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This kind of excessive fixation on perfect fairness is exactly what got us into this mess. They thought they could help the poor attend college by giving them grants, then the middle class would have loans, and the rich had to pay their own way. Then it turned out that both the poor and the middle class had to take out loans because grants were too expensive, and the "rich" were fine anyway. Here's a crazy thought: if these debt holders are so well-off, why haven't they paid off their debts yet? Being in debt is a huge psychological burden, and forces people to choose high-paying jobs in expensive areas (which makes them appear to be well-off), instead of doing work that is more meaningful and socially beneficial.

It's good to remember in these situations that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and what Sanders is proposing has the advantage of maximum simplicity. If you listen to the advice of perfectionists like David Leonhardt, you're going to neither eat nor have your cake.

It's not a matter of "perfect fairness" versus "workable compromise." Sanders' proposal epitomizes everything that's wrong with progressive liberals' attempts to implement a welfare state. While everyone else in the developed world treats middle and upper middle class people as the benefactor class, people like Sanders are convinced that the kid who took $150,000 in loans to attend a liberal arts college and now makes $80,000 a year as a journalist is the one entitled to welfare. This is a fundamentally flawed, unfair, and unprecedented approach to building a welfare state.

That is why you hear about free college, like Germany, and not one peep about what Germany's income tax brackets look like: http://www.worldwide-tax.com/germany/germany_tax.asp

  Tax %  Tax Base (EUR)
  0      Up to 9,000
  14%    9,001-54,949
  42%    54,950-260,532
  45%    260,533 and over

You see, in Germany, the guy making $80,000 is treated as a benefactor. He pays the 42% marginal income tax, 19% VAT, 7.5% social insurance contribution, etc. He doesn't get a $2.2 trillion windfall.

Is it the case that you are coming at this from a point of view that is opposed to progressive liberalism in general? That would have been helpful to mention up front, because the article you cite is actually arguing from the view of Sanders' proposal being insufficiently progressive. It seems disingenuous to me to cite it without clarifying that your own reasons for opposing the proposal are completely different.

The article criticizes Sanders' proposal for allocating a large government benefit disproportionately to the middle class. I'm criticizing the proposal for the same reason.

My point about taxes is the flip side of the same criticism. "Progressive liberals" view the upper middle class as a marginalized class that should receive government benefits, not a privileged class that should pay for them. That's why Sanders' proposed tax brackets are the same as Trump's until above $250,000.

> Income bracket Tax

  Lower limit Upper limit Rate 
    $0 – $18,450              10% 
    $18,451 – $74,900         15%   <--- German 42% rate starts here
    $74,901 – $151,200        25% 
    $151,201 – $230,450       28%  
    $230,451 – $250,000       33% 
    $250,001 – $500,000       37% 
    $500,001 – $2,000,000     43%
    $2,000,001 – $10,000,000  48%
    $10,000,001 –             52%

Put differently, upper middle class "progressive liberals" only believe in a progressive system to the extent they are on the receiving end of the welfare system. So that someone who paid $100,000 for college and has a $100,000 job in New York is treated as the proper recipient of government welfare, at the expense of those above them. But taxing that guy like the privileged class, to support the people at the bottom who truly need it, is off the table.

Your example of the guy who has $100K in student loans and is making a $100K salary in New York is a good example, but I think we very much disagree on how he should be treated. If he's living in NYC, his take-home is about $68k after taxes and he's laying out $3500/month in rent for a one bedroom and paying $1k/month for the loans. That leaves him $1100/month for utilities, medical, and, you know, food if he wants to eat. I know there are plenty of people who are worse off, but this guy is working a non-trivial job just to tread water. Why do you have so little sympathy for him?

Because (1) he's objectively well off, having a one bedroom apartment to himself in New York itself being a sign of prosperity and privilege; and (2) because he's around the 90th percentile income level, and if we don't tax him heavily we cannot afford an expansive welfare state.

