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MORE THAN VIBES: WHY HARRIS-WALZ SHOULD EMBRACE DEBT RELIEF  
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Anand Giridharadas
August 9, 2024
The.Ink [[link removed]]

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_ Organizer and anti-debt campaigner Astra Taylor explains how a
Harris-Walz administration could transform Americans’ lives through
debt relief, replacing the old idea of a welfare state with the idea
of a “solidarity state.” _

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The vibes, as they say, are immaculate. The joy is palpable. The
energy is real. The crowds are vast. This is what has felt missing
from the cause for some time now.

But America needs more than vibes. So, starting today, The Ink is
publishing a series of interviews with some of the smartest policy
minds out there, asking them to envision a truly bold, aggressive
Harris agenda that would materially improve people’s lives.

In a nod to Vice President Harris’s catchphrase, we’re calling the
series Unburdened. We’re not intending to serve up boilerplate ideas
that have been circulating forever or that can already be downloaded
on a website. Rather, we asked these big thinkers to dream up
transformational policies that could be, unburdened by what has been.

In the first installment of the series, we talk to organizer and
author and anti-debt campaigner Astra Taylor about her notion of
“unburdenomics”: how a Harris-Walz administration could transform
Americans’ lives through debt relief, the idea of a “solidarity
state” that replaces the old welfare state,” revolutionary new
access to college, and a better grasp of the connection between policy
and human emotion.

Don’t get us wrong. Bask in the vibes, we say. We have been
advocating for a more vibey politics for some time now at The Ink
[[link removed]]. But it’s time
for more than vibes. Here is our attempt to help envision what could
be.

Welcome to Unburdened.

AS ALWAYS, IF YOU LIKE WHAT WE DO HERE, WOULD YOU CONSIDER JOINING US
AS A SUPPORTING SUBSCRIBER? THIS IS WHAT MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR US TO
BRING YOU THIS WORK AND KEEP GOING. WE ARE GRATEFUL.

“Unburdenomics”: a conversation with Astra Taylor

LET'S SAY THE HARRIS-WALZ CAMPAIGN CALLS YOU AND THEY SAY, "HEY, WOULD
YOU LIKE TO BE OUR ADVISOR ON STUDENT DEBT AND OTHER ECONOMIC
ISSUES.” WHAT'S YOUR WISHLIST? GO BIG.

I would suggest a program I call “unburdenomics,” riffing on
Kamala Harris's motif of being unburdened by what has been, and also
her powerful emphasis on freedom.

I'm very impressed by the fact that the campaign is trying to reclaim
freedom, which I think naturally is a progressive concept. This is
something that liberals should have been owning all along, and it's
kind of a travesty that the right has been able to claim it.

Unburdenomics would be a robust program of debt relief across debt
types with the aim of liberating people from debts they have incurred
to provide themselves and their families the basic necessities of
life. So we could continue down the path of student debt relief,
really lean into medical debt relief, and add school lunch debt
cancellation to the mix.

These are all very achievable policies. These are policies that have
proven track records of success at the state and the national level. 

GOVERNOR TIM WALZ, FOR INSTANCE, HAS EXPERIMENTED IN THIS AREA PRETTY
SUCCESSFULLY

Tim Walz is making my dream of unburdenomics feel that much more real.
I mean, school lunch debt is an abomination that should not exist. I
mean, it's something that is so morally reprehensible. It's a
wonderful thing to make your opponents defend, to say, "OK, so you're
against feeding kids. You want kids to be hungry at school."
Meanwhile, what you're talking about in the classroom is banning
books, allowing folks to bring assault rifles into schools. And we're
talking about fucking feeding kids and not leaving them humiliated and
hungry with school lunch debt, which is a huge problem. Mostly in
rural school districts, actually.

The idea of unburdening is so real. So I've spent the last 10 years
organizing with debtors. When you talk to debtors, they talk about
being dragged down. They talk about debt as an anchor. They talk about
drowning. The way compound interest works is that it keeps
accumulating. The debt keeps getting heavier and heavier.

What does this do?

It has terrible effects on people's emotional well-being. It has
detrimental effects on not just their mental health but also their
physical health. And it creates all sorts of economic calamity. If you
can't pay off your student debt, and your debt to income ratio is
screwed up, and your credit score is bad, then you know you're not
going to be able to ever get a mortgage. You're going to be charged
more for other kinds of debts.

