Unpacking Nancy Pelosi's Student Debt Forgiveness Lies
Student Debt Forgiveness is popular, will lessen systemic racism, and boost the entire economy. Democratic leaders like Pelosi & Biden still refuse to consider it, however
Over 45 million Americans hold student debt, totaling about $1.7 trillion. Economists say that a complete, no-strings attached forgiveness of student debt would not only be a boon to individuals, but to the entire American economy.
A 2018 paper from academics using 2016 data found that forgiving “$1.4 trillion outstanding student debt held would translate to an increase of $86 billion to $108 billion a year, on average, to GDP.”
Many leaders of the U.S. Senate have called upon Joe Biden to use the power at his disposal to forgive at least some amount of student debt by executive order. Thus far, President Biden himself as well as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, have stood steadfast in opposition to the popular, life-saving proposal.
In fact, Pelosi made headlines this week by staunchly opposing student debt forgiveness. First, Speaker Pelosi lied to reporters by saying that the President doesn’t have the power to forgive student debt via executive order.
“People think that the President has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not…that has to be an act of Congress.”
That isn’t true, though we can’t say for certain if Pelosi’s lie is due to ignorance or intentional deceit. Pelosi continued by saying that, in any case, she opposes forgiving student debt through any mechanisms.
Her given reasoning was…interesting.
“Suppose…your child decided they at this time do not want to go to college but you’re paying taxes to forgive someone else’s obligations you may not be happy about that,” Pelosi reasoned.
Let’s forget for the time being that the Democratic Party has so much loathing for us that they trot out someone who is a literal insider trader worth over $100 million to make that callous argument. Let’s continue on the Speaker’s thread regarding citizens being upset about how tax money is spent.
As a U.S. citizen I’m a little upset that my tax dollars go to killing millions of people abroad in our illegal wars, as well as murdering democracies wherever we find them with coups in the Global South that have bipartisan support.
My tax dollars go to funding our police state which kills more than any other country in the world and locks up more than any other nation, per capita and in terms of total prisoners. In Pelosi’s words, I’m not “happy about that.”
I’m upset that my tax dollars go towards the largest domestic spying operation in human history so that the government tracks me and my neighbors’ every move and word. I’m upset that the poorest person I know pays more taxes than all the wealthiest American corporations, combined.
I know I’m not alone with all that. Yet, here we all are, going about life like mature adults, not storming the gates with pitchforks. Speaker Pelosi would have the world believe the final straw that will send angry voters knocking down her door would be a compassionate measure with overwhelming public support that might add another $100 billion to the GDP each year.
Pelosi’s reasoning defies survey data that tells us Americans want student debt forgiveness, ignores economists who tell us it would help the economy, and rests on the logic that her constituency is just as sociopathic, and selfish as her and her colleagues.
It rests on the idea that we don’t want to contribute to society through our decisions if we can’t see an immediate way to enrich ourselves personally from them. And, once again, Pelosi’s argument ignores the economists who point out the ways in which forgiving the massive yolk of student debt that the U.S. rebuilt its house of cards on after 2008’s financial collapse would indeed create a massive tide that would lift all boats.
Pelosi isn’t stupid. She’s brilliant, and self-interested.
What her flimsy and unbelievable rhetoric doesn’t touch on is her and her colleagues’ real reason for opposing student debt relief – simple political economy. Pelosi is in the ruling class and it is not in her own class interest to help the majority of people.
So, she makes up pretense for public consumption, and lies. She and her colleagues have made their fortunes by advancing the interests of the institutions which benefit from our being indebted, impoverished and subsumed by a condition of constant precarity.
Yes, it’s short-sighted, but that’s the cannibalistic logic of our global system – use consumers and workers rapaciously as the raw material needed to make profit. We long ago become too poor as a working class to afford to buy things, so they made credit mainstream and mandatory.
If the credit system is destroyed, people and national economies might benefit greatly, but the particular, short-term goals of corporations and institutions which feed off of our debt would have to find new, honest ways to make money. Pelosi’s real constituents are the corporations that have made her rich, not the voters who are crying out for debt forgiveness.