In America today, 44 million people collectively carry $1.4 trillion in student debt. That giant pile of financial obligations isn’t just a burden on individual borrowers, but on the nation’s entire economy… canceling all student debt would increase GDP by between $86 billion and $108 billion per year, over the next decade. This would add between 1.2 and 1.5 million jobs to the economy, and reduce the unemployment rate by between 0.22 and 0.36 percent. So, the macroeconomic upside of canceling all student debt would be substantial. The primary (supposed) downsides of such a policy would be a higher deficit, the potentially regressive distributional consequences of debt forgiveness, and (relatedly) the unfairness of rewarding certain well-off borrowers who don’t “deserve” it. Of course, all of these critiques would apply more powerfully to the recently passed tax cut bill.

Read full article [here].
by Eric Levitz, New York Magazine.

Posted: February 1st, 2018, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.