Bernie's Student Debt Jubilee

Bernie Sanders is announcing legislation of truly Biblical proportions: the cancellation of all $1.6 trillion of United States student debt.

The bill, with the co-sponsorship of Democratic Reps Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, would wipe the slate clean for each of the nation's 45 million student borrowers, both rich and poor, and would be paid for with a Wall Street transaction tax. As such, it goes much further than Elizabeth Warren's plan, which would means-test student debt and forgive a smaller total amount of $640 billion. The wealthy, defined as households making more than $250,000, would stay on the hook for their education loans.

In one fell swoop, therefore, Sanders's bill destroys the argument that it's unfair for the wealthy to bear the entire burden of loan forgiveness. It also renders moot their standard demand that the less well-off must always "have skin in the game" so as to avoid the dreaded moral hazard of free ridership. If the children of the wealthy also become entitled to a free higher education, then the proverbial Playing Field might truly be leveled. No student will have a leg up or a head start just by virtue of how much money the parents have, either for tuition or for "bribing" institutions of higher learning to admit their children in the first place.

Everybody would be privileged. The much-ballyhooed meritocracy might finally develop some relation to reality. Every student will legally and morally accomplish what Donald Trump has boastfully admitted on more than one occasion: that he became successful because he is one of the few privileged owners of wealth connected enough to figure out how to manipulate debt to his own advantage.

If he rails against student debt forgiveness during the presidential campaign, he'll sound like even more of a hypocrite than he already is. 

 Why do I say that the Sanders plan is Biblical? Because the forgiveness of debt goes back to the dawn of civilization. Most famously, a prophet named Nehemiah, a Babylonian Jew and the appointed governor of his native Judea, became very testy in a very Bernie-like way when he noticed that whole generations of his people were living in permanent debt bondage because of the greed of wealthy landowners. "Then I consulted with myself, and I rebuked the nobles, and the rulers. and said unto them, 'Ye exact usury, every one his brother.' And I set a great assembly against them," he wrote in the Book of Nehemiah.

So while Sanders calls his own plan to end whole lifetimes of punitive student debt peonage a "revolutionary" one, it's really an idea that is very firmly tethered to history, especially pre-democratic history. And it is also quite modest, in an FDR-style liberally democratic sort of way, given that Nehemiah's Law of Jubilee stipulated that all debts owing from the powerless to the ruling class automatically be cancelled every seven years. It was the only way to keep civilization chugging along.

As anthropologist David Graeber chronicles in the book "Debt: the First 5,000 Years" the obliteration of debt has become the result in just about every major peasant revolt in recorded history.  

And since our current oligarchic system is one of the most extremely unequal in all of recorded history, the inherent unfairness of the feudalistic American student debt crisis has become more apparent by the day, with stories abounding of retirees in their 60s and 70s having their Social Security checks garnished to satisfy their student loans, and even dying in penury, still mired in decades' worth of crushing student debt.

Since debt is premised upon two equal parties entering into a contract, the trillion-dollar financial systems which demand the lifelong servitude of powerless student borrowers are exposed not only as unequal and immoral, but criminal. Such contracts should now rightly be viewed as fraudulent and such loans as predatory. 

As Graeber points out in his book, the Old Testament debt jubilees were ordained expressly to keep the promise of the Promised Land to formerly enslaved Jews. Wouldn't Bernie's own plan similarly keep the promise of the American Dream alive for perpetually indebted college graduates? After all, higher education is marketed as a ticket to a better life, not as a ticket straight to the hell of precarious, low-wage employment in a gig economy.

Graeber writes, "Throughout most of history, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the form of pleas for debt cancellation - the freeing of those in bondage and, usually, a more just reallocation of the land."

So another consequence of Bernie's permanent Student Debt Jubilee, coupled with legislation for tuition-free courses of study at public institutions, might be that students will begin to study what they're good at and what interests them and what might make the world a better place, rather than what courses might make them the most money and enable them to pay off their student loans. In other words, art and literature, education and the social sciences might begin to vie with business and finance curricula in popularity. Institutions of higher learning might discover that it no longer behooves them to be endowed and dictated to by Wall Street, think tanks and transnational corporations. Those forgiven their debts will not, like Trump and his oligarchic cohort, have cheated the system. As co-equal beneficiaries of free higher education, they also would be less likely to then turn around and cheat their own employees and bilk their investors and pit one group of powerless people against another group of powerless people. 

Resentment and fear might go out the window, right along with the punishing debt.

A Debt Jubilee would not only be good for the country's economic health - think of the boost to the system if 45 million graduates suddenly have more money to spend on things like houses! - but our mental and moral and environmental health as well.