It's not "fair" but I think it's necessary. We are staring down the barrel of a loaded gun at this point.

I may be a little salty because I took the community-college-into-university approach to save on costs and made some sacrifices to send every extra penny I earned towards paying down debt.

But I also realize that the country is going to be much worse off if we continue to punish people for spending more than they could afford on university.

No. It doesn't punish those people who paid earlier because those people fare no differently in the world where we don't retroactively forgive loans and in the world where we do retroactively forgive loans. It doesn't benefit them either but unfortunately this is a society level problem, we need to move beyond individual level thinking to solve it.

I'd also like to point out that the later people went to school, the more they paid. On average, at least. The burden that debt brings is becoming more and more as time marches on and we don't fix this problem.

That's where a TARP-like buyback would come into play. Negotiate to buy private student loans and extinguish them also. I know there are charity-type groups that do this with mortgages, though I'm having trouble finding any links at this current moment.

But, honestly, I'm not a huge fan of logic lines that sound like, "We can't help everyone, so therefore we should help no one." We should absolutely strive to help everyone we can. And if there's still a population remaining afterwards which requires help, then we can talk about why they weren't helped before and figure out whether and how to reach them also.

Are you talking about things like Rolling Jubilee[1]? They focus on credit card debt. I heard about them YEARS ago, and they were trying to get on student loans back then and it looks like they still haven't been able to do it.

[1] http://rollingjubilee.org/

I definitely remember reading about them. They're a good example of the type. It looks like they are transitioning their focus to The Debt Collective, which looks like some sort of play on collective bargaining instead?

https://debtcollective.org/