Plain English with Derek Thompson - Should We Cancel Student Debt?

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Americans owe $1.7 trillion in student loans, and some Democrats think the time has come to cancel this burden. Derek shares 10 big student-loan facts that shape the debate. Then Jordan Weissmann of Slate joins the podcast to talk about the proposal to cancel student debt, the best arguments for and against it, the modern history of student loans, and their economic and psychological burden. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jordan Weissmann Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Head into the Ringerverse to stay up to date with all things superheroes and nerd culture entertainment. Hosted by a rotating lineup of super fans at The Ringer, including Mallory Rubin and Van Lathen, shows will provide instant reactions to blockbuster releases, insightful backstories on canon, and mind-bending theories, as well as fresh takes on the latest news and rumors. Check out the Ringerverse on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today I want to talk about the student debt crisis and the debate over whether to forgive or cancel a huge chunk of student debt.

This issue is either a perfect subject for plain English or a terrible subject for this podcast because it's really, really complicated. This is a story about finance, about macroeconomics, about debt burdens, progressivity versus regressivity and public policy. But in the biggest picture, this is a story about the American dream. It's about how we as a country treat people who want to move ahead in the world and how too often American policies punish people that they mean to reward. Because this issue can be so emotional, I thought it might be best to begin in the realm of facts.

So here are 10 facts about student debt in this country. Fact number one, how big is it? Well, in 2006, when I was smack dab in the middle of my college education, there was about $500 billion of student loan debt. That was a lot. Today there's $1.7 trillion. The difference is equal to the total amount of credit card debt in America. To state this very plainly, since I went to college, U.S. student debt has increased by an

amount equal to total U.S. credit card debt. That is insane. Fact number two. Why is this number growing so fast? I could do like a 30-minute segment on this. I probably will do a whole episode on this later on. The upshot is that more people are going to college, and college costs are rising faster than basically any other service in America. So more people trying to access an increasingly unaffordable product equals a shit ton of debt.

Fact number three. How many people have student loans? Well, among households led by someone between 25 and 38, basically millennials, about 40% of those households have student loans. That number, by the way, has doubled since the 1990s. Fact number four, how much do they owe? The median, typical student debt for college grads, is about $20,000. The average that you sometimes see reported is about twice as high, close to $40,000. You're like, why is the average so much higher than the median? And that brings us to fact number five. It's higher because one third of student debt, one third is held by the 6% of borrowers who owe more than $100,000. Now, those stories, people who owe more than $100,000, of student debt. They often take up a lot of airspace in the media. They're more likely to be cover stories in the Wall Street Journal in New York Times. It's an important part of the picture, but remember, it's 6% of the pie. Fact number six, what groups are most likely to have debt? It's black students and for-profit students. Black borrowers on average owe 40% more than

white borrowers, and students at for-profit colleges also owe 40% more than those that attend public and private schools. Fact number seven, who defaults on their student loans most often? This is a really important fact, because if you default on your student loans, it makes it very difficult for you to get loans to buy a car or a house later. And again, we're looking at the same population. Black borrowers, borrowers at for-profit schools, both default on their loans more than twice as much as other students.

Fact number eight, this isn't just an undergraduate phenomenon. In fact, more than 50% of student debt in this country is owed by graduate school borrowers. They also tend to account for a higher share of people who owe $60,000, $120,000. Sometimes it's people that went to law school, went to medical school. Fact number nine, student debt cannot be measured by that first number that I gave you exclusively. It's not just about the $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans. student loans also shape moving decisions, marrying decisions, they delay adulthood, they make it harder for people to buy a car or a home or even launch a business. So the spillover effects,

both in life and in the economy of that $1.7 trillion student loan amount, are pretty large. And finally, fact number 10, student debt is a problem, and some Democrats want to cancel it. And that brings us to the meat of today's episode. with Joe Biden's presidential agenda coming undone by the week, there are some Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and AOC that are urging the president to put student loan forgiveness front and center. They claim that the president has the legal ability enshrined in the Higher Education Act of 1965

to wipe away any amount of student debt that he wants with a mere signature. Should Joe Biden cancel the debt? Can he cancel student debt? And what would happen if he did? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Today's guest is Jordan Weissman.

