Clock ticks for Biden on college debt bomb | Will Bunch Newsletter

For the first time in 68 long years, baseball’s A’s (or Athletics, if you will) are opening up their season where they belong, in their true home of Philadelphia. Yeah, sure, there’ve been some detours to Kansas City and Oakland on their long strange trip since the inglorious 1954 season, but the ghosts of Connie Mack, Jimmie Foxx, and Shibe Park will loom large when they face our Phillies Friday. Play ball!

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PS: If you missed the first installment of The Will Bunch Culture Club last week, it’s not too late to watch and tell me what you thought at [email protected]. Plus, read below to see how you can suggest a topic for the next edition!

Like millions of other Americans who came of age in the 21st century, Annette Deigh, a 42-year-old licensed clinical social worker, knows what it was like to start adulthood with the weight of a huge student loan. Moving from Philadelphia to suburban Morton in Delaware County in search of better schools for her two young children, Deigh said paying down her $56,000 loan loomed over every decision, including signing her daughter up for gymnastics.

Today, Deigh knows that she is luckier than many of her peers, as her employer is finally helping bring her student debt down toward zero. Yet she still burned a day off from work Monday for a long bus ride to D.C., where she stood outside the U.S. Department of Education with a sign reading “Cancel That Jawn,” joining hundreds of protesters in urging President Biden to wipe out all — or at least a big chunk — of the nation’s $1.7 trillion higher-ed debt with one stroke of his pen.

“I’m a social worker, and we don’t just think about ourselves,” Deigh told me Monday night by phone, on her bus journey back to Philadelphia with other members of the Debt Collective as well as Philadelphia City Council member Kendra Brooks of the Working Families Party, who addressed the rally in Washington. To Deigh and most others who attended Monday’s protest, debt relief “is a racial justice issue” — since studies show the burden has fallen disproportionally on Black and brown families striving for a middle-class life.

Monday’s protest offered a glimpse into the increasingly fraught stakes over student debt, both for the 45 million individuals with outstanding government loans but also for President Biden and the Democratic Party ahead of November’s midterm election — since so far the party controlling the White House and (just barely) Capitol Hill has failed to deliver on the ambitious promises made to young voters in the 2020 campaign.

Between now and May 1, Team Biden faces a critical decision on whether to resume monthly federal student debt payments, which have been on hold since the start of the pandemic two years ago. Top aides say the president hasn’t decided whether to stick with payment resumption, continue to extend the moratorium as happened in 2021, or finally go ahead with a more ambitious move toward at least partial debt forgiveness.

Biden’s dilemma poses huge implications for the still-recovering post-COVID economy — so far the debt repayment freeze has pumped an estimated $200 billion back into consumer spending instead — but arguably bigger implications for the body politic, ahead of an election in which an increasingly anti-democratic Republican Party is poised to re-take Congress.

Young voters broke strongly for Biden against Donald Trump in 2020, and arguably provided his margin of victory in key battleground states. But today, the latest CNN poll shows the president’s approval rating with voters in the 18-34 age bracket is only 40%, believed to be the largest drop-off among any voting bloc. Ask a young voter why, and a common answer is Biden’s inexplicable failure to keep that promise from his 2020 campaign, to sign an order to eliminate at least $10,000 of each individual’s federal debt load.

“I honestly believe if he doesn’t take substantial action ... that could be the make-or-break decision in terms of what the House and Senate look like [next year],” Thom Clancy, a 32-year-old therapist with a community mental-health agency, who lives in Port Richmond, told me by phone from the bus of protesters. Like many under-35 voters, Clancy has been watching his student debt load move in the wrong direction — $80,000 when he earned his master’s degree from Bryn Mawr College in 2017, but more than $100,000 today.

Not every American struggling with student debt fits the stereotype of a 20-something recent grad living in their parents’ basement. Indeed, one of the Philly protesters on Monday was 66-year-old Irving Jones of West Oak Lane, who borrowed money in his middle-age to earn two master’s degrees at the University of the Arts and a Philadelphia seminary, and still owes $203,000. He said he’s never been able to find work that would bring in enough money for all the dollars he borrowed. “I couldn’t keep up,” Jones conceded. “I wasn’t employed long enough.”

