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Problem is Liz that it would disproportionately put money into the pockets of people who are already relatively affluent and thus have a lower marginal propensity to consume. Bad class politics AND bad Keynesianism. Do something on health-related debt or similar instead https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1334514364708237313
The emphasis that reducing tuition fees/student related costs/debt etc have gained in the platform of Left parties recently is not a good sign. It belies their new bourgeois-liberal class coalition and alienates working people without degrees who don't benefit
It's not that I'm necessarily against reducing student fees/debt etc in principle. It's that it shouldn't be a priority. The Left should make poor kids who are shafted by their economic circumstances from a very early age - and their struggling working families - its priority
All the indications are that disadvantage is baked in very young. A kid who grows up from birth with worse housing than their middle class peers, worse diet etc - and usually a more chaotic family too - is often set up to fail before they've gone to school, let alone university.
And yet the Left fixates on the gesture politics of universities: fulmination against Oxbridge/Ivy League elitism, banging on about fees and student debt etc etc. To the kids brought up on the breadline, it's all so much talk. Most of them won't even get close to university.
They need good pre-natal care. High quality early years interventions. Vocational training. Decent non-graduate jobs. Stable families. Decent wages. Unions to join who will actually deliver for them. Let's focus on those things eh?
But the reality is that the modern Left - its institutions, its activists, its party members - have little empathy for the kids who are left behind. Who grow up on sink estates in the Doncasters and Scunthorpes of this world. Whose parents really struggle to make ends meet.
They want a politics that reflects 'people like them'. Graduates from middle class backgrounds. Young professionals. Public sector managers. Guardian not Mirror. Dalston not Dagenham. White collar not blue collar.
The truth is that they have distaste for people not like them. The working class of all races, but especially the white working class, whose views they find inconvenient & who have a lifestyle & habits & values alien to theirs. It makes them feel good to look down on those people