Jordan is a senior editor at slate.com. He's also a writer on politics, economics, and public policy. Jordan used to write for the Atlantic, and then he left me. Jordan, hello. Thanks for having me, man. So Elizabeth Warren, other Democrats like AOC, They're talking about canceling student debt. What does this plan look like?

I mean, in short, it's really simple. It's that Joe Biden should just cancel the debt just with a pen, just on his own, unilaterally. And from there, we can get much more deep into the weeds, but that's really the long and the short of it. Warren has been arguing since her presidential campaign that the president essentially has the authority on their own to cancel all of the outstanding,

federal student loans that are currently on the books. So most of the time the government is sending money to people, and obviously if student debt is canceled, that's a little bit like sending money to people, you need Congress to do this, right? Like Biden's relief bill, $14, $100 checks, that was a bill passed through Congress. You want to expand a tax credit for kids. That's a bill that has to go through Congress. But this is a very, very unusual case where Biden can arguably, and I want to stress arguably

because it is an argument and not necessarily a point of legal fact, that Biden can just like wave the magic wand of executive power, as you said, take out the pen and cancel hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt by himself. How does that work? How is this something that Biden can do alone? That's a good question. And there are some brilliant legal minds in the Biden administration and outside of it contemplating this right now. But so I want to say, kind of reemphasize what you said, which is this is one side of the argument. But the Higher Education Act, kind of the the bill or the statute that sets up the federal student loan program has this provision in it, which basically gives the Department of Education the ability, the option to settle or compromise

or essentially forgive some amount of student debt. And what it doesn't say is it doesn't put any kind of a cap on it. It doesn't say you can forgive up to this amount. It doesn't say in these circumstances, just as you have this ability. And this, you know, at one point, some legal scholars kind of noticed this, this little feature of the law and said, hey, we think this gives the president, the authority just wipe out all this debt. And then Elizabeth Warren went to some scholars at Harvard and got a legal opinion from them. And they said, yeah, we think this gives the president the ability to unilaterally just clear out all of this debt. And, you know, I should qualify what I said before, which is that right now, you know, Democrats in Congress are calling for President Biden to

forgive up to $50,000 per person, right? They're not calling for all of the debt. But there have been different versions of this argument made where, you know, some people on the left would like all of the debt to be wiped out. The, I guess, center-left version we should say now, is to forgive up to $50,000 per debtor. But the core of it remains the same, which is that this is something supposedly that Biden can just do on his own. The executive function here, the fact that Biden can do this on his own is really important because Biden is in a moment right now where he's had like a woke up on the wrong side of bed day that's lasted nine months.

Other than Trump, his net approval rating is like the lowest of any president, I think, at this point other than Harry Truman. His main piece of economic legislation, the build back better bill is on life support. We had Jim Fallows in the pod last week to talk us through the Democrats' voting rights bill, which failed to overcome a filibuster. You've got inflation in the economy. Amicron it's doing his Amicron thing. It's not letting Biden off the hook entirely to say this is just a shitty time to be president

because the universe is throwing one wrench after another. And if I'm the administration, I'm looking at all this thinking, what can we do that gets around the wrenches that doesn't rely on Senator Mansion, Senator Sinema, Republican senators, Chinese supply chains, Amacron subvariants, what can we do alone by ourselves that can immediately help people and be politically popular. And this might be that something. So what is the latest you're hearing from people

in the administration or around the administration about the state of student debt cancellation? I haven't personally heard much. People I talked in the administration haven't brought it up lately. But, you know, I'm not plugged into the very highest levels of Biden's inner circle. Here's where the debate is right now publicly.

the Democrats in Congress, including Warren, and I should say Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, are calling on Biden to do some sort of student debt forgiveness, up to $50,000. The Biden administration, a long while back, said it was going to produce a memo on whether or not it actually had the legal authority to do this. And we'll get into why there's some questions about it in a bit. But that was back in the spring. And since then, there's just been no real word of what's actually in this memo. And so you're starting to hear this rallying cry of release the memo. It's sort of like the release the Snyder cut of student debt advocates right now.

They want Biden to release the memo and see what it says. And has the administration concluded that it does or doesn't have this authority? And so that's where this argument about executive authority is at this moment. Okay, let's build the case for and against student debt forgiveness. I want us to basically pretend to be like the defense attorney for this idea and then the prosecutor against this idea. And then later we'll render our decisions as judges. But let's imagine that we are drafted as the lawyer who's tasked to represent the best possible argument for student debt forgiveness. Jordan, where would you begin?

