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Student Debt Cancellation
IS Progressive
The numbers are crunched. The
findings are clear.
“Today there's more evidence from
@rooseveltinst that cancelling up to $50K in student debt
benefits people struggling to reach the middle class most, especially
Black and Brown families who have historically been locked out of ways
to build wealth,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted this week.
That evidence comes from
a
new Roosevelt issue brief by Charlie Eaton, Adam Goldstein, Laura Hamilton, and Frederick
Wherry, whose analysis reveals a vital truth: The more student debt a
plan cancels, the more we can reduce racial and generational
inequities and boost household financial well-being.
“We were getting really frustrated
with seeing data manipulated in a way that provided an incorrect
picture, which was then being used as media fodder to feed the notion
that this [student debt cancellation] was regressive,” Hamilton
told CNBC’s Abigail Johnson Hess.
“If you look at someone in the top
10 percent of households for net worth, the cancellation is only going
to be $562 per person, but the estimated cancellation for someone who
is Black and in the bottom 10 percent, is $17,366. And for white folks
in the bottom 10 percent, the average would be $12,617,” she said.
“That’s just not regressive.”
Learn
more in “Student Debt Cancellation IS Progressive: Correcting
Empirical and Conceptual Errors.”
 The Cornwall
Consensus
The days of the
Washington
Consensus could be
numbered after this weekend’s G7 summit in Cornwall, UK.
On
Marketplace
yesterday, Felicia Wong—Roosevelt President & CEO and US
representative on the G7
Economic Resilience Panel—described the panel’s proposed replacement: the Cornwall
Consensus.
“So the Cornwall Consensus is
something that really looks to multilateral cooperation to solve real
problems for real people. Obviously, fighting global pandemics is one
of those things. But we’re also arguing for things like more economic
inclusion,” she said.
“It’s important that our
international economic cooperation uphold labor standards across the
board, that we promote sustainability, that we invest in a greener
economy, again, not just in the United States, but
internationally.”
Learn
more.
The Investments We
Need
As experts had long
predicted, May’s
year-over-year inflation numbers were relatively high. That’s no reason for
alarm yet, Roosevelt
Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz argued in The
Guardian
earlier this week.
“We should recognize the current
‘inflation debate’ for what it is: a red herring that is being raised
by those who would stymie the Biden administration’s efforts to
confront some of America’s most fundamental problems. Success will
require more public spending,” he wrote.
For the latest analysis of Biden’s
investment plans, catch up on this week’s Roosevelt blog
posts.
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