This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 20th,

2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Biden administration appears to be moving forward

with an attempt at larger scale student debt cancellation.

The fiscal impact is one thing, but is it even a good idea on other metrics?

Cato's Neil McCluskey comments.

Since the pandemic began, at least in the United States, as an official matter, it was really early March of 2020,

what happened to student loans during that time.

Right, so we got to sort of take ourselves back to March 2020

and understand what people are looking at.

We were all, I think, at the very least, uncertain what COVID-19 meant.

There was a lot of fear in part because of uncertainty.

And we saw states moving to lockdowns where nobody was allowed to leave their house,

where the economy was essentially going to come to a halt for at least some period of time. We didn't know how long. And it was a legitimate

concern that people simply wouldn't have income because we expect a lot of people to lose their

jobs in order to pay back

student loans and we don't want the federal government being involved in student lending, but since it is the biggest student lender,

it made some practical sense to pause repayment of those loans.

And the Trump administration did that early, well

by mid-March 2020. They said we're going to pause repayment and importantly

within a couple of weeks of there saying that as an administration

...