With presidential election season heating up, so are the empty promises from the ever-growing field of candidates.
The latest ludicrous statement came from Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator who is trying again to become the Democratic nominee for president after a failed bid in 2016.
Sanders has proposed legislation that would wipe out all student loan debt, all $1.6 trillion of it, named the College for All Act, which would also eliminate undergraduate student tuition at four-year public colleges and universities and save the average borrower about $3,000 a year, according to a report from the Associated Press.
The plan is one-upping his fellow Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s unrealistic, but slightly less ridiculous, proposal that would consider the income of student loan borrowers, canceling $50,000 in debt for those earning less than $100,000 per year, which would cancel about $640 billion of student debt.
The proposal follows Sanders’ campaign promise for free healthcare, or Medicare for All. Free healthcare and free education? Who wouldn’t sign up for that? Anyone would enroll at their nearby public university and pursue their degree in a heartbeat if tuition wasn’t a factor.
It’s an attractive thought. But here’s the deal, it’s never going to happen. Maybe Sanders actually believes what he’s proposing, or for the more skeptical among us, myself included, it comes across as him simply saying what will get him more votes.
This reminds me of everyone’s first experience with politics: student council elections in middle school when everyone’s favorite candidate got elected by promising free lunch for all. Who wants to pay for their lunch? My middle school self was voting for the classmate who saved me a couple of dollars a day.
As we all found out, middle school campaign promises rarely, if ever, came to fruition and neither will a plan for free college and paying off everyone’s student loans.
Because really, how is a country that’s more than $22 trillion in debt, with federal debt expected to increase to “unprecedented levels” over the next 30 years, according to a new report released on Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, going to be able to afford to pay off $1.6 trillion in student loan debt and offer free college tuition?
Sanders claims to have a plan, one that will cost $2.2 trillion over a decade and one that he says will be “fully paid for by a tax on Wall Street speculation,” including taxes on stock trades, bonds and derivatives.
The payment plan, which he claims would eliminate student debt in six months, appears to be a mere fantasy, with the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board taking a hard stance that a financial transactions tax, as he’s proposing, would never pay off the plan.
Instead, the board wrote that it could make America’s capital markets less liquid or push traders overseas, and by lowering asset values, it would dent every 401K and public pension, while raising costs for institutional investors.
Here’s a thought. Why doesn’t the focus shift to making college more affordable, rather than radically trying to make it free? For the most part, out-of-state students receiving the same education pay significantly more than those who reside in the same state as the colleges they attend. How does that make any sense?
Many students take out loans not only for public schools for their undergraduate degrees, but for private colleges, and then for their graduate degrees.
So, student debt, if paid off with the plan, would again accumulate as tuition wouldn’t be free for private schools or for students pursuing a graduate degree under the legislation.
It’s a never-ending cycle, but providing false hope to the estimated 45 million people mired in student loan debt isn’t doing them any favors.
For this one, I’m sticking to some traditional, well-known advice: When something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
