It'd be one thing if people were talking about student loan forgiveness through gritted teeth: "This is really, truly crappy way to accomplish our broader goals, but we have to do something and it's the only option without Senate control"

But for most people on twitter it's just naïve maximalism - the more things the government does, the better. Larger is better. All govt spending/debt forgiveness is good and the only way it's bad is if it could have been bigger.

Student debt forgiveness is *at minimum* very poorly targeted to the poorest members of society, or those hit hardest by COVID.

And depending on the details of the proposal, it could be outright regressive, burdening society as a whole to give money to the well-off.

It's also not clear it would work well at all as a stimulus - it's not a lump sum of money in the bank today. It's 'future debt obligation that would have taken years to pay off now gone'. The fiscal multiplier is likely very, very low.

There's something ironic about the Dems doing this.

"I am the party of understanding & caring about inequality" say the Dems as they drop a trillion dollars, very little of which will hit the least educated members of society (who are the most left behind in today's economy).

This isn't going to make us super popular, because twitter trends to the left, trends towards maximalism, and *massively* over-indexes on young, highly educated people.

But I think it's still true that this is a very poor welfare effort.

Maybe it's better than doing literally nothing, but that's not the dominant framework for the conversation. And I'm not going to shut up about how much better almost any other welfare/bailout spending would be.