In recent months, Major Democrats have pressured Joe Biden to adopt an ambitious student debt cancellation plan by forgiving up to $ 50,000 in debt per borrower. But on Tuesday, the president unequivocally rejected the idea. “I won’t make it,” he told a member of the public at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee. Biden said he didn’t want to write off “billions of dollars in debt for the people who went to Harvard and Yale,” and added he didn’t think he had the power to write off the debt unilaterally. via an administrative authority, as some prominent figures in his party have suggested.

Biden, however, said he was open to a student loan cancellation, telling his interviewer that he was “ready to write off a debt of $ 10,000, but not 50.” It’s a position the president took during his White House campaign, when he backed the idea of ​​including the proposal in a COVID relief bill. On Wednesday, the White House reiterated to me that Biden wanted Congress to enact loan cancellation through legislation, and that he was not promising to do so himself through executive action.

Biden’s comments on this issue were deeply frustrating. for progressive who has rallied around the idea of ​​a student loan discount. One of the reasons is that it’s not yet clear whether there are even 50 votes in the Senate for the more modest $ 10,000 plan that Biden has backed. If the president is not willing to test the power of his executive pen, and risk having the decision blocked by our conservative Supreme Court, then there’s a chance we won’t see all large-scale debt forgiveness.

But the other, simpler problem is that many forgiveness advocates believe that setting aside $ 10,000 per capita just wouldn’t give borrowers enough relief. (That was essentially the post from the member of the audience who asked Biden about it on Tuesday night.) Whether or not you think it’s true is a subjective judgment, but I think it’s important to keep in mind. Mind two somewhat contrasting points about this when considering the problem.

First, forgiving even $ 10,000 would actually do a lot of good for many borrowers. It’s easy to lose sight of this fact in the middle of a Twitter fight over this topic, but it shouldn’t be overlooked.

Second, unless you are concerned about the deficit, there really isn’t a sound and logical reason to Stop to $ 10,000.

For someone who borrowed to attend private college or law school, a $ 10,000 loan forgiveness may not seem like much help. For people who already rely on income-based repayment plans, it might not even change what they owe each month. But while that might sound like a miserable number to some, to many others, $ 10,000 would be a huge helping hand. According to the Ministry of Education most recent data, there are approximately 42 million Americans who currently hold federal student debt. About a third of them have balances below $ 10,000. Another in five has a balance of less than $ 20,000. We are finally talking about a policy that, for more than 50% of borrowers, would halve or more what they owe.¹

But why limit sorry to $ 10,000? The most compelling answer is probably that it’s a decent way to target the most distressed borrowers while spending a somewhat limited amount of money. An unintuitive aspect of the student debt crisis is that the ex-students who have the most difficulty repaying their loans are generally not the ones who have withdrawn the most money. In fact, the opposite is generally true: borrowers who default tender To have some of the lowest balances, in part because a large portion of them never completed their education. (A long-term study of students who started repaying their loans in the 2003-2004 school year found that, among those who ultimately defaulted on their loans over the next 12 years, 49 percent had dropped out of school.) Students who accumulate the largest loan balances, on the other hand, often won advanced degrees in fields like law and medicine that generally pay off quite well, at least in the long run (obviously, being a hospital resident isn’t a financial picnic). Forgiving just $ 10,000 wouldn’t be cheap, in and of itself – my quick calculations in Excel indicate that you would likely write off about $ 375 billion of the $ 1.5 trillion in outstanding federal student loans.²– but that would reduce costs, while relieving a lot of financial pressure. Plus, it would make the whole program a bit more progressive, since Washington wouldn’t forgive so many debts belonging to doctors and lawyers.

Of course, that’s also part of the argument against the forgiveness cap. However, once you put the debt worries aside – and in these days of trillion dollar relief plans, it seems a lot of Democrats have – it becomes pretty hard to find a reason to. principle for keeping the limit at $ 10,000, especially once you start to consider all the nuances of student debt that make it such a pernicious burden for many Americans, such as how black Americans are particularly saddled by expensive loans for higher education. I mean, once you’ve made a commitment to forgive the slightest bit, there just isn’t a clear philosophical dividing line between the $ 10,000 forgiveness of everyone’s loans versus 20 or more. 30. The number is not really related to the typical debt of graduation borrowers. It might be somewhere about the median student debt balance among low-income people, but there is a lot of the poorest households struggling with more than $ 10,000 in loans.³ Since lawmakers want to target forgiveness on people who are in dire need of financial assistance and who have not attended Yale or Harvard, the easiest way to do so is to limit income relief. – you know, an old-fashioned American voucher means testing. If you were determined to get really whimsical, you could do it based on an age combination. and income, to account for the fact that people tend to earn more as they age. But simply putting a cap on the pardon amount does not directly solve the problems of economic equity in itself.

Ultimately, I suspect the main advantage of the $ 10,000 figure, from the White House’s perspective, is that it looks a bit small, when it comes to big public policy gestures, which means that it’s a little less likely to generate intense opposition and might have a slightly better chance of slipping into a bill that makes sense. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will finally be ready to vote. Student Debt Cancellation Surveys decently overall, but there is a vocal contingent that is fiercely against the idea. These voters (and experts) will likely oppose any pardon, but by supporting a relatively small number, Biden keeps much of the conversation centered on how he resists the more liberal wing of his party, rather than to give in to them.

When you stop and consider it in the grand scheme of things, however, it is somewhat remarkable that this plan is actually seen as the moderate option at the moment, given that just a few years ago, l The massive cancellation of student debt was still seen as a relatively marginal idea mainly championed by self-identified socialists. Now the president is taking a moderate pose by simply talking about freeing one-third of borrowers entirely from their student loan debt while the Senate Majority Leader urges him to go further. Times have changed in the Democratic Party, just less than many would like.