For a Functioning Democracy, Student Debt Cancellation is a Necessity
Like millions of other Americans, I owe a share of this country’s $1.7 trillion dollar student loan debt. The debate around the topic of student loan forgiveness is a personal one for many Americans, and if we are to be honest, it is a desperate one as well. The burden of our predatory outstanding student loan debt has been crushing for those saddled with it. An entire generation of borrowers has inherited an array of mental and physical health issues, indefinite postponement of major life milestones such as home-ownership (or a private living space in general) or marriage, as well as a forced abandonment of “public-interest” career paths due to needing to pay down their debt burden.
As the Millennials and Generation Z age, the idea of having two generational cohorts who have owned very little in their adult lives and are often shuffled into taking part-time gigs and positions with little to no room for growth is a terrifying prospect. If we remain on this path that we are currently on, we are moving into a future marked by mass immiseration and deep despair (to an even greater extent than our current moment).
Having entire generations of people with little ability to build any new wealth due to their debt and lack of access to good-paying jobs will only go to increase the importance and sway of inherited wealth, further widening our extreme socioeconomic inequities. Given this reality, it is important for us to shut out all of the accusations of promoting irresponsibility and the bad economics spewed by those hostile to the concept of student debt forgiveness. It is responsible, economically feasible, and most importantly, the first step in building toward a true Democracy.
To address the issue of responsibility, as mentioned above, there is nothing about trapping generations of Americans into a cycle where they live to pay down onerous debt instead of being able to use their skills to be the most productive members of society that they can possibly be. One horrifying example of this dynamic is with our nation’s medical students and doctors. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges the average medical school debt for the class of 2019 was $201,490 dollars, with many young doctors even exceeding that amount.
With the cost of a medical degree being so high, new doctors are often forced to take the highest-paying positions, usually in wealthy communities, in order to pay down their debt. Our nation faces a doctor shortage within the next 10 years that is projected to be anywhere from 46,900 to 121,000 physicians due to a Clinton-era austerity policy that slashed funding for medical residencies and fixed the number of funded residents at 1996 levels (as well as rising education costs). Not only is this arrangement harmful for our doctors, with the shortages leading to burnout and higher rates of suicide among those in the profession, it has dire consequences for people in low-income communities.
Poor communities around the nation are facing a dearth of resources and services when it comes to their health care needs with a joint 2014 analysis by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel finding that:
“At a time when research shows that being poor is highly correlated with poor health, hospitals and doctors are following privately insured patients to more affluent areas rather than remaining anchored in communities with the greatest health care needs”.
Upholding a dynamic that makes providing medical care to the most vulnerable people financially unsustainable for many doctors, while also making a medical education inaccessible to millions of potential practitioners, is irresponsibility of the highest order. The amount of death and suffering experienced by those without the privilege of wealth and power that could be prevented by simply freeing our nation’s doctors from their burdensome debt and broadly expanding debt-free access to a medical education is immense.
Finding themselves in an even more precarious position than our doctors, our country’s educators also face significant hurdles in their personal lives and careers due to their student loan debt. Much like medicine, teaching is another profession that is vital to the health of our society facing serious shortages and burnout among those within the profession. One way that teaching is regrettably unique in our country is how the poor pay for teachers intensifies the debt burden. In a 2019 Forbes article on the matter, a depressing reality is outlined:
“The profession — which has struggled with deep shortages in recent years — has been hit hard by the high cost of education, with more than two thirds of those who choose to go into education taking on an average debt of about $20,000 for a bachelor’s degree and $50,000 for a master’s degree. This debt load is especially problematic since teachers, on-average, make 30% less than peers with similar degrees and even less if they choose to work in poorly resourced, high-need communities.”
The situation is even worse for educators of color (particularly Black educators) who often take on higher amounts of debt in order to finance their degrees. With demand for teachers rising and the supply of teachers enrolling in preparation programs falling by nearly 40%, the consequences for our society and democracy are horrific. At a time where having a good formal education is more important than at any point in human history, we exist in a world where the resources (both human and material) necessary for delivering that service are being hoarded by those with wealth and means while the rest of the population is left to fall through the cracks.
