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by mech765
1208 days ago
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In today's inflationary environment, forgiving the loans will have an effect of increasing the money supply (roughly-quantity of dollars in circulation). Even if nobody ever pays increased taxes because of the loan forgiveness, everybody has to take on the burden of somewhat higher inflation to make up for it. |
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Let me put it this way: if you truly believe that this student loan forgiveness will have a significant effect on the overall inflation rate of the United States, that just proves how incredibly burdensome this student loan debt is on the debtors.
On the other hand, the debt was never going to be all repaid immediately anyway. We're just talking about resuming regular payments, as it was before the pandemic started. If the debt is not forgiven, it would still take many years, even decades, for it to be paid back, and thus wouldn't be a massive contributor to current inflation. Current debtors have only saved a couple years worth of payments. In a sense, the "inflationary damage" has already been done by the pandemic suspension of payments (begun by the previous administration).
Anyway, it's strange to think of something like higher food prices as caused by people having too much money, because food is a necessity, and nobody should go hungry for lack of money.
It is true that the US has an obesity problem, but it's not caused by people having too much money either, otherwise the richest would be the most obese, and the poorest would be the least obese, but that's not the case. Moreover, if "luxury", non-necessary foods were driving inflated food prices, then that would be a kind of self-limiting phenomenon, might even be considered good and healthy. That doesn't seem to be the case either though.