But while there are 45 million Americans who still owe student debt, you are likely to hear almost as many arguments why massive loan forgiveness is a terrible idea — either morally or politically, or for some other reason. Absolving everyone who took on debt to get an education is grossly unfair, critics argue, to those who never borrowed money in the first place or who worked diligently to pay their loans off. And what about the 63% of American adults who never earned a four-year degree — what’s in it for them?

But for the debtors who took part in Monday’s protest and their allies, college-debt forgiveness on a massive scale is the first step toward a much bigger societal goal — treating higher education not as an individual crucible but as a public good that benefits everyone, by creating better-informed citizens and more productive workers.

“Market logic doesn’t have a place in higher-education policy,” Clancy said, noting that his friends and co-workers went into social work to help their neighbors, but instead got walloped with a huge bill that’s all on them. It’s a powerful argument, but advocates like the Debt Collective know they face an uphill battle and are already planning their next move if Biden does reinstate the payments in May: a debt strike.

“It’s not like ‘The Silent Generation,’” Deigh said of her younger allies in the movement. “They will do something about it. They are fearless.”

Question: What is Putin’s endgame in Ukraine, and what happens if it eventually becomes clear that Russia will not gain territorial control there? — Via Andrew Benowitz (@abbenowitz) on Twitter

Answer: Andrew, it seems clear that the next 30 days or so could be decisive — leading up to May 9, which is when reports suggest Vladimir Putin had grandiose visions of celebrating a sweeping victory in Ukraine on the anniversary of the USSR’s 1945 triumph over Nazi Germany. And the key battleground will be the regions in the east of Ukraine such as Donbas that the Russian dictator insisted was his real objective all along — even as his troops were getting whupped in greater Kyiv. Putin might take territorial gains in the east — which is rich in energy resources — and call it a day, leaving the rest of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine intact. But the world’s growing anger over Russian war crimes makes it less likely other nations will let Putin be “the decider” of the conflict.

The first installment of the Will Bunch Culture Club last Wednesday won’t be the last, because the day was a rousing success. We had a great virtual crowd watch on Inquirer Live as I spoke with Garrett M. Graff, author of Watergate: A New History, about his new book and the meaning of the 50th anniversary of America’s greatest political scandal. If you missed the program, you can watch a replay of it here.

Here is one highlight as Graff answered a question from one of our online viewers — hbsherm61, who asked:

Do you think the Trump impeachment had the same impact on the country that Nixon’s possible impeachment did?

Graff’s response:

I don’t think it did, and in part because of the obvious difference that Nixon’s potential impeachment removed him from office in a way that Trump powered right through. And that to me was the moment I decided to write this Watergate book – to try to understand what about Washington was different then as opposed to now, and how was a corrupt and criminal president removed from office in the 1970s …

To me what makes Watergate so interesting from start to finish is that it becomes this incredible story of how power works in Washington, and all of the levers and checks and balances that had to come together — from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — Article 1, Article 2, Article 3 — the FBI, the Justice Department, the House, the Senate, the District Court, the Appeals Court, the Supreme Court and the executive branch … to force the president from office.

The shortest possible answer to the difference between then and now is that you see that the Republicans in Congress in the 1970s acted as members of Congress first and Republicans second … They understood that Congress was a co-equal branch of government, that Congress has a role in holding the executive branch to account — providing oversight and keeping presidential power in check … The biggest difference we saw with House and Senate Republicans in both Trump impeachments is that Republicans acted first as Republicans and not as members of Congress.

We’re already thinking ahead to the next installment, sometime this coming summer. Do you know about a new book, podcast, documentary or some other cultural doodad that might appeal to readers of The Will Bunch Newsletter? Make a suggestion by writing to me at [email protected]. I love hearing from you.