There are several problems with President Biden’s executive action canceling up to $20,000 in student loan debt, and Victoria Hugo-Vidal’s Sept. 4 Maine Millennial column ignores them all.
The president’s selective compassion is an abuse of executive action, terrible precedent, politically dubious and will increase the already-huge budget deficit by at least $200 billion over 10 years. There is also the issue of fairness, but Ms. Hugo-Vidal says, with careless insouciance, that concerns about fairness are “childish,” a view that is insulting to all the individuals who have a better-developed sense of responsibility and who have paid off their loans – often at great sacrifice.
College costs are too high, partly because of the allure of government loans, but the president’s ill-judged largess will do nothing to solve that problem and may make it worse if colleges and students expect more forgiveness in the future. Ms. Hugo-Vidal’s solution is a “massive re-investment of public funds toward public higher education,” and making it a public good. This is an appealing idea until someone asks where the public funds would come from. Making college free would increase demand and costs unless price controls were imposed.
Many millennials seem to be attracted to utopian solutions for public issues that dispense with any need for individual responsibility and ignore costs and adverse consequences. Ms. Hugo-Vidal’s student loan sentiments are a good example.
Martin Jones
Freeport
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