Do you want me to make an emotional argument or just like a really clinical argument? Why don't you make the emotional argument first and then you can make the clinical argument? argument. Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of people who feel like a student debt's just crippled a generation, right? If you've been paying 10% of your income or more or 15% whatever percent year after year, it's just exhausting, you know, especially given just everything else going on in the world, that's the emotional argument, right? It just feels that it's albatross on a whole generation of Americans, you know, that previous generations didn't really have to deal with. So the emotional side is, yay, millennials, you did everything right. Here's your reward.

1.7 trillion dollars worth of student loans. What is the clinical side? The clinical part of me has tried to really think through this argument as carefully as possible. And I think there are two ways you can frame it. There's one which is sort of this notion that, you know, it's fundamentally unfair to make people pay for college, that like education should be a right. The other argument, which I personally feels a little bit more compelling, is that in a lot of ways the federal government has acted as sort of a predatory lender over the past 20, 30 years. The student loan program essentially gives out money to kids, 18-year-olds, no questions asked. You don't need a credit score. You don't really need anything. You just need to be going to school.

And it doesn't even ask questions about the kind of school you're going to. So it will essentially lend anybody money to go to sort of a fly-by-night-for-profit school, a not very good private school that charges way too much for the education it's offering to, you know, all sorts of institutions that don't necessarily offer students much bang for their buck and leave them off in some the cases, worse off than they were before they went to school. You know, famously, it's almost impossible. Impossible, it might be overstating it, but it's extremely difficult to discharge your student loans in bankruptcy, right? And so if you think about the federal government as sort of this, you know, predatory lender in some respects, then yeah, it needs to make right by some

people. It needs to fix this situation. It's sort of created. So to summarize, number one, it's just wrong. College education is a necessary ticket into the middle class and upper middle class, and we shouldn't force people to go deep in a debt to access the upper middle class. Number two, it's an emotional and economic albatross on this generation, which previous generations have not necessarily had to suffer. And number three, I'd take your point that the government has essentially acted as a predatory lender, saddling people with debt for programs that weren't particularly good. So they were buying fools gold. They were going into debt for a degree that didn't actually help them in the labor force. I think those are pretty good from an

economic and emotional standpoint. I would add to the case for student debt forgiveness to political arguments. Number one, it's pretty good politics in an economic year when Biden is losing young voters. Like, Biden's net approval rating is lowest among people under 45, and it's plunging fastest for people under 30. Well, guess what's true about people under 45, and especially people under 30? They have the most student debt. They care the most about student debt.

They are most likely to maybe support you or support your party if you are seen as canceling student debt. Number two, student debt burden is particularly high among non-white Americans, particularly among black Americans. And there is a debate within the Democratic Party that I know you're extremely familiar with between, I guess you could say, like, the woke part of the Democratic Party, the CRT part of the Democratic Party that talks a lot about racial inequity, and the sort of class-based socialism aspect of the Democratic Party, which says we should focus more in class than we should on race. Well, if you want to pass a law or achieve a policy that helps a class of Americans,

but disproportionately helps black Americans, canceling student debt is a pretty good policy that achieves that end. According to the Brookings Institution, a think tank, four years after graduation, the average black college graduate owes $53,000 in debt compared to the average white graduate who owes $28,000 in debt. So those, I think, are two political arguments for the cancellation of student debt that you can sort of layer on top of the economic arguments that you laid out. Anything you want to add before we throw off the defender 3P suit and don the prosecutorial suit before we try to shred the arguments that we just laid out? Exactly. I mean, I think it's worth emphasize or reemphasizing the point you just brought up about kind of racial equity

and the disproportionate burden of student debt on black families. And I think that that's part of what's making this issue even more emotionally charged is that there's a sense among black college graduates that it's so hard for black people to get ahead in this country, period, right? Right. Like, we put so many weights on black people just to get into the middle class, right? It's just like, it's a fight. And then on top of it, once they go to college and they want to kind of secure their place in the middle class, they're going to end up with, having to take on even more loans that will be harder for them to kind of start saving and

