Kuttner on TAP: The Bogus Arguments Against Student Debt Relief

Deficit hawks have been attacking the idea of student debt relief using straw men and deceptive data. The offenders include the Brookings Institution, Goldman Sachs, and the Pete Peterson–spawned Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Here are their key arguments: First, a lot of student debt is held by relatively well-off people and those with advanced degrees, and so student debt relief is bad distributively. Second, the macroeconomic stimulus would be weak compared to other possible uses of the money.

But it’s easy to target the relief away from the affluent and toward people who really need it—by capping the amount of the relief.

Even the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget—the ultimate deficit hawks—admits that about half of the total debt is held by households making less than the median income. So capping the total amount of relief can target it to where it’s needed.

Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have proposed a debt relief cap of $50,000. A Brandeis study found that capping the relief as Schumer and Warren propose would target most of it to households below the median income, and that the total forgiveness rate would be 87 percent for people with associate’s degrees, 72 percent for those with bachelor’s degrees, but only 28 percent for those with doctoral, legal, or medical degrees.

The stimulus argument is a straw man. Debt relief is no substitute for a massive program of COVID relief and infrastructure spending. But those require legislation, which is not on the table, while Biden can do debt relief by executive action. It’s especially galling to hear these straw-man arguments from the likes of the Committee for a Responsible Budget, which exists to cut social spending, and from Goldman Sachs.

And all of these deficit-hawk studies rely on the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances. But that survey derives household income by looking at the main earner—and misses the millions of recent grads stuck with large debts who have had to move in with their parents. It thus fails to capture hundreds of billions in debt held by millions of people who are financially strapped, and completely cooks the numbers.

The reason to do debt relief is not because we expect it will be massive macro stimulus, but because student debt is hobbling young Americans who don’t happen to have wealthy parents before their economic lives even begin. Debt obligations have especially harmed Black and Latino/a students, those who went to community college, or were duped by for-profit colleges and now carry large debt loads relative to their incomes.

Time for Biden to use his executive power to help millions of struggling young adults.