Interesting Insight

The author makes a compelling case that argues that the fury over student loan forgiveness is driven by old school bigotry and elitism.

The idea is that getting out of school without multiple years of wages of debt is not just a privilege, but it is a marker of privilege, and so we experience ferocious hostility from people who think that they are better than the rest of us:

I have a new piece up for Slate on the history of debt relief as an essential safety valve for a functioning credit-based economy. Hillary Frey is running a great shop over there, and I encourage you to read Mark Joseph Stern's piece on Biden's legal options should the Supreme Court engineer any problems for his new student debt forgiveness program.

As I emphasize in the Slate piece, debts are discharged every day in the United States. But as CNN's John Harwood notes, there's a striking degree of animosity over the prospect of student debt in particular that doesn't seem to be about, well, debt:

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Even the somewhat more sober macroeconomic critics are letting their rhetoric get the best of them. Jason Furman attacked Biden's plan as "reckless," saying it would pour "half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning." But when he finally got around to talking numbers, he informed us that he expects just 0.2 - 0.3 percentage points of inflation from the plan. That does not sound like pouring gasoline on a fire to me.

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So why all the vitriol over student debt? When we argue about student debt, we aren't really debating credit policy, inflation, growth or the separation of powers under the U.S. Constitution. All of these avenues of discussion are elaborate detours around the central issue: the structure of the American social order.

In the United States, a college degree is about much more than securing a higher wage. People without college degrees aren't just excluded from a lot of jobs that pay well. They're more likely to be laid off and less likely to be hired during recessions. They're less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to have a disability (the causal arrow there probably points both ways, but the combination is particularly cruel). People who do not graduate from college even have shorter life expectancies than people who do. Higher education is perhaps the single most important factor in determining who has access to a financially secure lifestyle and the leisure to pursue intellectually interesting activities. A college degree confers respect and prestige.

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Student debt allows a certain kind of prestige-hoarder to pay lip service to the ideal of universal education, while also looking down on some graduates as, well, not quite the real thing. "Technically, you have a degree, but we all know you don't truly belong up here, dear." Erase that debt, and this distinction disappears. College graduates are all just college graduates again. A little bit more equality has entered the picture, and a little bit of prestige has departed.

I suspect this is what most people really mean when they say student debt relief is "unfair."

(emphasis original) 

Student debt confers a lack of virtue, and hence a lack of worth.  Attempting to address that issue is assault on privilege, and one of the things that our elites cannot tolerate, in particular conservative elites, is losing their special perks.

To quote Emilio Estevez in Repo Man, "F%$# that."