Embarrassing Confession: I’ve been watching She-Hulk: Defender of Heroes. In general, I’m not a fan of the superhero genre; but after “Orphan Black” I see anything starring Tatiana Maslany.
In any case, one of the show’s plot points is that the title character is reluctant to reveal her superpowers. Because? Among other things, she worries (correctly, it seems) that when people know what she’s capable of, she’ll have a hard time paying off her student loans.
I don’t think the authors intended to make a political statement. They were just acknowledging the ubiquity of student debt – and the anxiety about it – in the modern United States. And that generality is why Republicans’ attacks on President Biden’s debt relief policy — which they often portray as a gift to privileged elites or lazy spenders — are likely to fail.
Let’s talk about the numbers. The Biden administration says its plan will provide relief to up to 43 million Americans. It’s a lot of people, not a small spoiled elite. In particular, data from the New York Fed says that more than 12 million Americans in their 30s — more than a quarter of that group — still have unpaid student debt.
What this means is that even if you agree with Trump’s diner political theory — according to which the only voters who matter are blue-collar workers who wear baseball caps — you should be aware that some of these guys probably took out loans to attend high schools. commerce or community colleges, often getting nothing but debt in return. Even among those who have not taken out student loans, many likely have children, siblings, cousins, or friends who have. So the Biden plan will affect a lot of people.
In short, student debt relief is not some sort of elite concern; it is a broad, one might even say populist, question. Initial voting on Biden’s plan is somewhat mixed, with an Emerson College poll showing much greater support than a CBS/YouGov poll. Even the latter, however, shows that most Americans approve of the plan; he still encounters far less opposition among non-college whites than might be expected, given that group’s general disapproval of anything Biden-related.
The other end of the right-wing reaction involves invoking personal responsibility — indeed, painting debt relief recipients as queens of well-being. Republican efforts on this front, however, were extraordinarily deaf.
Just on general political principles, telling tens of millions of Americans that they are lazy and irresponsible – who are all, as Ted Cruz put it, like a “lazy barista” who has wasted years “studying completely useless stuff” – seems… stupid. To be brutally blunt, this kind of caricature may have worked for Republicans when the insults were aimed at urban blacks. But it’s likely to backfire when we’re talking about a broad spectrum of Americans who were just trying to get ahead.
Furthermore, many of the most prominent critics of debt forgiveness are almost comically out of touch, hypocritical, or both. In fact, delete the “almost”.
For example, Marco Rubio proudly declared that he paid off his entire student debt — after he was elected to the Senate and got a contract to write a book. Why can’t everyone do this?
On the hypocrisy front, the White House is taking a day off poking fun at Republican congressmen whose companies have received debt relief under the Wage Protection Program. It is true that debt relief for employers who maintained their workforces during the Covid-19 pandemic has been incorporated into this program; it is also true that later research suggests that only about a quarter of program funds supported jobs that would otherwise have disappeared. The rest was, in fact, a gift to the entrepreneurs.
More generally, it’s hard to take lectures on personal responsibility seriously when they come from a movement full of people — from Donald Trump, famous for defaulting on his contractors, on down — who have long refused to pay the money they owe. . It’s hard to top the spectacle of Stephen Moore, who Donald Trump tried to appoint to the Federal Reserve, calling people who don’t pay their debts “deadbeats”; after all, Moore’s nomination failed in part because he refused to pay his ex-wife $300,000 in child support.
Now, none of this means that Biden’s plan should be exempt from criticism, although the vehemence with which some centrists attacked it remains puzzling. Above all, the plan offers one-off relief, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem that led to all this student debt — which isn’t a proliferation of lazy baristas; it is a society that demands educational credentials for many jobs without making education accessible.
The point is, Biden tried to address this underlying problem; free community college was part of their original Rebuild Better proposal. But he failed to pass it in Congress. He is, however, offering real help to millions of Americans — and Republicans clearly have no idea how to respond.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