generate and kind of creating the sort of generational wealth that white families already have because they have to borrow so much for school that staff from the brookings institute um you quoted a lot of that that increase in debt um among black people after graduation is because they have to borrow so much to go to grad school which white people can kind of pay for with combination of family support and um you know, other financial resources. If a black person in America wants to go to grad school, they are just much, much, much more likely to go deep into debt. And so I think, again, that this sense of unfairness

is especially acute among black voters. So, all right, now the other side of the argument, the best objections to a student debt jubilee. Let me get us started with a quick overview of what I consider the best objections, and then maybe you can fill in some of the details. Number one, what you're going to hear from economists, what you're going to hear from sort of the center left and center right,

is that it is regressive that most of the benefits from a student debt cancellation will go to the top 50%, maybe even the top 20, 30% of earners. One reason for that is that a lot of people who graduate from college turn out to be high income. In fact, that's one of the reasons to go to college, is to earn more. And so if you forgive student debt, you might be disproportionately rewarding white-collar workers doctors, lawyers, people that have taken on student debt and now are earning $100,000,

number two, it doesn't do much in the long term to solve the underlying problem of rising college costs. If you have a one-time jubilee, a one-time cancellation of student debt, how are you solving the problem for someone who starts college this September? How are you solving the problem for people who start college any time in the next decade? You're not. You just have this. extremely acute solution to a chronic problem. Number three, people will say, oh, it's unfair to people that have already paid back their loans or never went to college.

You're going to needlessly anger those that have gone through the student loan repayment process. And finally, I think that clicks into a political argument against student debt cancellation, that a lot of outstanding debt, as I've already pointed out, is held by doctors, lawyers, high-earning, white-collar workers, and that might be a political liability. You can imagine Fox News in a world where Joe Biden wields the power of the pen and cancel student debt, saying, Republicans are the party of small business owners, carpenters, minors, people who never went to college, salt to the earth, and Democrats, this party of the

college elite are just handing out a trillion dollars to people with student debt from going to college. That's unfair. They are especially benefiting people who aren't you. Tell me which of those issues strikes you and what you want to build on if we're building the objections to the student debt jubilee. You're making me pick one. So I've written, I mean, I've written about all these objections at some point or another. And I should say my, and will reveal where I stand on student debt cancellation near the end of this episode, I'm sure. But I, you know, I've gone back and forth in this issue over time. And in part because of all the things you've mentioned here, I mean, it doesn't take a lot to imagine, like, the face that Tucker Carlson would make as he does a segment on this.

Well, he only has one face. So in fact, it's very easy to imagine the furrowed brow and the eyebrows touching each other in the middle of the face. Yes. It's like, Joe Biden wants to forgive $350,000 of debt for this neurosurgeon. Meanwhile, you're working hard down at the car wash. Like at the, you know, to, it's just like, it doesn't, you don't have to think very far to, or hard, you don't have to think very hard to figure out how it's going to play in certain audience, with certain audiences. And, you know, I think if you look at the polling on student debt forgiveness, and I'm going to admit it, I haven't, I haven't checked it too recently. There's probably been more bowls on this since the last night with, but it pretty consistently gets like above 50% approval, right, from the general public. It pulls pretty decently. It pulls better than like the giant tax cut that Republicans passed back when Donald Trump was in office. You know, it's not a bad issue overall if you take issue polling seriously. The problem is it's probably going to generate really strong feelings among certain, you know, on both sides. Like the people are happy with it are going to be thrilled, right? Like it changes their financial lives. But the people are unhappy about it. I mean, you can imagine sort of like a new, I mean, even in even more.

so than already exists. You can imagine sort of like an angry Tea Party-esque reaction to this, right? Like, you know, this could be like a central issue for, you know, MAGA, for MAGA America. And so it's, you know, politically, it's, it's tough, right? It could make young voters happy, but it could also just usher in a backlash. And it's hard to predict exactly how that's going to play out. You can just kind of guess at it. Could you talk a little bit about the regressive aspect, because this is something, you talk to a lot of economists, and this is an issue that I would say centrist and center-left economists talk about a lot, that what Democrats should do, capital D-democrats should do, is pass policies that are progressive. That is to say that the policy disproportionately helps

