It’s starting to smell a lot like winning in the student debt cancellation. A bunch of important things happened last week
To learn more about the student debt cancellation fight, join our Campaigns Update call, tonight at 6PM EST.
First, a bombshell news story broke that confirms what we’ve been saying all along: tying student debt cancellation to income is virtually impossible. From the article: “Education Department officials have concluded that the agency is unable to cancel federal student loans based on a borrower’s income level without requiring some action from the borrower.” Such an application process would be a bureaucratic disaster, a healthcare.gov, Version 2.0, in which political good intentions backfire.
If Biden wants to make good on his campaign promise to cancel student debt – he needs to make it big, bold and universal. We shouldn’t have to prove “we’re eligible” for our unjust debts to be cancelled.
Second, the president of the AFL-CIO, the largest union federation in the United States, released a statement calling for the President to cancel student debt. This is big. And it proves another point we’ve been making for a whole: debt cancellation is a working-class issue – not an elite giveaway. One quick way Biden could give an effective pay raise to 45 million Americans would be to cancel student debt that drains hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars from workers’ paychecks each month. (If you want to be part of the push to get labor unions -and city councils- to demand debt cancellation, join our call Tues. May 17 at 7:30PM EST.)
And, finally, our talking points, The Best Answers to the Toughest Questions, dropped this week. (Congrats to all the folks at our last strategy session who worked to get this started y’all are brilliant.)
And to learn more about how the student debt fight is tied to the medical debt fight, housing debt fight, carceral debt fight, and more, join our Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay book club that begins this Wednesday.
Yours for the win,
The Debt Collective