Student loan forgiveness will sink any candidate that runs on it. [View all]

[Recursion]

There's two groups it infuriates, two groups that normally don't have anything in common: middle-class people who paid off their loans or never took any on, and people who didn't go to college in the first place.

We've seen the anger of the first group, in the form of that guy who confronted Warren. Yes, he was probably a plant, and this is an example of why plants like that work.

The second group, though, has what I think is a much more legitimate grievance. They're going to see their tax money go to people who are, almost entirely, much richer than them. As far as they're concerned it's going to be just like the tax cuts for people richer than them or the bailouts for banks a decade ago.

We stumbled with white people without college degrees in 2016, famously. Student loan forgiveness is like erecting a giant flaming "screw you" sign in their front yard.

This doesn't mean we can't do anything. Fund income-based repayment and public service repayment more. Limit interest to the inflation rate and don't recapitalize it. Allow student loans to be dischargeable like any other debt. Make colleges take on some of the financial risk with their students. These are all good ideas that don't enrage half of the country. (And when I say "enrage" -- remember that the Tea Party started as a response to simply the suggestion that the government pay off some of the mortgages of homeowners who were underwater).

People also seem to be confusing student loan forgiveness with free tuition. These are two completely unrelated concepts. Norway has zero tuition but their students take on a higher debt load than Americans, for instance. I paid zero tuition when I went to college because my famly was really poor but I still had to take on student debt because I have this habit of eating every now and then. But paying off existing student loans doesn't reduce future tuition, and reducing future tuition doesn't pay off existing student loans. These are unrelated questions.

Free tuition, though, is an interesting idea and one we should look at more. I think it tends to cause some changes that Americans may not like (countries that do free tuition wind up being much, much more selective about who gets to go to college than we are in the US), but it's definitely worth looking at and wouldn't cause a huge backlash like debt forgiveness would.

If we want to do a massive spending project to give everyone a nest egg, like Cory Booker advocated, and let people with student debt use that to pay if off, that's something we can sell. If we want to expand -- even massively -- the help we give to low-income people with student debt, that's also a politically feasible idea. But it is absolute fucking political suicide to say "we're going to spend a trillion dollars of tax money and most of it is going to go to people who are already rich".