President Joe Biden and his administration announced yet another wave of student loan cancellations on Friday, zeroing out some $4.9 billion in federally held student loans.
It’s an unsurprising move for an administration that has already discharged more than $130 billion in student loans and has attempted to cancel billions more in what can only be described as a blatant vote-buying scheme.
The typical response from Republicans in Congress has been to highlight the unfairness of these bailouts. The Biden administration, they say, is transferring billions of dollars from working-class taxpayers who did not take out any student loans to the more educated and comparatively wealthier segment of the population who took out these loans.
This is completely accurate. By forgiving student loans, the Biden administration is forcing autoworkers in Detroit who only have a high school diploma to pay for the expensive college degrees of doctors, lawyers, and other people in professions that pay significantly more than factory work.
But there is one problem with this response. It is a response that fails to recognize the reality that too many people, often under heavy pressure from their parents and loved ones, took on thousands of dollars in debt at a time when they were deeply impressionable to pay for a degree that has failed to pay the dividends that they were promised.
This is not to absolve student loan borrowers of the free choice that they made to take on these loans. But there needs to be a recognition that social pressures and expectations clouded the realities of student loan borrowing to the point that many people felt like they had no other choice than to take out these loans.
Republicans are right. Biden’s student loan bailouts are deeply and offensively unfair. But as the party continues its shift toward the working-class voters, it has to remember that the working class is not just high school graduates. There are plenty of working-class people who have college degrees and have been crippled by debt distributed by the federal government’s student loan programs.
Instead of simply shrugging their shoulders at the millions of people who have crippling student loan debt and saying, “You took it out, pay it back,” Republican lawmakers should look for new and innovative ways to address the student loan crisis.
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This could include tax breaks for companies that help their employees pay off loans, capping the amount of interest that can accumulate over the length of a loan, or rewarding borrowers that consistently make payments by lowering their interest rates. Other ideas could include some form of student loan forgiveness for borrowers who get married and have children, given that student loan debt is often cited as an obstacle to family formation and falling birth rates will affect the ability of the federal government to collect taxes in the future.
It is not healthy for a significant portion of a nation’s population to be saddled with significant debt that many cannot hope to pay back. Biden and his party have recognized this and have successfully exploited the student loan crisis by offering billions of dollars in bailouts. Republicans must come up with a political strategy on student loans that recognizes the deep social wounds created by the student loan crisis; otherwise, this class division will only get worse.