Student debt relief shows why campaign pledges matter
By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion
President Biden’s decision to forgive some student loan debt 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.
What fever-pitch rhetoric combined with poor logic do tell us is that the decision sparked strong feelings. That alone could explain why Biden chose to move forward with the plan and why Republicans are opposing it so fiercely. Politicians don’t always read the mood accurately; the truth is that very few people get riled up about public-policy decisions, especially ones that don’t affect them personally. Unless, that is, their party works hard to get them upset in the first place.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-student-debt-relief-shows-why-campaign-pledges-matter/
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