Having a significant portion of the young population be unable to participate in the economy seems unsustainable as well.

The federal government is adding $1T every 100 days to the national debt.

That far outweighs any effect of student loans.

Does that go into the hands of consumers though? The great thing about debt forgiveness is it goes directly to the population.

The only more direct route would be to write everyone a check! (…and I just remembered Trump actually did that.)

Indirectly it does. Check out the economic multiplier effect.

https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/reference/multiplier-effec...

This hasn't held up at least over the last 15 years ago in the US. Our debt to GDP was around 60% going into the housing crisis. The ratio is now roughly twice that, around 120%.

In that time our national debt went from $9B to $33B. GDP went from $15B to $25B.

You can always calculate the multiplier, but in this context the multiplier would really need to be greater than 1 to show a meaningful economic benefit to the additional spending, and the debt to GDP ratio would decrease as GDP would grow faster.

That's fine, as long as we actually use the opportunity to fix the underlying problems that will take longer to heal.

Which of course we won't do, especially if a certain former president gets re-elected. But at least it's helping some people in the short term.

Much like a 21% corporate tax rate (lowest in a century) juicing the deficit to record highs.

Why should there be a corporate tax rate at all though? Why not just tax income and leave it at that?

All of the money that corporations earn (and would be taxed on this way) will always be taxed as income before it's distributed to an individual, after all, no? Corporate tax never fully made sense to me.

Because then they could do accounting to make it look like they're never earning money, and still get taxed nothing.

The point is that they would be able to earn money without being taxed money anyway. It'd mean fewer accounting tricks, or none.

Those would be shifted to individuals. You'd see an uptick in high earners trying to avoid taxes. It's just a question of whether high earners would be better or worse at hiding income than corporations.

Taxing income rather than profit would actually account for that. I'm not sure I'd want to see that change, but you can't employ clever accounting to hide income like you can hide profits.

Because companies have ways of avoiding income taxes.

Aren't they generally dodging taxes on profit rather than income?

The US has painted itself into a corner.

On one hand, culturally, we pushed young people into colleges and universities at ever-increasing and frankly unethical price points. Many people have spent "buy a house" money on education. These people are then given a heavy burden which holds them back significantly both socially (raising families) and financially (owning a home, saving for retirement).

On the other hand however is the many people who decided not to go to school because it was simply unaffordable. They went to work instead, and often in the kinds of careers that are unappealing to college graduates who prefer white-collar work. Any student loan forgiveness is coming directly from the pockets of these people, who have on-average lower incomes and shorter career spans than their white-collar counterparts.

It's easy to see both sides on this one. The only meaningful solution I can see is to remove the (again, unethical) protections which prevent students from declaring bankruptcy over student loans. In turn, this would hopefully force wiser lending and more price-competition to bring the cost down.

Except you don't have to tax low earners! Progressive taxation is the norm in the US; you just need to tax where the wealth lies, and the ways in which it moves.

This is the process that I see happening:

1. Money is printed, inflation occurs

2. Cost of living rises, wages follow (but not closely enough)

3. Buying power is decreased, but the tax brackets don't change much

4. The lower income groups proceeds to pay more taxes than they "should" while simultaneously being the group that can afford it the least. At the same time, this group is the most affected by inflation, hurting even more.

The money printer hurts everyone. Spinning it up as the expedited solution to every problem for political expedience is how we ended up with an enormous and ever-growing amount of debt.

Who gets taxed only really matters for a specific federal expense if the spending were being covered directly by an increase in taxes. Any money spent on buying up student debt will come from new federal debt without a tax increase or levee to pay for it.

Bankruptcy for student loans should be allowed, with appropriate restrictions against the obvious abuses.

I think the federal government should cap the student loans amounts they secure also and standardize all fee and interest service that can be applied to them. That cap should be modest too. The ability for students to get larger and larger loans is the primary driver of tuition fee inflation.

Lastly, and this is maybe a bit controversial. But any university that is either non-profit or receives government subsidies must have a limits on the amounts paid to executive staff like presidents and also a limit on the ratio of administrative spending to education spending. The crazy growth of the the former compared to the latter is form on theft from the students, in my humble opinion.

hardly. consumer spending is from the top 10% mostly. the upper-middle-class and above contribute to 80% of consumer spending.