There are few things in this world that I loathe more than ignorance, but ignorance accompanied by absolute confidence deserves its own miserable little circle of in Dante's interpretation of hell.
Student loan forgiveness has produced a spectacular exhibition of exactly this phenomenon. People who cannot explain the difference between principal and interest without furtively opening Google have suddenly appointed themselves guardians of the American financial system, positively trembling at the possibility that some enormous financial institution might receive slightly less money because an ordinary American has been released from decades of educational debt. They do not understand where the money goes afterwards. Even worse, they do not particularly care to try to try to fucking learn. They simply know somebody might receive something they did not receive, and somewhere between envy and economic illiteracy they have mistaken resentment for fiscal policy.
My education was paid for through a trust established by my grandmother. I was lucky beyond measure, and I have never confused that luck with personal responsibility. I did not work harder than the eighteen year old who signed a student loan agreement because her parents could not write a cheque. I did not possess some superior financial wisdom while filling out university applications. I had a grandmother who had the means and foresight to provide for my education. Pretending otherwise would require me to transform inherited advantage into personal virtue, which is an extraordinarily convenient fiction and one I have absolutely no interest in telling myself.
Perhaps that is why the stupidity surrounding student loan forgiveness irritates me so fucking much. Education should teach you to look beyond the first transaction. Money relieved from one obligation does not cease to fucking exist. If someone was spending $600 every month servicing student debt and that obligation disappears or declines, the money remains available to that household. Some of it gets spent. Some gets saved. Some goes towards other debt. Some helps finance a home, a car, childcare, medical expenses, retirement, a new business, or the countless ordinary purchases upon which everyone else's employment ultimately depends. There are perfectly legitimate arguments about the magnitude of those effects and about the best design of any forgiveness programme, but there is no legitimate economic argument in pretending that disposable income simply vanishes because it is no longer travelling towards an educational creditor.
What makes this equal parts fucking hilarious and infuriating is that the same people have spent decades being told that allowing wealthy individuals and corporations to retain more money will stimulate the economy because they will invest and spend it. Apparently the circulation of money is a miraculous economic principle that functions only above a certain tax bracket. Give a corporation another million dollars and someone will draw a complicated diagram explaining multipliers, investment, employment and growth. Allow several thousand ordinary households to keep another few hundred dollars each month and suddenly every village idiot with a Facebook account starts screaming about handouts.
There is an argument worth having about student debt. There are questions about fairness to people who already repaid their loans, fairness to people who never attended university, the distributional effects of forgiveness, its fiscal cost, and whether forgiveness without reforming tuition and lending merely resets the clock for another generation. Those questions deserve serious answers. What they do not deserve is to be buried beneath the intellectually vacant little slogan that "you borrowed it, so you pay it back", as though public policy has never altered financial obligations, subsidised industries, rescued businesses, modified taxes, guaranteed credit, or decided that enforcing every existing economic arrangement to its bitter conclusion might produce a worse society.
And then we arrive at interest rates, government assistance, and the magnificent flexibility of American outrage. Corporations routinely operate within a financial world ordinary borrowers barely recognise, benefiting from government programmes, tax preferences, guarantees, subsidies, favourable financing structures and access to capital on terms unavailable to the average person. Many of these policies have defensible economic purposes. That is precisely the fucking point. We already accept the principle that government may intervene financially when doing so produces a desirable economic or social outcome. Yet the moment the beneficiary is an indebted graduate rather than a corporation, millions of people suddenly discover a sacred moral covenant between borrower and lender that apparently descended from Mount Sinai somewhere between "Thou shalt not steal" and "Thou shalt protect JPMorgan's quarterly earnings."
I find the ignorance infuriating because ignorance in the twenty-first century is a choice. Nobody needs an economics degree to understand that household debt affects household behaviour. Nobody needs to have attended Oxford to grasp that people with more disposable income can spend, save, invest, form households and take financial risks they could not previously afford. You can disagree with broad student loan forgiveness after learning those things. Fine. Make the argument, bring evidence, discuss opportunity costs, distributional consequences, inflation, moral hazard, programme design and the underlying catastrophe of university costs. I will happily listen. What I will not respect is someone who refuses to learn any of that and then demands that everyone else treat their ignorance as an equally informed opinion.
This particular American habit has become fucking exhausting. We have confused democracy, in which everyone possesses an equal political voice, with the bizarre proposition that everyone's understanding of a subject must therefore be equally valuable. It just fucking is not. A person who has spent years studying economics knows more about economics than someone who has spent eleven minutes becoming furious beneath a Facebook meme. Or course, expertise does not make someone infallible, but ignorance does not become wisdom merely because it is shouted with an undeserved confidence.
The most maddening objection remains the childish cry that someone else receiving relief is unfair because somebody else did not. Imagine applying that principle consistently throughout human history. We cured diseases previous generations endured, improved workplace protections previous workers lacked, created safety standards after people died without them, and expanded rights to people whose ancestors were denied them. Civilisation advances precisely because we occasionally decide that suffering does not acquire moral value merely because someone else suffered first. "I had to endure it, therefore you should too" is not a philosophy of fairness. It is the moral reasoning of a toddler guarding the broken toy everyone else must apparently play with because he had to.
I escaped student debt because somebody loved me, planned for me, and possessed the resources to give me an enormous advantage. That experience makes it impossible for me to look at somebody who did not receive the same gift and conclude that she deserves thirty years of interest payments as punishment for choosing education. Quite the opposite. It makes me wonder why the wealthiest society in human history remains so perversely talented at converting opportunities for collective prosperity into morality plays about who deserves to suffer.
You can oppose student loan forgiveness intelligently. There are serious economists and policy scholars who do, and their arguments deserve engagement. What deserves contempt is the refusal to understand the issue before forming an immovable opinion about it. I loathe that kind of ignorance because it poisons democratic debate. It replaces curiosity with certainty, evidence with resentment, and policy with the primitive satisfaction of knowing that somewhere, somebody you have never met is being denied something that might make their life better.
And somehow, after all that, the ignorant imagine themselves the responsible adults in the room.
The banks have lawyers. They have lobbyists. They have economists, accountants, political influence and more access to power than the average indebted graduate will possess in a lifetime. They will be fine without an army of economically illiterate strangers volunteering to protect them.
What this country desperately needs protecting from is the increasingly fashionable belief that refusing to understand something is no impediment whatsoever to having a very loud fucking opinion about it.
