This week, the left has stepped up calls for president-elect Joe Biden to write off student debt by executive order, possibly up to $ 50,000 per borrower. Such a move would constitute both a horrific policy and an abuse of the discretionary power that Congress has bestowed on the executive in this area.

It is often said that America’s 1.5 trillion student debt is a “crisis.” It’s not. As Manhattan Institute’s Beth Akers noted, the typical four-year graduate who has borrowed starts with $ 28,500 in debt, which he can eliminate with 20 years of monthly payments of $ 181. By comparison, bachelor’s degree holders outnumber high school graduates by about $ 1 million in their lifetime. University is too expensive, but not to the point of pitying the most educated people in our society.

What about those with much heavier loads? These large sums normally come from higher education, not four-year degrees, and are disproportionately held by relatively high-income people, including doctors and lawyers. Higher undergraduate debt is also often the result of a deliberate choice to attend expensive private colleges over more affordable public colleges, and denying avenues such as military service that can pay for college. In addition, many students with really modest incomes already benefit from large scholarships. On top of that, the truly unmanageable debt problem has already been solved – and at the expense of federal taxpayers.

The federal government owns about 90 percent of student debt, and it allows borrowers to escape their burdens through various “income-based repayment” options. Borrowers who take this route, about half of them, typically pay 10-20% of their discretionary income – and after 20 or 25 years (ten for those working in the civil service), any remaining debt is written off. . Someone who owes a lot of debt for their college education but has a low income can get tens of thousands of dollars back this way.

Some borrowers fall through the cracks of this system and default, but they are disproportionately those who moo debt, especially people who attended university but did not graduate. Any further reform effort should be targeted at this problem and should be accompanied by reduced incentives for students who are unlikely to graduate to borrow a lot of money for college in the first place.

There is simply no justification for blanket cancellation of student debt, even with limits on the overall amount of cancellation or the income of recipients. Forgiving college debt is a slap in the face for those who paid off their debts earlier, those who minimized their borrowing by attending cheaper schools or working while studying, those who dropped out of college altogether, and those who are suffering from other types of debt. Canceling the college loan is also a bad way to boost the economy in the short term during the COVID-19 malaise, as there are many more deserving groups as much of the canceled debt would not have gone. repaid for years anyway, and because forgiveness would likely be enforced. And it’s pretty much guaranteed that it will be regressive, for the simple reason that Americans who went to college are a wealthier-than-average bunch. And if the debt cancellation is based on the idea that the current lending system is unfair, why should only one generation of borrowers benefit from it? This will create political pressure, as all “one-off” amnesties do, for repeat on behalf of future borrowers, who will be encouraged to view debt as free money that will never need to be repaid.

Forgive the debt by decree poses additional problems. Congress recklessly gave the executive broad authority to modify, compromise, cancel, or release student debt, but this was clearly not intended to allow a full-scale jubilee, and there is a strong case for the courts to fail. should not even allow it. For example, federal law also requires agencies to ‘try to collect’ debts owed to them, and as the late Antonin Scalia once wrote, policymakers do not hide elephants in mouse holes: a obscure provision of the law should not be taken as a license to ignore the rest.

Joe Biden presented himself as a moderate capable of uniting the country. Virtually nothing could be more divisive than diverting taxpayer dollars from people who have been to college while low-skilled workers bear the brunt of our current economic pain.