Let's say you have an emergency and you have to put something on a
credit card. You're going to be charged more for that. So it creates
cascading financial crises that are felt, of course, by people who are
the most economically disadvantaged to begin with, which is why Black
women are disproportionately burdened by student debt. So relieving
these debts has all sorts of socially beneficial consequences. It will
help what the experts call household formation. So it will help people
move out from their parents' home to start their own families, to
maybe not be renters their whole lives.

When you're not feeding your debt and you can actually save, then you
can start saving for retirement, planning for a rainy day. It
increases entrepreneurialism. People are better able to go and start
businesses or go follow their dreams.

IT MAKES YOU MORE FREE. 

On that point, over the last couple of years, as Debt Collective
[[link removed]] and other groups have taken the fight
for student debt cancellation to Washington, D.C., the opponents of
debt relief have been very, very direct about why they hate debt
cancellation. When we look at the litigation against student debt
relief, their arguments were explicitly — and this is happening now
in newer lawsuits as well as in lawsuits from the last two years —
that debt cancellation will make it harder, for example, for employers
to retain employees with the promise of slow PSLF, which is public
service loan forgiveness.

In other words, the Republicans do not like debt cancellation because
it makes people more free to leave their jobs. There were also
Republican congressmen who said, "We don't like student loan relief
because it's going to make it harder to recruit for the military." In
other words, it's going to be harder to coerce people into joining the
military. 

So they don't like the freedom that debt relief brings.

I think it would be brilliant to reframe debt cancellation broadly as
an issue of fairness, but also as an issue of freedom. To get into the
weeds a little bit, Kamala Harris is not just running for president.
She actually is the vice president right now. So to have the best
chance of implementing a policy of unburdenomics, she actually needs
to start now.

And there's a lot that a President Harris can do on medical debt
cancellation and certainly school lunch as well. And it fits into what
she's laying out as an emphasis on care economics — sort of basic
household bread and butter stuff of caring about kids, caring about
families.

In order to set people up for success, we need to ensure they're not
going to have their lives destroyed by unpayable education,
healthcare, education, and healthcare bills. And that little kids
shouldn't be shamed by not being able to pay for their meals at
school. It's just in keeping with our campaign themes and eminently
doable. Ideally, through legislation, but even without controlling the
House and the Senate.

BIDEN HAS MADE A FAIRLY STRONG SERIES OF STATEMENTS ABOUT CANCELING
STUDENT DEBT. BUT HE HAS ALSO EMPOWERED THE ANTITRUST DIVISION AT DOJ;
EMPOWERED THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION UNDER LINA KHAN. THERE’S BEEN
SOME EFFORT TO REIN IN PHARMACY BENEFIT MANAGERS. NON-COMPETES, WHICH
ARE A SIMILAR UNFREEDOM ISSUE THAT KEEPS PEOPLE IN PLACE, ARE
POTENTIALLY GOING AWAY THIS FALL. MAYBE THERE'S EVEN A BROADER
UNBURDENOMICS AGENDA THAT KIND OF COLLAPSES ALL OF THESE THINGS INTO
ONE PROJECT?

HOW COULD YOU SEE HER RIGHT NOW AS VICE PRESIDENT AND ON THE CAMPAIGN
TRAIL BUILDING A CONTINUATION OF THE BIDEN LEGACY AND TALKING ABOUT A
REAL PATH FORWARD BEYOND IT? AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE A
WORKING-CLASS PERSON ON THE TICKET IN TIM WALZ, AND SOMEONE WHO'S
EXPERIMENTED WITH THE STUFF THAT YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT AT THE STATE
LEVEL?

The Debt Collective has never been a group that's solely fighting for
debt cancellation. There's always the positive side of the equation,
which is that you solve this problem by providing the public service
that people are going into debt to access. So we have always coupled
the demand for student debt cancellation with the demand for free,
fully funded public education. We have coupled the demand for medical
debt cancellation with free, fully funded quality healthcare for
everyone.

MEDICARE FOR ALL, IDEALLY?

I don't know if that might be a non-starter in this administration,
but it's something to talk about.

