If one seeks the right answer, she must ask the right question. Should we forgive student loans? Wrong question. Why does college cost so much that one has to take out a mortgage-sized loan to pay for it? That is the right question.
Politicians are good at identifying symptoms that bother us – these are the building blocks of campaigns. Symptoms are easy to identify. It is also easy to identify ways of masking those symptoms, and it is a lot easier to mask them than to fix the problem. The student loan crisis is a great example. The political solution is to forgive the debt; but the problem is not the debt, it’s the cost of education.