People in the top 25% but outside the top 1% earn half of all income, $5 trillion, 2.5x as much as the top 1%. You need high taxes on that group to support an expansive welfare state. In Germany, Mr. NYC would be taking home $57,000, and he'd pay 19% VAT on cocktails in Munich.

Living in a high cost of living area is voluntary consumption just as much as leasing a new BMW or going on European vacations twice a year. If he wants to stop "just treading water", then he can move somewhere else, such as a place that's not in the top 3 most expensive areas in the country; just like the guy with the BMW can buy a used Honda instead.

That's a common fallacy. Places that have high paying jobs usually have high cost of living. You can't typically command high salaries in cheaper areas, but people seem to think that just by virtue of living in a certain area you are defacto well-off.

Anyway, this hypothetical guy isn't helping my case, because we can either add or subtract virtues to make him more or less sympathetic. As someone who matched this description personally, I can tell you I did not feel "upper middle class" by any stretch of the imagination, which is what I was responding to.

Vacating existing debt it wrong headed and relies on ignorance to even be considered. Politicians know the idea of paying off college debt sounds good and that is all they want you to do, think it sounds good instead of thinking about what it really means.

Not only is this welfare to the upper middle and upper classes it is the big wealth transfer to colleges. Colleges who have no reason to keep costs down. Plus they also have the benefit not having to steer people to viable careers and can instead sell them on many cost increasing courses which are more padding for the college bottom line.

If the politicians were serious about education they would lock colleges into rates set by government for any education guaranteed part or in full by government. People fall all over themselves demanding that the medical costs be regulated, where are the screams for colleges to do the same when it comes to costs.

Simply put. A degree cost X dollars. Each course credit is Y. The college that wants their students to receive loans or partial to full payment must offer degrees and courses conforming to the cost the government assigns to that degree. The college must make a good faith effort to see the student graduates with the degree or pay a penalty.

They would fall over themselves to comply

I'm a Bernie supporter and I agree. Make free college available to anyone and provide a path to discharge overly burdensome student debt via bankruptcy, but forgiving everything is a waste of resources and political capital. Though, I have to say, one of the things I like about Bernie is he doesn't start with half measures. He starts with the ideal vision, which is probably necessary to even get close to something reasonable in the end. If you start with a compromise position, you end up with a compromised compromise like ObamaCare.

Doing this fairly seems really difficult, when there are people who didn't go to college (but may have wanted to), and people who did go and paid off their debt.

This plan cancels all student loan debt; It does not matter what percentage of income-earners hold the debt. God forbid something nice happen for the middle class. It's really tiring to have scraped by, worked hard to get where I am, and be told I'm JUST privileged (white, male, income) enough to not qualify for any sort of government assistance.

Why just student debt though? People have a right to complain. Someone has no student debt but credit card debt.

What is so baffling is that much of that debt was accrued as basic living expenses with extremely low interest rates, where the poor have to rely on 20% interest cards, but no bailout?

Why does it have to be a competition of loss? The student loan issue is something that should be addressed in and of itself. The constant whatabout-ism when it comes to the less privileged/wealthy (and especially when it comes to being a white male versus a PoC) is exactly what I am complaining about. It feels as if the middle class is constantly being told that our problems don't matter because we have just enough to do OK for ourselves.

If the government sent everyone a check for $20k, this would be more fair regarding your concerns and the concerns of those of us who are against forgiving student debt for the reasons in this thread.

It's not about a competition of loss; you're correct. But it's simply an expensive and unfair plan to forgive the debt of those who have it, without regarding why they have it. Either we take a more refined plan about how we forgive student debt, or we simplify even further and just give stimulus checks to everyone without any conditions.

>>Why does it have to be a competition of loss? The student loan issue is something that should be addressed in and of itself.