Those are the solutions. If you want to unburden people, the real way
to achieve that is to actually provide these vital social services and
to stop predatory companies from burdening us with everything from
high bills to junk fees, which they impose on us through a lack of
choice. They create monopolistic scenarios where there's a lack of
competition, but we want something more than that, right? We want
robust public alternatives. Look at what happened the other day in
antitrust with the Google ruling. It's probably the biggest antitrust
decision since ever.

SINCE THE BREAKUP OF THE BELLS, I THINK.

So I think there is a way that this idea of unburdening could be
connected to attacks on these companies that are weighing customers
down with price gouging, with market capture, in a way that could be
really, really promising.

And it dovetails with Harris' track record, which she's leaning into
in her campaign ads, as someone who has the chops to go against
predatory lenders. So, for example, you know the Debt Collective, we
got our start organizing with students of Corinthian Colleges, which
is the predatory for-profit college chain that Harris investigated as
attorney general in California.

And our organizing kept the Corinthian problem on the national agenda
for seven years. And then, in 2022, as vice president, she was the
person who made the announcement that all of the student debt from
this predatory college was being erased. So it's been heartening for
us to see her lean into that in her self-narration about what makes
her a candidate — someone who can stand up against these kinds of
profiteers.

And there's so much more of that to be done. On that issue, for
example, there are a lot more predatory for-profit colleges, and the
executive branch actually has the power to cut off their federal
funding without additional legislation. I would love to see the
unburdener-in-chief go after those companies and use the full
authority that she will possess as president to stop the funneling of
public money to these predatory schools in ways that destroy people's
lives because they end up with these unpayable debts.

She can also go against predatory loan servicers that are essentially
capturing the government and capturing elected officials by making
generous campaign contributions.

And it's important to say they're on the payroll of for-profit
colleges and the student lending industry. So, yeah, I think there's a
lot of ways to make this concrete and to advance some of the progress
the Biden administration has made.

That said, I would like to see a stronger vision for higher education
from the Harris campaign. 

IF YOU ASK ANY RIGHT-LEANING VOTER, "WHICH PARTY DO YOU IDENTIFY
WITH?", YOU GET ONE ANSWER. BUT IF YOU ASK ABOUT THESE ISSUES — "DO
YOU WANT TO BE ABLE TO GO TO SCHOOL? DO YOU WANT TO HAVE ACCESS TO
HEALTHCARE? DO YOU WANT ACCESS TO ABORTION SERVICES?"  — WHATEVER
YOU NAME, THE POLLS GO IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT DIRECTION. SO IS THIS
SOMETHING THAT HARRIS OR WALZ COULD TALK ABOUT PRODUCTIVELY?

In polls I’ve seen, among Republicans, the people for whom free
college was the most popular were people without college degrees. As
people became more credentialed, they wanted to pull up the ladder
behind them and keep the status quo.

I found that really interesting, because the politics of resentment
that the right wing is assuming is a politics of resentment that
imagines millions of conservative heartland folks who don't have
college degrees wanting to stick it to the “cultural elites." And it
turns out that's a figment of the imagination of these Yale-educated
authoritarians.

In reality, at least according to some of these polls, these folks are
like, "Actually, you know what? Free college would be good. It would
be good for me. It would be good for my kids. It would be good for my
cousins. You know It would be good for people. It would be good for my
neighbors." 

And so I think there is something appealing there. In this old
neoliberal, corporate Democratic framework, what they wanted to do was
substitute educational policy for economic policy. In other words, we
don't need to do anything about the economy. We don't need to raise
the minimum wage. We don't need to strengthen unions. You just need to
get a degree, right? And then we'll fill this skills gap. And through
some magic of the market, our economic problems will be solved. 

Well, that's not how it works. You can't educate people into jobs that
don't exist. You can't educate people into employment security if
there isn't security as a matter of law and a matter of regulation, a
matter of policy.

What we need today is something that is rational, that says, Yeah, we
need people to be able to access education because all sorts of jobs
require training, but also because being educated is good for people.
It's good for society. And, also, employers should bear more of the
cost of training their employees through apprenticeship programs and
the like.

In other words, your ability to earn a decent living wage for your
family and to access things like healthcare and housing shouldn't be
contingent on you having a college degree. Or on your employer. 

WE WERE TALKING BEFORE ABOUT FREEDOM. RELATED TO THAT IS THE IDEA OF
DISCONNECTING ESSENTIAL BENEFITS FROM YOUR JOB. HAVING THEM CONNECTED
MAKES YOU LESS FREE BECAUSE YOU CAN'T QUIT YOUR JOB BECAUSE YOU WOULD
LOSE YOUR HEALTHCARE AND OTHER BENEFITS.

