Bernie Sanders will use a tax on Wall Street speculators to wipe out $1.6 trillion in US student debt

Bernie Sanders's latest campaign promise is a proposal to forgive all outstanding US student debt, and raising the $2.2 trillion needed over a decade to make lenders whole by taxing Wall Street speculators with a 0.5% tax on stock trades, a 0.1% fee on bonds, and a 0.005% fee on derivatives.

The debt relief would apply to any of the 46 million people currently repaying the $1.6 trillion in undergraduate and graduate loans.

Elizabeth Warren has already proposed to wipe out up to $50k per student debtor and to make state colleges tuition-free, while Sanders's Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education would comprehensively reform elementary and secondary education.

Sanders campaigned on free tuition in 2016. Republicans who support tuition-free state colleges outnumber Republicans who oppose them.

Student debt is a millstone around America's neck, producing distortions that beggar the imagination, from debt exiles who can't come back to the USA to a mundane form of "reverse affirmative action" that gives the wealthy preferential access to education and opportunity.

Some self-described progressives within the Democratic party (including would-be 2020 presidential nominee Pete Buttigieg) have campaigned against universal access to education and debt-forgiveness, arguing that the benefit should be means-tested to exclude the wealthy lest education become "irrationally cheap"; JW Mason's rebuttal: "Suppose users of Central Park are higher-income on average; is progressive policy then to fence it off and charge admission?" (in other words, if public goods disproportionately benefit the affluent, we can either strive to make them more inclusive or to recoup the cost of providing them, but not both). Read the rest