Saw this article a couple days ago and got suspicious.
If you read the report, it seems like you could easily change the headline to say it would benefit low and middle class income families mostly over upper class. Lumping middle with high seems pretty disingenuous, especially when you see that 50k forgiveness would forgive the complete debt for ~90% of families in the four lower quintiles and only 2% of the highest quintile. They seem to be basing this all on the first quintile getting a smaller percentage of the overall dollars forgiven, but it's not exactly surprising that lower incomes would have maybe attended cheaper universities or community colleges. And someone in that bracket getting their debt fully forgiven still is a huge relief even if the dollar amount is smaller than some high incomes.
And I find the quintiles they chose to be pretty weird?
Quintile 1: $12k-$25k Quintile 2: $25k-$39k Quintile 3: $39k-$57k Quintile 4: $57k-$89k Quintile 5: $89k+
It seems like they are only considering the 1st quintile lower class. And I guess that's technically correct in regard to the out of touch poverty lines, but it's not like the quintiles 2-4 are living large, especially since these seem to be household incomes and especially if you factor in high cost of living areas.
I didn't inspect this super closely or anything, but it seems like a pretty shit analysis on a quick glance other than acknowledging that forgiving debt now and not fixing issues like the increasing tuition of universities or costs of text books would mean future college students would face the same issues.
Maybe I'm missing something, and if so feel free to point it out!
Who reads this headline and doesn’t think: “don’t the middle and upper classes already benefit from everything else?”
Just throw me a bone for once. Holy fuck.