But Wait -- There's More!

In his latest column at the Washington Post, George Will makes some pretty good arguments against student debt forgiveness (and student debt in general).

He then issues a prediction:

When the latest payment pause expires after Aug. 31, it is highly unlikely that most borrowers will then have to resume full payments. It is highly likely that there will be not just another payments pause but a splashy and expansive loan forgiveness — one of the largest wealth transfers in U.S. history, by presidential fiat.

Biden — subtlety is not his strong suit — probably assumes that the gratitude of up to 41 million beneficiaries will exceed the resentment of borrowers who scrimped to pay their debts. Biden is probably right.

Yes, Biden is probably right. And Will's missing some important math.

There's an old saying about government programs -- benefits tend to be concentrated, while costs tend to be diffuse. Ditto gratitude for those benefits and resentment of those costs. The borrower who's getting the break, for the most part, will notice and appreciate that break more than most of the many taxpayers who are coughing up to provide that break will notice and resent it.

But there's a "slightly more diffuse benefit" angle at work here, too.

So, 41 million borrowers. To account for single-family households, multi-borrower families, deaths, etc., let's assume each only has one living and/or involved parent. Many of those parents will be grateful on their children's behalf. Some of them will be glad that the phone stops ringing  -- at least back when I noticed much of this, parents often co-signed student loans and were definitely on the collectors' "call and bug every day" lists.

That's another 41 million, probably mostly grateful, potential voters.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 60% of college graduates born from 1980 to 1984 were married at age 33. Let's apply some Kentucky windage here. Not all student borrowers graduate, and many who did graduate and who got married are now divorced, and many who are still married probably already have spouses who are in student debt as well. But it's probably not way out there to suggest that, say,  five million (12%) of the 41 million borrowers have spouses or partners who are not themselves in debt but who would be grateful to have the student debt monkey off the family's back.

So we're up to 86 million prospective voters who have good reason to be grateful to the president who delivered the goods, and/or to that president's party.

That's five million more than voted for Biden last time around, not counting people who may support the idea despite having no pecuniary or familial interest being served.

The only real question is how highly they rank the issue versus other issues in importance.

Whether student loan forgiveness is good policy or not, it's almost certainly good politics for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.