Do you believe this about health care as well?
Some people exercise and eat healthy every day yet they share the same scarce medical resources as someone who smokes and is overweight. Those people may be in the same insurance pool and may pay the same for those services.
Aren't we rewarding the poor decision? Why does the guy working his ass off in the gym every morning have to pay for obese people? These questions sound the same to the ones you're asking, except in this case, it's just money and education instead of public health which is far more grave.
Basically, making changes for the future (a shared healthcare pool, subsidized tuition, or anything else) is different than retroactively adjusting an arbitrary subset (only outstanding debt, only from tuition) of the past.
Part of the argument was the government owns 90% of outstanding student loan debt. Don't know how true this figure is but that's their claim.
One would think if this were a viable plan Helicopter Ben would've done it when things were really bad since they were giving away money left and right to "kickstart" the economy -- I personally got like $4200 for nothing due to the way I was discharged from the reserves.
At least according to http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/18/pf/college/navient-sallie-ma..., by borrower count, roughly 50% are federally backed and 50% are private.
However, even for the federal loans where taxpayers are the lender[1], there's still a choice whether to retire the debt or leave the debt as-is and fund something else (like tuition for future students).
[1]: More on federal loan funding, ie, which government entities are actually the lenders: https://www.loan.com/student-loans/where-does-funding-for-fe...
That was arguably the point of the NY Mag article, but the paper that the article is based on goes a lot deeper, and doesn't claim that student loan debt is destroying the economy.
> Is it really worth it to hold back everyone else just so you can finger wag at people that wern't responsible?
The last part of my comment addresses that. If you believe that (at least cost-effective) college education can have a net positive impact on the nation's economy, as I also believe, then put the money one would put into eliminating debt into making future public college free (or subsidized in whatever way maximizes impact for the subsidy).
Since they're both very expensive changes, the chances that both can happen is unlikely. Moreover, until at least some college is free, future students would still need to borrow. They'd re-create the same debt problem.
(Less important: it's not "finger-wagging" to not want to change the game underneath someone. It's trying to create a set of circumstances that reward good choices. Large swaths of our society exist to try to make incentives reward good choices.)
As someone who would like to see public education be free for future students, I’ll give you 3 great reasons why rewriting the past is an awful idea:
1. It would treat someone who worked throughout college (and possibly learned less and earned worse grades because of it) in order to borrow less - and someone who didn’t even attend because they couldn’t service the debt - the same as someone who borrowed heavily. It rewards a poor decision, one that others handled better.
2. It would treat someone who took on $30k/year in debt for a mediocre private school the same as someone who took on $10k/year to go to an in-state school (or nothing because they worked), or $30k/year to go to a top private school. At least 1 of those choices is a low-return decision.
3. There’s a lender on the other side of every transaction and they may not have had anything to do with the policy decisions you disagree with.
Finally, the paper covers many possible implementations. If by “forgiveness” you mean that the government should negotiate a payment to lenders (so taxpayers are paying off everyone’s loans), here’s why that shouldn’t happen. There’s a much stronger argument that future education from public universities should be free. Until that happens, given finite resources, any money that would go towards debt should go towards future students, not retroactively rewarding what may well have then been a poor decision. Pay/fund public colleges, not lenders.
Basically, any retroactive move rewards a lot of people who made what were then poor choices, and penalizes those who didn’t. Focus on making (public or otherwise verifiably cost-effective) education cheaper or free for future students.
Also, here’s a deep link to the paper PDF: http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/rpr_2_6.pdf