The right way to do this is giving everyone the same amount of cash and increasing marginal income tax rates.
It would be politically stupid to reward a small amount of people who have low voter participation rates and instead earn the ire of many who have high voter participation rates.
Simply stopping government funded higher education loans would be a better move that actually addressed the root problem with higher education costs.
If the goal is to help poor people, then help all poor people. Not just a subsection of the poor that happened to borrow money for overpriced signaling mechanisms.
And in your system, this counterbalances the natural advantage that children born to wealthy parents have how?
Canceling student debt on the other hand would be a massive handout for the rich as the majority of student debt is held by rich and upper middle class Americans. Students from from the poorest quartile of households have just 5% of the student debt [1].
1. https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-income-level
Or scrapping all income/property taxes, and just having marginal sales taxes (the more you spend, the more tax you pay), but then that would require tracking every single transaction.
My earnings and earnings potential will likely forever be below someone who graduated from ivy league. My network is also much smaller and less affluent.
Now telling me I have to pay the tuition of folks that went to said schools, via taxes, is a giant slap in the face.
That said, a quick Google says that 12% of student debt per year is taken by students at elite schools, despite it representing a tiny portion of borrowers. Link below.
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/biden-is-right-a-lot-of-s...
I did manage to find the article though. Thanks for sharing. Based on my own experience attending a private university, I had thought students at ivy league schools mostly used private loans. Unfortunately, the article doesn't break out which debt is government-backed and which isn't. This much debt in general is problematic for young professionals, but my understanding is that "cancel student loans" is about the government-backed debt. I'll have to see if I can find a breakdown somewhere.
Any "free" money going forward would presumably come with some strings that at least attempt to keep things reasonable. But it just feels wrong to pay off someone's irresponsible private school loan from a few years ago.
Socially, you could make an argument that they should be more careful. But to the borrower, any denial could be interpreted as taking away an opportunity, and could really backfire if not done very transparently and rigorously following an acceptable process. What if the process unintentionally has a disproportionate impact on one race, for instance?
For something seen as a ticket to the middle class, it's politically better to leave the decision up to the individual.
No, it's like taking my taxes and giving them to someone else instead of services which benefit many people.
Same here. However, I don't think other people should have to suffer through what I suffered just because I had to go through it myself. I want society to improve and for others to receive the benefits of those improvements, even if I myself will never get to enjoy them.
It's like getting upset at the development of a cheap cure for cancer, because it would seem like a slap in the face to all of the people who suffered and beat cancer themselves, were bankrupted by it or died because of it. I never smoked cigarettes, for example, am religious about sunscreen, and I take care of my body and health to avoid threats like cancer, and I've lost loved ones to the disease. Just because I "did everything right" and still suffered through the loss of loved ones to cancer, doesn't mean that I'd be upset if there were suddenly a cheap cure for it, and I wouldn't be upset if it benefited everyone who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for the last 3 decades, either.