Student Debt Relief Shows Why Campaign Promises Matter
Biden’s loan forgiveness plan reflects good political party management as much as a smart policy decision.
Sustaining party ties.
Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images
President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive some student loans has generated more bad arguments for and against the plan than perhaps any policy decision in years. Among the dubious takes, my current favorite is the notion that loans shouldn’t be forgiven because some recipients went to Ivy League schools. A close second is an argument in favor of Biden’s plan noting that millions of small businesses had pandemic loans canceled, ignoring that those loans were designed to be forgiven and weren’t so much loans as a means of keeping the economy from imploding.
Of course, bad arguments don’t tell us whether a policy is good or not.