My wife and I stand to benefit from a loan forgiveness program along the lines of the ones suggested here. As a foreign national, I wasn’t eligible for student loans for my grad degree in the United States, but my wife is American, and had loans from her undergrad and graduate degrees, and we’re still paying those off.
Despite the fact that we might benefit, I still tend to think that a broad-based forgiveness plan is not the best idea. There is overwhelming evidence that having a degree leads to significantly higher lifetime earnings, and I think it’s fair that the people who benefit from having the degree should also contribute significantly to paying it off. We’ve been paying, and it hasn’t sent us to the poorhouse.
And I also have broader concerns about spending and the debt, which have NOT emerged only because a Democrat is now destined to be in the White House. I’ve been heavily critical of Trump’s profligate spending as well, especially since it was combined with tax cuts, which made the deficits even worse than they might otherwise have been.
For the people who have been suggesting 50 grand to everyone, do you know how much money that it? Say we limit it to 50 million people, or less than one-sixth of the US population. That’s $2.5 trillion dollars, on top of the deficits we were already carrying, and on top of the more-than-three-trillion we’ve spent on COVID relief. It’s going to start to add up to real money pretty soon.
I agree that people should also think a bit more carefully before they get into mountains of student debt, but I also object to some of the asinine and reductionist about making “better choices” that have appeared in this thread. I also think there’s a difference between a post-hoc decision to forgive student debt, which is what is currently being considered, and an upfront promise that debt would be forgiven under certain circumstances.
That’s why these comments, in the conversation with @Jimmy_Chitwood, are especially silly:
If I understand @Jimmy_Chitwood correctly, the loan forgiveness he is talking about is the public service loan forgiveness program. This was a program created years ago, under a Republican president (2007), and designed explicitly to encourage and reward people who chose to go into certain areas of employment that could be defined as public service careers by forgiving the remainder of their debt after ten years of on-time payments while working full time in a public service job.
We can argue about whether or not this particular program constituted good policy, but if @Jimmy_Chitwood knew about the program, and explicitly chose to go into lower-paying public service jobs rather than (say) higher-paying corporate law jobs on the understanding that he would have the remainder of his debt forgiven after ten years, then it’s stupid to suggest that he has sacrificed nothing, or that he’s seeking special treatment, or that he’s being greedy. This was the deal that was offered, and he chose to take it. He’s not just being handed something for nothing; he’s getting what was promised for keeping up his end of the bargain.
It’s worth noting, too, that the government has actually (and, some people argue, intentionally) made this public service loan forgiveness program incredibly difficult to navigate and understand, to the extent that somewhere around 98 percent of the people who thought they qualified, and who applied to have their loans forgiven, were rejected. When it became clear that the whole program was labyrinthine and byzantine by design, and was intended to screw over people who thought they qualified, the government actually had to recalibrate the program and allow thousands of people to reapply.
Anyway, that’s my 2c.
Oh, one other thing: I think that this policy would definitely help:
We could quibble about the details of how much and how long, but making student loan debt forgivable in bankruptcy would force the supply side of the student loan equation to think more carefully about just handing over massive amounts of cash. Not only would that slow down the debt wheel, but it might act as a drag on college prices, because it’s at least partly due to the massive availability of easy financing that higher education costs have significantly outstripped inflation over the past few decades.