Will he?
By ,
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| From the Huffington Post |
Washington is abuzz with ideas for actions the Biden-Harris administration could take that would not require congressional approval. One of the buzziest: canceling student debts owed to the federal government.
The Department
of Education owns about 92 percent of
the $1.6 trillion in student loans Americans owe. Many legal scholars say the
department has the authority to wipe these burdens away with the stroke of a
pen.
“This is the
single most effective executive action available to provide massive
consumer-driven stimulus,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.
Back in
September, Warren joined with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to call on
the next president to cancel up to $50,000 in federal student debt for every
borrower in the United States. That would eliminate loan obligations for more than three-quarters of the
approximately 44 million Americans with student debts.
“As a working
adult in this country, I’ve had to decide between daily food, medicine,
shelter, and paying off this debt — and daily survival will win out every
single time,” she said on a November 13 webinar organized by the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center.
Now the national
coordinator of the Student Debt Campaign, Figueroa explained that debt
cancellation would help her generation “fulfill our potential and contribute
not just what little we can, but the best we can to society.”
Both Figueroa
and Warren point out that student debt cancellation would help narrow the
racial wealth gap.
On average,
Black students have to take out larger loans to get through college than their
white peers. A National Center for Education Statistics study
reveals that Black bachelor’s degree graduates have 13 percent more student
debt than white graduates. For graduates with associate’s degrees, the debt gap
doubles to 26 percent.
Black graduates
also face greater challenges in paying off their student debt because of their
lower average incomes. Black bachelor’s degree and associate’s degree holders
earn 27 percent and 14 percent lower incomes, respectively,
than whites with the same degree.
Research by the Federal Reserve and the Levy Economics Institute shows
that debt cancellation would also boost the national economy. Freed up from
these financial burdens, former debt holders would have more buying power to
stimulate the economy — just when we need it most.
Where does
President-elect Joe Biden stand?
In March he tweeted support for a legislative proposal
to cancel at least $10,000 in federal student loan debt per person. “Young
people and other student debt holders bore the brunt of the last crisis,” he
wrote. “It shouldn’t happen again.” But so far Biden has not committed to using
executive action to avoid that historic repeat.
Rep. Ilhan Omar,
who has championed proposals for universal student debt cancellation and free
college, is among those pressing the Biden-Harris administration to take bold
action.
The mountain of
student debt, she said at the CPCC event, “is the result of a two-tiered
education system — one for the rich whose families can afford to pay tens of
thousands of dollars for higher education and the other for poor and middle
class families who have to pay off that education for the rest of their lives.”
The Biden
administration will have the power to address these inequalities, Omar said.
“As Americans, we are not suffering from scarcity, we are suffering from
greed.”
,
Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy
Project and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. Margot
Rathke is an IPS Next Leader. This op-ed was adapted from Inequality.org and
distributed by OtherWords.org.