Dear John,

Is student debt meant to be a military recruitment tool?

That’s exactly the suggestion that surfaced in response to the news that President Biden was extending forgiveness of up to $10,000 in federal student loans (or up to $20,000 for the lowest-income borrowers).

Military recruitment has been hard up for a while now. This trend isn’t just another pandemic effect — it predates the so-called “great resignation.”

The military has long depended on economic hardship to drive recruitment, with more documented recruiting visits and Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs at schools with more lower-income students.

In recent years, recruitment tactics have included turning war into a video game and offering signing bonuses as high as $50,000 — five times the amount on offer for student debt relief for most students.

Maybe this is all more complicated than it needs to be. Instead of video games and huge signing bonuses, here’s an obvious solution: lower the recruitment goals.

The U.S. already has 750 military installations in all corners of the world and more than 200,000 troops serving overseas. No other country on the planet maintains such a military presence. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and nuclear weapons budget regularly eats up more of the annual budget passed by Congress than everything else put together.

Student debt relief is a good start toward reinvesting in young people instead of the Pentagon. But every $50,000 military conscription bonus is about what it costs to send a young person to a public college. That’s a trade worth making.

In peace,

Lindsay, Ashik, & the NPP team

TRADEOFF: WE CAN'T AFFORD IT?

Organized student debtors have successfully pressured the Biden administration into eliminating a major chunk of federal student debt for tens of millions of people.

But the White House’s cancellation policy could go much further. Canceling all student loan debt, including federal and private loans, would cost $1.75 trillion.

$1.7 trillion is already how much it will cost for the Department of Defense to buy, operate, and sustain its most expensive weapon system, the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter program.

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U.S. LIFE EXPECTANCY PLUNGES

After nearly three years of pandemic, the U.S. has seen life expectancies drop by three years, and even more for Native and Indigenous people. Much of the decline was due to the toxic mix of COVID and a profit-driven healthcare system, but the U.S. also saw more deaths from other causes, including drug overdoses, heart disease, and suicide.

Needless to say, the hundreds of billions spent on the Pentagon and war during the last three years did exactly nothing to curb this trend, and activists are still fighting for lasting investments in health care and anti-poverty programs that could reverse the trend.

FIRST FEDERAL CLIMATE ACTION

The Inflation Reduction Act marks the country’s first major federal climate investment. Coming in at a total of $369 billion over ten years, the new law’s investments are still dwarfed by investments in war, which are more than twice that amount every single year. But the bill will result in real fossil fuel emission reductions, and it’s a mark of what can happen when people organize.

As May Boeve, Executive Director of 350.org explains: “350.org grew out of a campaign calling for climate legislation in 2007. Now in 2022, US climate legislation has passed. It took fifteen years – and in those years we have built a powerful movement that has pressured our leaders to take the climate crisis seriously. We know the bill is far from perfect, and we’ve got lots of work ahead of us. But we recognize that this moment is a direct result of people power.”