More Than Vibes: Why Harris-Walz Should Embrace Debt Relief
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. But it’s time for more than vibes. Here is our attempt to help envision what could be.
Welcome to Unburdened.
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“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 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 Solidarity, lay out this idea of a solidarity state, 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 (born September 30, 1979)[1] is a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, activist, and musician. She is a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation for her work on challenging predatory practices around debt.
Anand Giridharadas is the creator of The.Ink. Subscribe.
He is the author of four books “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy,” “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas,” and “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking.”