Hello, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Ryan Boydler.

So you probably heard that just over a week ago, as we record this, President Biden unveiled

his long-awaited plan to forgive a bunch of student loan debt.

The forgiveness will go to people who earn less than $125,000 a year.

It's $10,000 for standard borrowers, $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.

It caps payments at 5% of monthly income to make servicing, remaining debt manageable.

And it also goes a long way towards sparing people from the curse of compounding interest.

It's not as expansive a policy as it could have been, but it's very big, in the realm of

half a trillion dollars.

And because it's big, and because it's by definition for people who attended college,

it has stirred up a fair amount of controversy.

Some of that controversy is sort of ginned up in bad faith by Biden's political enemies.

These are appeals to people's jealousy, caricatures of the millions of people who will benefit

as sort of self-indulgent gender study students from Brooklyn who now work at Starbucks.

Other aspects of the controversy are more above board.

And these are mostly policy judgments.

Is the forgiveness fiscally progressive?

Is it economically efficient?

Will it make inflation work?

I think these are mostly fair questions, but I also think they're kind of blinkered.

They treat the decision in the abstract in terms of choices about how to move money around

on a spreadsheet and ignore surrounding political and moral questions.

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