As mentioned above, student debt makes it much more difficult for people to build any sort of wealth in our society and them to use their productivity to entrench and expand the wealth of those who are already holding the great majority of it. Millions are trapped in what amounts to a system of debt peonage, but instead of being bound to an individual person or institution, Americans are made to disregard their health and passions in order to provide sustenance for the entirety of the most privileged classes in the country.
While we can point to a wide number of professions that are necessary to the functioning of a healthy society, it is important to use the examples of medicine and education to make this dynamic more concrete and to point out how our outstanding student debt total serves only to increase the power of wealth and stifle any attempts at real democracy. The hoarding and privileging of vital resources like healthcare and education, that are an absolute necessity for all people, is helped along by the lack of federal investment in and debt-burdening nature of our education system.
Democracy is more than just each person having a legal right to vote. It is at its core about each person having the material means and legal protections to actually access the privileges they are promised as members of society. It is impossible to have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if you do not have access to adequate healthcare and senselessly die early from a treatable illness, or if you receive a woefully inadequate education and are unable to earn a living wage or salary. If one is concerned with social integrity and believes in fairness, then it is quite irresponsible to tell millions of Americans that they have a certain set of rights, but then organize society in a way that makes it impossible for them to make use of those “rights”.
Now what should we do to reverse this trend? Well, the first order of business would be to forgive the entire $1.7 trillion student debt total. Many mainstream economists would take issue with this approach for fears that it could possibly lead to problematic inflation, but I think that is a fanciful notion given the historical record. Taking a view of the country’s most recent major expenditures and their impact on inflation shows that this argument is nothing more than an excuse to not provide a higher quality of life for the majority of Americans.
Just to give a few recent examples, the Iraq War cost our country $2.4 trillion dollars, the Bush tax cuts were about $1.5 trillion dollars, the Trump tax cuts cost around $2 trillion dollars and some project that in the wake of the Great Recession our government invested over $10 trillion to rescue Wall Street. Throughout all of this government spending, prices have remained stable and we have been able to avoid runaway inflation. With student debt cancellation likely enabling millions of people to invest and creating more opportunity for innovation, it would provide a bigger material boon for our society than any of those aforementioned expenditures that only served the interests of the most wealthy and powerful.
Beyond cancellation, the federal government also needs to step up to the plate and make public colleges and universities tuition-free for all. There will certainly need to be a standardized federal system of regulations in place in order to account for the cost of resources and services and to ensure quality at all levels, but the price tag itself is inconsequential. What matters is that the goods services paid for under this sort of socialized system are used properly and turned into significantly increased productive capacity.
It is as simple as committing the resources to ensuring that our population has the levels of education necessary to help us be the healthiest and most productive society that we can be in an increasingly service-oriented world. We need to train many more doctors, teachers, social workers, engineers, childcare professionals, nursing home workers, as well as people in other vital professions. Allocating the resources necessary to maximize both the financial incentives for people entering these fields and the productive capacity that we will need to provide vital goods and services to our population needs to be our main priority, not the big and scary number charged to a sovereign monetary-entity with unlimited spending power.
In defiance of the bad economics that dominates this discourse, we must understand that money, at its core, is a way for a society to mobilize resources and get its members to carry out its most necessary functions. The modern United States has a greater ability to spend money than any other monetary entity in the history of our species, and we are doing ourselves a great disservice when we fail to demand that our spending power is used to make us happier, healthier and more productive (whatever that means to each of us individually).
So as we move forward with debates around student debt cancellation, I beg each and every person reading this to view it not as a giveaway to the irresponsible, but a first step towards a society that has the real productive capacity to care for and nurture each of its citizens. I would like you to view student debt cancellation as a down-payment on a commitment to provide each and every person with the resources and services needed to truly live the American dream, and hopefully it is that honest framing that gets us to do the reasonable thing.
