DEBATENATE

Topics / Economy

The challenge

“Student loan debt should be cancelled”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. You can't cancel a debt. You can only move it. Cancellation hands the bill to people who never signed the loan. That includes the plumber who skipped college and the family that scrimped and paid theirs off. The Congressional Budget Office put President Biden's twenty twenty-two plan at about four hundred billion dollars. And in Biden versus Nebraska, the Supreme Court ruled six to three that he had no authority to do it. You'll say Washington bailed out the banks. Two wrongs don't make a refund. The real fix is getting the government out of the student loan business and making colleges compete on price. Let me ask you this: if we wipe the debt today, what stops tuition from running it right back up? Forgiving the debt without fixing the price is mopping the floor with the faucet still running.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. Mass cancellation is a giant transfer from every taxpayer, including people who never went to college and people who already paid their loans off.

    CBO estimated in 2022 that the Biden administration's one-time cancellation plan would cost about 400 billion dollars.

  2. A president can't wave away hundreds of billions of dollars in debt without Congress saying so.

    In Biden v. Nebraska in 2023, the Supreme Court held 6 to 3 that the HEROES Act did not authorize the Secretary of Education's mass cancellation plan.

  3. Cancellation treats the symptom and leaves the disease. While colleges can raise prices and students can borrow to cover them, the debt piles right back up.

    The federal student loan portfolio exceeds one and a half trillion dollars, and nothing in a one-time cancellation changes how tuition is set.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Many borrowers were 18 years old, told college was the only path, and some were defrauded by schools. Government forgives loans to businesses all the time, so why not students?

Nate: Where a school committed fraud, the borrower should get relief, and federal law already has a path for that. But a teenager being encouraged to borrow isn't fraud, and blanket cancellation pays off doctors and lawyers right alongside the people who were actually wronged. Help the victims. Don't bail out everybody.

What he grants the other side

Some borrowers were flat-out defrauded by their schools, and they deserve relief.

The lines

Sources

  1. Congressional Budget Office, Costs of Suspending Student Loan Payments and Canceling Debt (2022)
  2. Supreme Court of the United States, Biden v. Nebraska (2023)
  3. U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid, Federal Student Loan Portfolio data (2024)

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