[ceejayoz]

If I'm Googling correctly, there's $1.5 trillion in US student loan debt right now. We spent about that on the F-35 thus far, and it's only an extra year and a half of the current annual deficit to pay it off entirely.

Or, to put it another way, wiping out all student debt in the US would increase the national debt about 7%. Hardly catastrophic sounding.

[gizmo686]

There is a major moral hazard in just canceling student debt. Unless it comes along with serious reform of higher education financing, the problem is just going to come back much worse because, not only did we not resolve the original cause of the problem, but now borrowers think that their debt will be erased if they wait long enough.

[ceejayoz]

Maybe you're fixing the wrong moral hazard.

Maybe forcing people into debt to pay for a necessary education is the moral hazard, and we could pay off that debt and publicly fund secondary education like most of the rest of the developed world already does.