Because the money comes out of everyone's pocket. How about free healthcare for more people, free child care so people can go to work etc etc? The govt can't just issue new dollars indefinitely, so there's a cost. I understand that colleges are very expensive and loans have made it even more expensive--just sign here and see you in 4 years. But since the money is coming out of the pooled money we have to think twice and consider everyone's problems.

>This is welfare for upper middle class people.

Maybe more lower class people would go into this if they could afford it?

We don’t need to do debt forgiveness to do that. We could just fund future tuition.

One of the selling points of the universal policy is that it’s the only way to get the votes of the well off but resentful, even if it’s staggeringly inefficient.

>We don’t need to do debt forgiveness to do that. We could just fund future tuition.

I agree

The system we have is not fine. Tuition has no downward price pressure and is rising way too fast.

10% cap is nice and all, but not if you’re going to be paying it through middle age. Blunt loan forgiveness is not the answer, but reform is needed.

> but reform is needed.

Sanders is the last person to do any reform ( real reform would come most likely from somebody like Andrew Yang ).

Education is first and foremost extremely political, almost everywhere and every country.

Milton Friedman knew it 40 years ago.

Letting a free market in education to exist would put a lot of service jobs at risk.

Education is how people who support a candidate get a job after elections are over.

Many prominent lieutenant and donors in the Democratic party end up in the educational sector, same applies in every other party in so many other countries it's unreal.

In Islamic countries, trying to reform education is much much harder than other areas. Everybody wants a say in what goes in the heads of other people's kids.

No. It's also not fair to raise taxes (on rich and middle class) to pay college for poor kids.

It is fine to have certain amount of transfer from the rich and middle class to the poor to pay for basic things, but pay for college should not be part of it. College is not crucial for living a good life.

I would agree with proposal to support pay for vocational / professional training. But college? No.

So true, these clowns made the rules we currently abide by. College being a requirement for middle management positions etc. Only those with a stable upbringing (not the majority) have the options to play by those rules, now they want to change them to bail out the upper middle class?

I'd kind of expect richer people to be more likely to go to college, and also be more likely to have the contacts to get a well paying job.

On that basis I would expect this to benefit the lower middle class, they accrued the debt without accruing the earning potential.

Sort of the point is that it’s not needs based. It doesn’t matter if you make 400k with 100k of debt or 36k with 6k of debt.

Fairly clear one of those 2 is getting a much better deal.

If you borrow 100k graduate, earn 400k and pay off your loan in a year you wont be benefitting from this. Its those taking 90k in loans and only earning 36k that's the problem as I see it.

All that said I'm not from the US, so didn't expect fees to vary so much. (do they?)

The first is a common doctor situation in the USA. The second is a common paralegal. Both were taken from people I know.

The interest rate environment right now means that many of my high earner friends are not in a hurry to pay more than the minimum on their loans. Debt forgiveness for them will be a straight cash infusion against their net worth.

No idea what the percentage of each is.

We could just rollback the recent tax cuts and have a much more progressive tax policy than a student loan forgiveness program for all.

That said one of the arguments for universal forgiveness is that it’s the only way to get major reform in the space. That seems like a crazy expensive premium to pay to me but maybe I’m naive about the appetite for improving others lives.

The recent tax cuts are a side show. The main effect was to bring U.S. corporate tax rates in line with Randian hell-holes like... Sweden: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/corporate-tax-rate; https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-sweden.pdf (Sweden - 6% of revenue from corporate taxes); https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd... (US - 8% of revenue from corporate taxes).

If we want to help people, we need to raise taxes on the middle and upper middle class and spend it on safety net services, like everyone else in the developed world: https://taxfoundation.org/how-scandinavian-countries-pay-the...; https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-sweden.pdf (Sweden - 61 % of revenue from from middle class taxes: payroll, social insurance, and goods and services); https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd... (USA - 41% of revenue from same sources).

I don’t disagree my point is student loan debt forgiveness is an extremely regressive tax policy. That the left most of the Democratic Party is arguing for it is pretty concerning. Especially when the right most of the Republican Party is coming after the social safety net.