I totally agree. But it's like, can we have a Democratic Party and a
Kamala Harris administration that can hold both of these ideas at
once, to improve conditions for the working and middle classes more
generally. 

That means get the PRO Act signed, raise the minimum wage, provide
these benefits that are not connected to employment but are universal,
while also opening the pathway to education so that you know people
who want to can have that experience and pursue those skills.

And to really paint a stark contrast with the Republican Party, which
ultimately wants a reality where there are a handful of elite schools
and a whole bunch of for-profit predatory colleges and vocational
schools, which is an incredibly classist, even more stratified
scenario than the one that we have now. And it's just incredibly
unpopular.

TO GO BACK TO THAT RESENTMENT IDEA, EVEN IF REPUBLICANS AREN’T
CORRECTLY IDENTIFYING THE REAL OBJECT OF IT, THAT RESENTMENT IS REAL,
TOO. PEOPLE HOLD THESE VERY STRONG RESENTMENTS, WHETHER OR NOT THAT'S
BEEN GINNED UP OVER THE DECADES BY MESSAGING ON THE RIGHT AND FAILED
MESSAGING BY DEMOCRATS. THOSE FEELINGS ARE THERE.

THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY WORRIED ABOUT THIS STUFF THAT MAY SEEM
WRONG TO US, BUT THEY FEEL THAT VERY DEEPLY. THEY FEEL LIKE PEOPLE OF
COLOR, IMMIGRANTS ARE TAKING AWAY THE GOOD JOBS. AND THAT COASTAL
ELITES DON'T CARE ABOUT THEM NO MATTER WHAT POLICY THEY PROPOSE. 

AND THIS IS SOMETHING THAT'S FELT MORE AS A MALE THING. THESE JOBS ARE
GOING AWAY. THEY'RE NOT COMING BACK. AND THAT CREATES THIS KIND OF
CRISIS OF MASCULINITY AROUND BREADWINNERS. 

AT THE SAME TIME, IF YOU ACTUALLY ASK ANYONE WHO HOLDS THOSE
RESENTMENTS ABOUT ANY OF THESE SPECIFIC ISSUES, THEY'RE PROBABLY GOING
TO AGREE WITH YOUR VISION. WE TALKED TO ARLIE HOCHSCHILD A COUPLE OF
WEEKS AGO AND THAT'S WHAT REALLY COMES ACROSS IN HER NEW BOOK. SHE
TALKS TO ALL THESE PEOPLE WHO ARE COAL MINERS WHO HAVE RETRAINED TO
WORK IN SOLAR AND WHATEVER, AND IT HASN'T WORKED OUT FOR THEM. BUT SHE
REALLY GRILLS THEM ABOUT ISSUES. AND ON THE BASIC ISSUES, THEY SOUND
PRETTY MUCH LIKE YOU. 

This is why I've chosen to organize around material issues, because I
do think that it kind of gets to the heart of the matter and is where
you can break through some of this polarization and some of the sort
of cultural categories that people feel stuck in and instead find
common interests. It's also a way to address some of these intense
political emotions, whether it's resentment or despair or stuckness or
alienation. 

But one of my mantras is that economic issues are always emotional
issues, that you cannot disconnect the financial from the realm of
feeling, from the realm of affect, and that people feel so much
anxiety around their economic lives. And rightly so, because there's
no guarantee that we're not going to be destitute in old age. There's
no guarantee that what meager savings we have, if we have any, aren't
going to be wiped out by a medical emergency.

And that's a failure of freedom right there. And so I think you can
rechannel those toxic emotions by talking about this stuff and talking
about the shame associated with struggling financially, the shame
associated with poverty, the shame associated with not being as
upwardly mobile as you think you're supposed to be, and turn that
shame into solidarity and start fighting to get some of these things
not just on the agenda but actually written into law.

Political emotions are so important. I'm happy that the Harris
campaign is leaning into a future-oriented, positive, more joyous kind
of politics of hope. But it does need to be, I think, grounded in
people's everyday economic concerns.

AND THAT DOES FEEL LIKE SOMETHING WALZ IS WELL-POSITIONED TO SPEAK TO,
RIGHT?

