this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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If you split the population into two demographics, those who have student loan debt and those who don't, the former category is objectively wealthier on average, over their lifetime.
Therefore, forgiving student loan debt is by definition regressive. You cannot have poorer people's money going to richer people and say it's not regressive. The ones with student debt are statistically already going to end up with a lot more money than those who don't, without the extra handout paid for by all of the other taxpayers.
So why should they be getting even more, out of the pockets of poorer people, exactly?
By this logic all public services are regressive, since everyone pays into them and there will always be someone poorer who pays in and someone wealthier who benefits. That's why progressive tax rates exist, so that the amount of tax people pay is proportional to how much they are able to contribute. Our progressive tax system only breaks down at the upper levels with the obscenely wealthy. Despite this - on average - the poor benefit the most from student loan forgiveness and the (relatively) rich contribute the most. This is because even though the rich and poor alike would have their student debt forgiven, the rich would be paying more tax to make up for it. It's really a very simple concept, and should not be so difficult for you to understand.
Now, as an extra note, if we corrected our progressive tax system to tax the obscenely wealthy at the highest possible rate (as a progressive tax system is supposed to - and used to - do), there would be absolutely no question as to where the wealth is being distributed, because the wealthiest people who currently pay little to no tax hold more wealth than the rest of us combined.
This is not a valid analogy, unless those public services went only to the wealthiest people. Student loan forgiveness goes only to college students (obviously), who are statistically the wealthiest among us, over their lifetimes.
It's like if there was a financial government benefit/incentive to buying a second house. Only the wealthiest among us are buying more than one house, so that would be an obviously-regressive policy.
The same money that would forgive the loans of college students, instead being used as grants for people who, for financial reasons, never went to college, would be put to much better use.