New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote an opinion that shouldn’t be as controversial as it is. She put it plainly in three simple words: “Cancel the debt.”

The piece highlights just how short-sighted discussions of who deserves debt forgiveness and who should reap the consequences of it really are:

“The Biden administration is now considering giving more former college students a version of the relief that the Bennett students are experiencing: debt forgiveness. A lot of people worry that debt forgiveness will spur inflation. They tsk-tsk about what it will say to people about personal responsibility. And they worry about the optics of forgiving people who partied for four years and did beer pong in the quad and blew through their parents’ credit card limits on spring break.
Those are worries of an out-of-touch chattering class. No one drank enough beer in college for the last 30 years to deserve a student loan balance that increases even as the debtor attempts to pay down the principal. The message that some people don’t deserve debt relief is a politics of grievance. If you cannot craft a political message that acknowledges that we turned the greatest vehicle of social mobility into a debt machine, then you are not good at messaging.
This is the right message: We messed up. Our bad. Make it right. Cancel the debt.”

Read the full article here.