Biden's Plan Was Always Spineless

A Position on Student Loans I Didn't Think I'd Ever Have

A few days ago The Supreme Court ruled against Joe Biden's plan to forgive a few billion dollars worth of federally held student loans via executive order. A few years ago I think I might have done what several people are doing now: been outraged at the Supreme Court's decision here; but I'm not the same me I was a few years ago.

I want to be clear that I actually do think that absolving a lot of student debt is a good move. There's a little over a trillion dollars of student loan debt being held in the US, if you include federal and privately owned debt. This is not a good situation for anyone. A person being trapped under so much debt that they most likely will not pay it back in their lifetime is a huge burden on the economy as a whole. Much the same as people who are living pay-check to pay-check, people who are living under cumbersome debt simply aren't contributing to the economy the way that debt-free citizens are able to. This is of course is a massive burden on an individual, but also does kind of such for everyone: business can't make as much if no one has any buying power, and it doesn't take long for money to simply be re-distributed to a few wealthy people at the top of the economic food chain.

Furthermore, I don't judge many of the partakers in the college system to be entirely at fault. There is a question here about personal responsibility. Many people simply went to school and buried themselves in crippling debt for degrees that never would have done them any good in the job market to begin with. But I think it's important to acknowledge that this is very much what students have been told to do as part of US public education for decades now. Much of High School level education in the United States is geared towards preparing students for further education in college and not teaching them real skills. When I graduated high school in 2016, I went against the advice of nearly every teacher I had, in electing not to go to college. So it's quite difficult for me to fault people entirely for doing something that every person of authority in their life is telling them to do.

All of that being said, it was a terrible idea from the get-go to simply try and forgive massive amounts of student debt without addressing the underlying problems that created this system in the first place. I've come to the opinion that a lot of the big government funded program pitches like single-payer health-care and federally funded higher education in particular are a game of timing more than anything else.

In the case of single-payer health-care: it would be something very close to pointless to simply institute an UK style NHS system and then walk away. The entire point of having a single-payer is to provide an ultimate position of bargaining power in which the people can simply refuse to pay an absorbent amount for health services. If the only change made to health care is that the government picks up the tab for health services rather than insurances companies all you've done is eliminate a tons of jobs in a massive industry and done nothing about the actual cost of health care. The system only works if you force hospitals to change their practice of spending huge amounts of payroll on unnecessary administrative labor; and more importantly: forcing pharmaceutical companies to charge a reasonable rate for commonly used drugs.

Much the same way, simply forgiving student debt doesn't do anything but cost the tax payers a stupid amount of money in the short term and provide no benefit in the long term. You have to also fix the same problems in the college industry: cut outrageous spending on administrative employees, and all the rest of things that have made the price of a college education go from something that could reasonably afford when my parents and grandparents were in their prime, to the most expensive purchase a lot of people will ever make in their lifetime, save for a house. Though it's starting to seem more unlikely that the average person in my generation will be able to afford both a house and a college education in their life-time.

This was a spineless position on Biden's part from the start. If you're going to forgive student loans and also do some work to force colleges to bring their prices down to a reasonable price point, that's one thing. But this was never Biden's intention. The plan was to simply force the tax payers to bail out students and then move on.

I'm not saying that I even necessarily have a huge problem with this. After the auto-industry, banks, airlines, and Ukraine all being bailed out to the tune of billions of dollars in the past few decades; I think it's a little bit hypocritical for people to decide that bailing out students is just a bridge to far all of a sudden. But that doesn't change the fact that it's an objectively stupid way to pretend to solve the problem. The same way that it was stupid to bail out banks in 2008 without forcing any reform, and airlines in 2021 during COVID without any requirements that they make changes -- it's absurd to put a bail-out band-aid on college debt without doing any work to solve the underlying problems that created the broken system.

It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world had Biden's plan actually gone through. America is the richest country in the world, and while we can't afford anything and everything -- I think there is a case to be made that this is an investment that would have paid for itself. If you release some percentage of the population from crippling debt, their buying power increases and ultimately the entire economy does better for it. I don't know that forgiving the $200 billion in debt (or whatever the figure was) would have certainly paid for itself in five years or something with contributions to the economy that it would enable. I also am not sure where I come down the idea that The Supreme Court has the power to block Biden's executive order here, or whether or not this is the kind of expenditure that falls under the power of the executive order.

What I am certain about is the complete and total lack of courage displayed by everyone involved here. There is a reason that Biden moved to forgive student debt, rather than, for example, pull federal funding from schools unless they drop tuition rates: its inoffensive to all the stakeholders. Forgiving student debt isn't going to take any money from schools, and will only encourage them to continue as they were.

Sum-up: I wouldn't be mad at all if a big chunk of student loan debt was forgiven, I do think it's a great idea. However, the simple spinelessness displayed by Biden and crew here to just throw money at a problem with no intention of actually fixing it is absurd. I'm exhausted watching the US government as a whole continue to waste money to the tune of billion of dollars to provide fake fixes for problems that only they really have the power to properly fix. This is true for everything thing from Airlines, to Ukraine, to student debt.