Biden’s student debt plan is a Dem version of "trickle-down" economics

Obviously, it would be nice to give money to everyone. Even investment bankers would probably be glad to have $10,000 shaved off their debt. But we live in a world of finite resources. Surely the past two years have driven home the lesson that there’s limited fiscal space and political appetite for government spending.

This should be obvious, but: A taxpayer dollar spent on one thing is a taxpayer dollar that can’t be spent on something else.

Given limited resources, distributing debt forgiveness to Wall Streeters, Big Law associates and other white-collar professionals is a less equitable use of taxpayer dollars than giving that money to, say, the non-college-educated custodians who clean their bathrooms. Instead, the custodians are being asked to effectively subsidize the debt forgiveness of people who make more money than they do.

Here’s another way to think about it: Biden just unilaterally doled out an estimated half-trillion dollars of taxpayer money. That’s slightly more than the cost of the (near-universal) stimulus checks in his 2021 American Rescue Plan. Except this stimulus went only to people who attended college — who skew much higher-income than their non-college-educated peers.