That's part of the relief a lot of us are feeling about having him on
the ticket. I have to imagine that was the call. I don't think it's
about “weird.” 

IT DOES SEEM LIKE THEY HAVE TO KIND OF WALK THE WALK NOW.

I feel like they could really go and talk about real things that
they've both done and been involved in. Just to stick to the education
example: they provide a stark contrast. This is the first ticket to
have one person who's not a lawyer in a very long time. But, also,
they’re not Ivy League candidates, either. And I think emphasizing
those ordinary credentials is a really good approach, but then
matching those with policies. 

And that's why on the student ed front, which is the area I know the
best, what members of the Debt Collective need to see is a real
commitment to actually delivering. This is where we need the words to
be matched with wonkery. A Harris-Walz administration is going to have
a much easier time delivering on student debt cancellation if a
Biden-Harris administration tees her up for success by playing
hardball against the Republicans who want to stymie relief because we
are in a moment where the rhetoric is great, but the reality is we
have a judiciary that's totally captured and we need the Democrats to
start doing things like jurisdiction stripping or using power that's
already in their possession in really aggressive ways.

On medical debt, for example, you know it would be wonderful to have
Medicare for All. Harris has already signaled she's not going in that
direction. But under the ACA, under Obamacare, the vast majority of
hospitals in this country, they are nonprofit hospitals, are required
as a condition of their tax status to provide free or reduced cost
care. And they are not meeting their obligations to a wild degree.

So you know President Harris could say, "I'm going to enforce
Obamacare. I'm going to make sure that Americans get all the free care
and reduced cost care they are entitled to under the law." And that's
something she can do whether or not Republicans play along in
Congress. That's the kind of thing we want to see. It's just: What
powers do these people possess? Is there a commitment to aggressively
using them?

And you know the vibes are great. I don't want the good vibes to go
away. We just want it to be matched with a savvy commitment to
improving people's material conditions. 

I AGREE WITH YOU. BUT IN A WAY I WOULD GO FURTHER THAN THAT, AND SAY
VIBES ARE NOT REALLY DISTINCT FROM ADDRESSING MATERIAL CONDITIONS. A
LOT OF PEOPLE LOOK AT THESE VIBES AS _JUST_ VIBES, BUT THE WAY
PEOPLE FEEL IS IMPORTANT TO WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO. 

Yeah, because it creates feedback loops of engagement. Leah
Hunt-Hendrix and I, in our book 
[[link removed]]_Solidarity
[[link removed]]_,
lay out this idea of a solidarity state
[[link removed]],
which we say is a step beyond the welfare state. And what we argue,
essentially, is that liberals have a track record of paying attention
to issues of redistribution, at least compared to their conservative
counterparts. But that we haven't paid enough attention to the
feelings that those policies produce, right? So we want to create a
more egalitarian economy, but we also want to create strong social
bonds. 

I think school vouchers are a really good example of the problems with
the current approach. Part of what school vouchers do is they
undermine solidarity because they pull communities apart. Under the
mantra of choice, they reduce the experience of education in common. 

IT'S A LOSE-LOSE SCENARIO. 

But I think education’s part in maintaining the social fabric is
actually really key. And so what we'd like to see and what we argue
for is how can we structure social policy so that it also has that
additional benefit of enhancing solidarity, making people feel like
they're all in it together, making people feel like they see each
other, that they see the ways that their lives are embedded in and
improved by a government that actually provides for them.

And I think that realm is really important and was given short shift
even by our allies on the left, who are sort of focused on seeing
people as just recipients of services as opposed to, How do we
actually structure policy to bring us together as a people across our
differences?

_ASTRA TAYLOR [[link removed]] (born
September 30, 1979)[1]
[[link removed]] is
a Canadian-American
[[link removed]] documentary
[[link removed]] filmmaker
[[link removed]], writer, activist, and
musician. She is a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation
[[link removed]] for her work
on challenging predatory practices around debt
[[link removed]]._

_Anand Giridharadas is the creator of The.Ink. Subscribe.
[[link removed]]_

_He is the author of four books “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines
of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy
[[link removed]],”
“Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
[[link removed]],”
“The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas
[[link removed]],” and “India
Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking
[[link removed]].” _

* welfare state
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* Student Debt
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* Debt Collective
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