's perfectly reasonable for taxpayers to retrospectively pay for the benefits that they are receiving, and to relieve (at least in part) the unjust burdens of those who passed through the university system.
The big problem with imposing the burden of costs on the individual students is that genius is both rare and difficult to detect in advance. If you want to get the maximum benefit of an educational system for society at large, you need to accept that many individual students will never be sufficiently productive as to repay to society the cost of their education - but that having a broad intake of students will capture the few whose productivity will massively outweigh the costs of their less successful peers.
If you want to avoid relegating the next Einstein to a life flipping burgers, then you need to accept that you will have to also educate a dozen or more people who will end up flipping burgers despite their educational opportunities, in order to ensure that Albert gets the background he needs, to change the world.
on X: "We have an updateout for bad actors and pursue accountability and oversight. So: document, document, document! This last video installment will show you how.
