Not terribly sure what I think of tuition loan forgiveness. I obviously don’t have debt, I have wealth. And I don’t see it changing my vote. But just giving people public funds (and forgiving debt is mathematically identical to giving money) on the basis that they want it and will vote accordingly strikes me as a known failure mode of electoral governance.

But reducing taxes by X is also mathematically identical and that’s core to the Republicans, how is that different?

My first instinct is to say well but people don’t vote for that, though. The rich, maybe, but there’s not enough of them to care and they can’t literally buy votes…

…but what they can do is fund an apparatus that solicits votes on other bases, anti-abortion sentiment say, knowing that in America’s two-party structure that translates as increased appeal for tax-cutters.

But like, anti-abortion voters very much are voting on the basis of their positions on that issue, and “coalitions form along various lines that do not always map to Marxian class conflict” does not strike me as a failure of democracy as such.

And so then I think “what about the George W. Bush tax cuts, refund checks being mailed out and all, that was very much an attempt to associate the Republican Party in voters’ minds with the issue of increased personal wealth through the mathematical equivalent of government spending?!”

But even though any given dollar of student debt forgiveness might even be more likely to accrue to Republican constituencies than Dubya’s tax cuts to Democrats (I am sure there are non-wealthy Republicans taking loans for nursing and criminal justice degrees out there, they’re not all using the GI Bill) I guess that’s something about “tax expenditures” – on balance they might favor the rich (which is what Dems have been ramping down with all this means testing) but tweaking the margins on what is still overall structured as a progressive income tax feels more normal and legitimate than implementing a specific one-off program that puts dollars in a specific demographic’s pocket, even where it’s just the reverse at scale.