those at the bottom of the income ladder. But canceling student debt is disproportionately benefiting people that often have graduated from college and therefore are higher earning. And so this might be a regressive policy. It might benefit the rich more than the poor. Just why do you spell out a little more about what that argument is and even how much it connects to you? I think you're spelling it out pretty well, right? Like, I mean, I can go through the numbers. And I should say it's actually, we know shockingly little about how student debt is really distributed, like who really holds it. Like, our data on student debt are just terrible. Like, it's, like, I, there, for a long time, we didn't, like, the Department of Education

had just, like, never even published how much it collected in student loan payments every year. Like, it just, it didn't publish that statistic. You'd think that would be, yeah, I had to, like, dig and fight and, like, beg the Department of Education to tell me what that number was. And eventually they did. But, like, you know, it's just like, that's just a small example. But in general, yes. if you look at, you know, one study that I liked kind of suggested that the top 40% of earners

probably hold about 60% of the student debt, right? So if you canceled all of the debt, right, it would probably be a bit regressive like you're saying. Like, you know, people at the top would benefit a little bit more than people at the bottom. The reason why that argument doesn't totally connect with me anymore is because you don't have to cancel all of the debt. You could, I mean, you could means test it. You could say we're canceling debt for people who make under X amount. You could say we're canceling up to X amount like up to $10,000 or up to $20,000 or up to $50,000. And what that would do is it would prevent, you know, essentially what it would do is it would forgive the debts of a lot of people who maybe spent one or two years at a for-profit school and, you know, dropped out and didn't do very well or who went to a public college because that's what they could afford. It would wipe. out a lot of those debts, but it wouldn't wipe out the entire debts of people who went to an Ivy League law school. Right? Like it would, so it would sort of act as a version of means testing. There are ways around that issue. To me, you know, there are ways you can make it kind of essentially a middle class tax cut.

And in a lot of ways, that's what student debt is, right? It's a tax. So you could turn this into a middle tax, a middle class tax cut essentially. But again, it, the real problem is the politics, right? it's because the word debt is involved. And because some people actually have paid these debts back, it adds this emotional element to it on the fore and against side. That's just, it's kind of hard to predict and it's hard to grapple with. All right. I've done my best to represent the case for or the case against.

I think I know where I come down on this, but Jordan, where do you come down on this? I mean, I think that, look, if Joe Biden is in his... the second half of his first term and can't pass anything else, I think it would be worth considering trying it at least. I think there's a good chance that if he went for it, the Supreme Court would knock it down. We haven't really talked about the legal case against it, which I think is very important. And I think people kind of need to maybe lower their expectations here. But if he's kind of finished out his period where he can actually legislate, right? Like if we, if Democrats lose control of Congress, I see no reason why he couldn't give it a shot. I think I basically agree.

Where I come down on this, having spent a few days doing my best to familiarize myself with the cases for and against, is this is a B or B-minus plan, canceling, say, $10,000 in debt. I don't think, I think once you get to canceling $50,000 or $100,000, I think it starts to become a little bit wonky and preferential for the doctors and lawyers in the world. But the Biden plan of canceling $10,000 in debt for all borrowers, a plan that would cost about $380 billion, which is a lot, but it's not in the trillions, it's a B-to-B-B-minus plan in essentially a C-plus world, right? We don't have the option of, it seems to me, passing a big bill that fixes higher education in one fell swoop. And we don't also have the option of, at this point, passing the billback

better plan or voting rights act that Biden wants to pass with, larger congressional majorities. So if this is basically the best that he can do to be seen as trying to help the American middle class, then it's better to help the American middle class than to not help them. So I think that's where I finally come down, is that I do lightly support the Biden version of this plan. Is there any other important aspect of student debt cancellation that I haven't asked about or that people are missing? You know, about the idea of just canceling $10,000 of debt. Some people hear that and they're like, oh, that's nothing because they think of like these huge student debt balances. Like they think of all these, you know, people have $100,000 in loans.

