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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32946 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I’ve previously written about how much I dislike student loan forgiveness policies and framing college education as a public good. Now that the Biden administration is attempting to implement the policy, the discourse has shifted away from whether it’s a good idea to whether it’s a legally valid policy, with two challenges currently going to the Supreme Court. For a defense of the policy that extends all the way to declaring that the challenges are completely illegitimate, we can look to a Voxsplainer from Ian Millheiser:

The legal issues are straightforward: A federal law known as the Heroes Act explicitly authorizes the program that Biden announced in the summer of 2022, as the Covid-19 pandemic persisted. Under that program, most borrowers who earned less than $125,000 a year during the pandemic will receive $10,000 in student loan forgiveness. Borrowers who received Pell Grants, a program that serves low-income students, may have up to $20,000 in debt forgiven.

And yet, while this program is clearly authorized by a federal law permitting the secretary of education to “waive or modify” many student loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency,” it is unlikely to survive contact with a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.>

I suggest a full readthrough, but that does get to the heart of the matter. The full text of the Heros Act is here and is about as clear as Milheiser suggest above. After some initial throatclearing, the act says:

SEC. 2. WAIVER AUTHORITY FOR RESPONSE TO MILITARY CONTINGENCIES AND NATIONAL EMERGENCIES. (a) WAIVERS AND MODIFICATIONS.— (1) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, unless enacted with specific reference to this section, the Secretary of Education (referred to in this Act as the ‘‘Secretary’’) may waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV of the Act as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency to provide the waivers or modifications authorized by paragraph (2).

I don’t see anything in the ensuing paragraphs that would narrow this meaningfully, although I welcome input from anyone with a sharper legal eye than I have. Nonetheless, I find myself looking at this as an utterly dishonest exploitation of a law that was written with a clear purpose in mind. The Heros Act was created to handle soldiers being sent abroad to fight the War on Terror; whether this was good or bad policy, it had a clear purpose and a somewhat defined cost cap based on how many people are actually affiliated with the military or meaningfully economically impacted. The Biden student debt cancellation takes advantage of the “or national emergency” provision by declaring that everyone was impacted by the declared Covid emergency and therefore all student debt was subject to cancellation per this bill.

This, I suppose, is where I rediscover that whatever judicial philosophy I adhere to looks more like originalism than textualism, but really looks even more like I adhere to my own You Must Be Kidding Doctrine. I don’t buy for a moment that the people that drafted this legislation intended to empower the executive branch to declare an emergency that affects all Americans and that this would grant the power to cancel as much student debt for as large of a group of people as they like. Had they intended to do so, they probably would have just done that explicitly rather than spending a page clearing their throats about the importance of the United States military.

I see many speculating that the ostensibly conservative Supreme Court will use the Major Questions Doctrine to overturn the policy:

In the last few decades, the Supreme Court has placed another limitation on the Chevron Doctrine’s scope. The “major questions doctrine” holds that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations that concern questions of “vast economic or political significance.” The Supreme Court justifies this limitation with the non-delegation doctrine. According to the Supreme Court, courts are supposed to interpret “major” legal questions, not administrative bureaucrats.

I have to confess that I personally despise student loan “forgiveness” so much that I would be enthusiastic about nearly any convoluted reasoning that the Supreme Court comes up with to reject it as a legitimate policy. I am further bolstered in that attitude by what I perceive as decades of utterly ridiculous, lawless rulings that build on the time honored principle of deciding what I want and figuring out why the law agrees with me later. In this particular case, I think it’s actually fairly reasonable to say that this $400 billion policy and license for trillions more is not a legitimate use of executive authority delegated by Heros act, but I don’t think I can actually prove that through looking at the language in the text.

What say you?

The problem also is credentialism; we cannot just blame the borrower or the lenders. Things like automated resume screening, degrees req. in the application, etc. So it's wrong for the govt. to subsidize college from a free market perspective, I can understand the rationale if college is effectively a very expensive ticket for a hope of entering the middle class.

From an optics standpoint, I can understand the unpopularity. Forgiving student loans seems to be equivalent of bribery for a core constituency. But so can tax cuts, which benefit generally wealthier, red-leaning voters. The irony is that had Biden pledged billions for something vague like 'helping Ukraine' or 'general welfare' ,there would have been much less polarization even if the money does not have as much of a quantifiable benefit. It's worse that spending is seen as favoring a specific group , than if it's sent into a furnace and benefits no one specifically but middlemen.

I think the unpopularity is right. Unless we solve the issues that are making college unaffordable, simply wiping the debts (or a portion of the debts) simply makes the problem worse. The issue is that for skilled, non-labor jobs, college has become not so much a “nice to have” thing, but a requirement, in fact, it’s basically like high school was in the 1960s. If you want a good job and don’t want to be in construction, repair, or a chef or some other skilled labor— you have to go to college.

This creates a huge demand and thus makes the price inelastic. No one really looks at the costs or the interest rates beyond the choice between schools. You go, and if it costs 100K so what? You need the degree to even apply. And as long as college is the ticket to a middle class lifestyle, people will go, regardless of the cost. And of course as college becomes obligatory, and everyone gets a degree, the value falls. College in 1970 was a “wow, he must be a real go-getter. He must be smart,” thing. This was because they were relatively rare. Once college became the default, it’s not longer useful to signal intelligence or hard work (unless it’s a super hard degree), it’s too diluted to do that.

Making loans forgivable even if it requires a specific act of government to do so simply makes the problem worse. The forgiveness will be priced in. Why wouldn’t a school charge as much as they can get away with? If the dumbass students can’t pay, the government will. And on the student side, there’s no reason to economize here. If the debt gets bad enough, there will be a bailout. The employer side gets harder as well. Everyone other than the truly stupid have a diploma. So college is no longer enough. Maybe it will be internships, maybe we move up the credential treadmill, but college itself won’t be a ticket to those coveted middle class jobs. They’ll be a ticket to the line to buy a ticket to the middle class. And such a thing can stretch out quite a while because obviously people are willing to do everything possible to not be poor.

I'm reminded of the US healthcare tax system's incentives for employer-provided health insurance, which (a) encourages people to buy and use more healthcare than would be optimal and (b) encourages them to delegate decisions to a third party. IIRC, the system evolved as an accident of World War II, as employers and employees avoided wage controls. Now, it exists because middle class people think "Ah, finally a tax break that I get."

I can see the same dynamics playing out with student debt, with occasional debt jubilees giving politicians a chance to posture (Republicans for, Democrats against) before eventually forgiving the debt, just like with the Debt Ceiling. When organised and motivated, the middle class can be a very effective group, as suggested by Director's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director%27s_law

I'm extremely skeptical that the lower classes are subsidizing the middle class. I would need to see some numbers to back that up given that income taxes are progressive and most handouts are restricted by income.

Is this the math where they count tax breaks the same as welfare payments?

Is this the math where they count tax breaks the same as welfare payments?

Moreso that money is fungible. A trillion dollars you spent on college-educated middle-to-upper-class young people is a trillion dollars you could have spent on the poor and the working class, and didn't.

I'm extremely skeptical that the lower classes are subsidizing the middle class

The claim is that the upper and lower classes combined are paying the majority of taxes, not that the lower classes are paying the majority of taxes.

I don't know if that's true, but there are tendencies that make welfare to the middle classes crucial to political success in most places today, even in ostensibly egalitarian societies.

That's like saying that me and Jeff Bezos combined have a net worth of $100 billion.

The lower class pays a negative amount of taxes after accounting for subsidies

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