This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 30th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Biden wants to use executive authority to forgive student loan debts en masse.

But the dirty little secret over federal student debt bailouts may be that it's already somewhat

underway.

Mike Riggs of Reason magazine details some of the ways the often illusory promise of student debt bailouts

is enough to get young people to make bad education decisions.

In the past decade or so, the federal government, the US federal government has taken a much

dramatically larger role in student lending.

And we've seen this increased put.

We had some programs that have been created.

One was student loan debt forgiveness.

If you work for a nonprofit or the government for a decade that seems to have been over promised a little bit.

And now we see with Joe Biden in the White House a push to forgive a much broader range of student loans.

So as you see it, where does things stand now?

So I think there are basically just two things happening at the same time.

One of them is that a form of statutory student loan forgiveness, which is what you mentioned for

non-profits and for government workers, that has always existed that predates Biden.

It goes back to Bush, And the idea is the number of people who are going to get that is pretty much determined by how much any given Department of Education Secretary wants them to get it. You know, it's it's up to the education

secretary to figure out how streamlined is this process going to be etc. And then the

other group of people is almost entirely optional forgiveness. There was this really

interesting debate between progressives in Congress and the education department

...