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Current Affairs

PREVIEW: Student Debt Special (feat. Allie Conti, Marshall Steinbaum and Matt Bruenig)

Current Affairs

Current Affairs

Comedy, Government, News, Culture, Politics

4.4645 Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2019

⏱️ 2 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Current Affairs finance editor Sparky Abraham sits down with Vice writer Allie Conti, economics professor Marshall Steinbaum and People's Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig to discuss the question of cancelling student debt, in light of Bernie Sanders' and Elizabeth Warren's recent plans for college debt forgiveness. This episode will be unlocked in full soon, but is available now in full for Patreon subscribers. To receive early access to episodes like this, as well as exclusive bonus content, consider becoming one of our patrons at www.patreon.com/CurrentAffairs.

Transcript

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0:00.0

But then also there's got to be a huge number of, maybe not that huge, but a larger number of people who didn't go to school at all because it was expensive.

0:08.2

And they're kind of in the worst position of anyone who was affected by the fact that college costs money.

0:15.2

And so you probably should compensate them as well.

0:18.0

And when you get into that logic, you just say, hey, write a check to everyone

0:21.7

under the age of 50. Just take the money, divide it evenly between everyone under the age of 50.

0:26.4

If you went to public school, here you go. If you went to private school and then tell us it was

0:30.6

because public school costs money, okay, whatever, here's a check. And if you didn't go at all,

0:35.3

and you say, oh, it's because it was too expensive. Here's a check, too.

0:38.3

Everyone gets money, you know. So I don't think that this sort of accurately represents the

0:43.2

arbitrariness of the welfare calculation embodied in these debt cancellation plans. I think there is a

0:48.0

meaningful distinction between people who currently have student debt outstanding and people who

0:51.8

don't from welfare terms. Namely that not having

0:55.0

student debt is a sign that you are relatively privileged because it means that you went through

0:59.0

higher education without having to take on debt and that probably means that your parents or

1:02.4

family supported you through it. Not having student debt outstanding because you paid it off

1:06.8

is also a relative sign of privilege. And if you look at the progress toward repayment of

1:12.8

successive student debt cohorts, what you see is that more privileged people pay off their debt

1:16.7

sort of as they're quote unquote supposed to over 10 year time horizon because they tend to get

1:21.3

better jobs with better wages and can kind of do what they're told. Having student debt outstanding

1:26.4

is a sign that you're

1:28.0

relatively unprivileged in comparison to those two groups. And so it's not an arbitrary

1:32.4

delineation of people. I mean, extending the cancellation plan in the direction of people who

...

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