About a third of American adults have a university degree and about a fifth of all Americans do. So just when you thought American policy-making could not possibly get any worse or more regressive (because didn’t lockdowns shift massive wealth from the poor to the already rich and constitute the two best years ever for billionaires?), Joe Biden stumbles along and proves you wrong. Last week he more or less simply announced he was going to cancel between $10,000 and $20,000 of student debt, per person, for a whole swathe of American graduates. Team Biden, astoundingly, says this is all fully costed and yet when asked what that cost will be his press secretary answers that they do not know. (You don’t need a degree to spot the problem with those two responses, do you?) A number of think tanks and economists have offered their own estimates of the cost with a mid-point stab being around US$500 or $600 billion, with more than one saying all up it will cost a trillion dollars. Even a former economic advisor to Obama likens this to pouring fuel on the already really bad US inflationary fire.

Now of course when President Biden says he is ‘cancelling’ student debt he misspeaks (or prevaricates). These are people who have already been to university and been awarded their degrees. The craziest Modern Monetary Theory adherent can see that the debt is not being cancelled but rather shifted to the general taxpayer. For the median price tag of $600 billion that works out to about $6,000 for each and every American family. Think about it. In generalised and statistical terms the rich go to university. Well over half of American adults did not go. This Team Biden policy is asking those who didn’t go to university to subsidise (no, to pick up the tab for) those who did and who are likely to earn more. Likewise, many Americans have paid back their student loans. Under the Biden loan ‘cancellation’ announcement they are chumps. Their thriftiness and playing by the rules makes them suckers. In fact, despite gaining admission more than a few Americans forego the chance to attend expensive, elite and prestigious private universities in favour of attending much cheaper in-state public universities. They want to limit their later-in-life debt. Patsies! Dupes! Mugs! And why would anyone pay back a student debt in future? If you had six months you couldn’t dream up a worse set of incentives for citizens in a modern democracy, at least if you couldn’t re-use our pandemic economic response.

Now this would all be bad enough if both Houses of the US Congress had enacted into law some bill to this effect. It did not. There was no chance Biden could get enough of his own Democrats on board. So he is governing by Executive fiat. The claim being made is that a twenty-year-old post-9/11 law, the Heroes Act, that grants the Executive a power to ‘waive… [debts]… in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency’, allows Biden to do this. (And this is despite Nancy Pelosi rejecting that exact claim in the past – not now, of course – and a senior counsel for the Department of Education doing so too in 2021.)  The claim is more or less laughable if any regard is paid to a statute’s intended meaning and scope. But Team Biden is claiming the national emergency is Covid and its aftermath. That’s a tough line for them to take with a straight face, though, because they recently lifted the meagre Title 42 border controls on the basis the Covid emergency was over. (Seriously. The Biden administration is taking both positions concurrently.)

Well, my take on this is that this Executive action to ‘cancel’ student debt will be held to be unconstitutional by the courts and Team Biden (not to say every sentient being) knows it. That’s not the point. When it does get invalidated it will be Trump appointed judges who do so. Political gold for the Dems! Then there is the fact that the political spectrum has realigned across the Anglosphere and that the rich today (I speak in general terms) vote left. And rich, college-educated people, especially whites, are the main pillar of the Democratic party (along with black Americans, though the black vote is shifting). This decree about student loan ‘cancellation’ is one of the most effective transfers of wealth from the average American to a Biden supporter imaginable. (By the way, that is Nate Silver’s of FiveThirtyEight.com claim, a Democrat if ever there were one, though it’s impossible to disagree.) If you are incredibly cynical you need also to realise that US university enrolment is dropping noticeably. Given that universities are a stalwart bastion of the Left’s institutional control, this debt-forgiveness scheme amounts to a short-term bailout or subsidy for a core Democrat constituency. Plus, American universities will feel less pressure to moderate tuition fee rises. And best of all, this Biden kingly proclamation is likely to get the youth vote out for the looming mid-term elections. Who cares if the courts ultimately strike down this blatant misuse of the Executive power? Not Joe Biden, I can assure you.

Hence, cynicism on steroids is wholly warranted here. The massive likelihood this gets struck down in the courts eventually won’t trouble its initiators in the least. They may well even want it struck down for reasons related to inflation control and their ‘blame Trump’s judges’ stratagem.

Having said all that I do have sympathy with young people who get highly in debt taking degree courses that increase their employability not at all (nor even their knowledge of the Western canon). Nevertheless, that is no excuse for plumbers or secretaries being made to subsidise those with gender-studies degrees. But I do agree with those who think that universities, including here in Australia, should be on the hook (directly, out of the university’s bottom line) for defaulting student debts. Maybe then there would be fewer degree courses that shouldn’t be degree courses at all in any sane set-up. And maybe that would put pressure on a trend that can be seen around the Anglosphere university world (though perhaps most egregiously here in Oz): the massive explosion of the university bureaucracy to the point that about two-thirds of salaries go not to teachers and researchers but to administrators. Every single year of my seventeen years in Australia the universities have become more top-down, more administratively bloated, more centralised, more focused on churning through the students, more grade inflation, more woke and quietly left-leaning, and yes, more and more do senior administrators make world’s best salaries. Sadly all those trends worsened each year of the nine years of recent Coalition governments too. The Libs did next to nothing, not even to stand up effectively for Peter Ridd and free speech on campus.

Anyway, yes, we can all feel sympathy for the students with near worthless degrees. But taking their debts and handing them over to hard-working hairdressers and rubbish collectors is immoral. Full stop. Even Joe Biden in one of his lucid moments should see that.