Basically all of those questions were rhetorical, attempts to be illustrative about how arbitrary this appears. Let me be crystal clear: I think helping the poor is the mark of a civilized society. That's one of the main reasons I continue to vote democrat despite my best judgement. I think helping a relatively rich person become relatively richer is not my mission. I am against the mortgage interest deduction, and I think the SALT limitation from Trump's tax plan is one of the very few of his policies I can point to that was grounded in good reason (even though he probably liked it because it fucked blue state residents harder--sometimes the blind squirrel finds that nut after all).

I say all this to point out that I'm not reflexively against things that don't directly benefit me, even if I can confess to a level of sour grapes, having gone to community college for 3 semesters on a tiny scholarship, then transferring to a third rate state school while working as a night janitor at a restaurant all in service of not accruing onerous debts, but I digress.

I am disappointed in this decision for two main reasons, one specific and one general, and I will try to articulate them below.

First the specific. That is what I was getting at with the not-so-rhetorical questions above. There are plenty of people who play the lotto and lose. I do not feel any amount of grief for someone who racked up $100k in debt getting that FIT degree in textile design only to find that their job prospects may include folding clothes at Old Navy. Sorry to sound like a republican there, but learn the market before your journey of self-discovery. There are plenty of ways of making it in the world that don't require accruing massive debts. Beyond that, however, is that fact that most people with tons of college debt are doctors and lawyers and management consultants, exactly the type of people who don't need the help, even if they're in the dawn of their career and may be below the 125k cutoff. This edict is arbitrary and arbitrary is exactly what the law is supposed to not be.

Want to help people? Take the bottom two quintiles and give them each $3,000. That would work out to about the same $330 billion price tag. Of course that would require an act of Congress, and literally 0 members of Congress will vote for that in an inflationary environment. But Sleepy Joe thinks he has the executive authority to do this, so he'll do this instead. Which segues into my much bigger problem with this action.

Executive authoiry.

It's out of control and getting worse with each presidency.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and if you can dream of something that democrats despise and think it immoral, but republicans love, then you can think of the next executive action that's going to occur as soon as President DeSantis decrees that it shall be. Rightness has fuckall to do with it. How about DeSantis instructing the FDA to define personhood as "heartbeat". Can he do it? Probably not 30 years ago. Today? Why the fuck not? Congress is derelict, but that doesn't mean that the president gets to fill the vacuum. Or rather, it does mean that until Congress reasserts its authority as the First Among Equals. Since at least Wilson there's been executive creep, but (much to Liberals' dismay) Obama just straight blew it up, and that clearer the way to Trump to shit on the rubble.

Executive orders are supposed to be about instructing agencies how to prioritize limited resources among the many competing interests. They're not supposed to be an alternate avenue for law-making. But that's what they've become. it has to stop somewhere, because it's ripping us further apart. Laws that can't get passed as laws shouldn't be laws. Process matters as much as substance, because process is how to help to root out arbitrariness. A dictator is literally defined by dictating what becomes law. So if a "rule" or an "order" or a "regulation" is sufficiently indistinguishable from a "law", then what the hell do we have lawmakers and representatives for? And if arbitrarily changing the terms of a contract isn't lawmaking, then I don't know what the hell is.

Look, all this isn't to say that many people got a raw deal with college. All this isn't to say that college shouldn't be a lot less expensive. And all this isn't to say that many people don't deserve a break. I just wish that we could put some effort into things that are hard, like consensus building, or needs-based forgiveness. People like teachers, police officers, nurses, other essential workers who do the shit jobs for shit pay because they love them. Those are the people, in my opinion, who we need to give a break. But if we want to do it for all, fine. Just fucking do it legally. Not because you can stretch the law to buy votes.