Well, what about them? But, you know, if you look at all 42 million Americans who actually have student debt right now, about a third of them have balances below $10,000, right? So if you were to wipe that, I mean, you would, you would, and then another 20% have balances between 10,000 and 20,000. So if you were to cancel 10,000 of it, you would be essentially wiping out all to half of the debt for about 50% of borrowers. I mean, that's, or a little bit more than 50% of borrowers. So that would be, it would do significant amounts of good to, if Biden were to actually enact, you know, his plan by executive action. But that gets us back to this question. He said, is there anything else people need to know about student debt forgiveness that we

haven't really talked about. And that's the legal case against it, why it might not work, why the Supreme Court might just slap it down. And I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but I occasionally talk to them. I'm not a lawyer. I know a very little bit. But, you know, the problem is that this would be a, we should say, creative reading of the statutes that exist right now. No one actually thinks that, you know, Congress wrote this part of the Higher Education Act with the idea in mind that some president would come along and cancel all of the loans. You know, it was really meant for, you know, settling individual debts when someone had defaulted and they were trying to collect in court and if they were trying to arrive at some sort of settlement, right? And so the question is,

could the administration then go and creatively leverage this vaguely written statute to then do this massively important economic thing? And the Supreme Court recently, And we've seen a little bit of this in the recent case on workplace vaccination mandates. The Supreme Court is really kind of souring on that idea, that they actually want to stop. This conservative Supreme Court we have wants to stop presidents from being able to take this kind of bold executive action based on vaguely worded statutes. And there's, it's actually, this is a major, major issue. If you talk to constitutional lawyers right now in the entire legal world, how they are trying to essentially kind of kind of, they're trying to rein in. in the executive. They're trying to prevent administrative agencies from kind of doing these

sorts of things. And, you know, the way Antonin Scalia once put it very famously is that the the Supreme Court does not allow the federal government to put elephants through mouse holes. That was his kind of memorable phrase for it. And the idea is that you can't use like a tiny little, like vague part of a law to try and then enact massive economic change. And that more and more seems to be becoming the sort of philosophy of the court. And so it seems very likely that the court would treat this as an elephant trying to be put, like they would treat this as Biden trying to push an elephant through a mousehole and say, no, you can't just use this one little line in this law to try and erase $1.6 trillion worth of debt.

Yeah, I think we can both agree that no matter where you stand on this issue, the president and his Secretary of Education, unilateral, handing out up to a trillion dollars through the cancellation of student debt is definitely putting an elephant through a mouse hole. You could argue it's necessary to shove elephants through mouse holes because nothing is happening in Congress.

We can't pass laws anymore because the filibusters become an endemic virus in American politics. But this is not exactly how the original education bill was intended. I want to close on America in the world of education. How exceptional is American student debt?

Because it seems to me that there are a lot of other countries that are as rich as us or poorer than us that don't quite seem to have the same student debt crisis that we do. Are we the only country that treats education this way? We're not the only country where students go into debt for higher education. are parts of Scandinavia, there are, you know, Australia people take on loans. You know, we're not the only country in the world that's like this. And there are also downsides, you know, to be in a country where higher education is essentially entirely state-funded and free

or close to it. You know, a lot of European university systems are sort of like metza-metza. They're not great. Like one upside to the U.S. system is that a lot of money goes into higher education and we have like great research institutions partly because of it. it's also in part because we spend a lot of federal funding on research at these universities, but it's also just because, you know, they can explore and find other revenue streams and get revenue from students. So there are, there are upsides, you know, in terms of like quality of the schools to what we do. That said, there are, you know, other countries have found more sane ways to run student debt programs. Like, that's, that's something is like, our student debt program is just, like,

horribly, it's just like a bureaucratic nightmare to deal with, right? That's part of what makes it so charged. It's like trying to pay your loans is hard in a lot of cases if you ever have to deal with a student debt servicer. Whereas like in Australia famously, you know, they have this system where everyone kind of pays a percentage of their income for X number of years and then they get the rest forgiven, right? And just everyone does that. And for a long time, I thought it would be good for the U.S. to go to, you know, we have debt payment programs like that. You can choose to do something like that, but they're complicated. A lot of people don't know about them. You're not automatically put in it. I mean, as with everything in the U.S. States, it just involves a lot of confusion and paperwork.

And so I think there would be ways to simplify and make our student debt system a lot more fair that are also not quite so galaxy-brained. They're actually just like what other countries do. So, yeah, we could try to follow like the, you know, social democratic model of just, you know, funding schools directly so they don't have to charge tuition, or we could just make a less insane student debt system, period. And there isn't really much effort to do either right now, which is what's frustrating. And so why I'm sort of sitting here saying, yeah, if nothing comes of it, then maybe Biden should just try to break out the pen and see if the Supreme Court will let him. Jordan Weissan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for having me. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review us. New episode drops on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.