This is the wrong approach. The universities will continue to push out more and more expensive degrees (some leaving the degree holder with no job prospects) while taking advantage of federally guaranteed loans.<p>The universities should use their own money to back the loans.
I'm less bugged by the hand-wringing on the right about how terrible this will be for the economy, and more by the left's failure to acknowledge it.<p>Hillary Clinton's 2016 was sunk in part by a revolt from the left wing of the Democratic party who felt she was too conservative. Their alternative was Bernie Sanders, who comes closer to being genuinely left wing.<p>It's not just that this gave us the far-right Trump as an alternative -- which, among other things, means a far-right Supreme Court until all the young Bernie fans are on social security. It's also that even when Biden does give them the things that they want, like student loan forgiveness, they still don't support him.<p>Cynically, it looks less like a sincere support for left-wing issues, and more like contrarianism. They can pat themselves on the back for avoiding taking any responsibility for actually running the country, even while bad-mouthing candidates who would give them some of what they want. The result is a system that gives them the opposite of what they want, making their own lives worse by their own standards, as well as the lives of many others.<p>The Democratic party lives in rather a quandary. It can't trust its left wing -- they demand to be pandered to but don't seem to return that with votes. They think of themselves as centrist, but are constantly badgered for being too right-wing by the left, while at the same time described as far-far-far-left by right-wing commentators who cherry-pick individuals with little power.<p>I have no idea if forgiving student loan debt is the correct thing to do. College pricing has clearly gotten out of hand, and student loans are one contribution to that. We need to fix this going forward as well as resolving the deep holes that the situation has gotten people into.<p>And that just gets harder when the nominally left-leaning people don't help even when they're given what they asked for.