Could Dismantling the Submerged State Surrounding Student Debt Pay for Free Colleges?

Josh Eidelson has a great post at The Nation, “Fighting Privatization, Occupy Activists at CUNY and UC Kick Into High Gear,” that dives into the battles currently being waged against the dismantling of public higher education. One of the Occupy movement’s major objectives is combating the privatization of public higher education and its replacement with a debt-fueled economy of indenture.

While prepping a recent Occupy panel, Sarah Jaffe brought up how we subsidize student debt in a similar way to mortgage debt, that is, through allowing people to deduce the interest paid on this debt from taxes. According to Pew Charitable Trust’s website subsidyscope, the deductibility of student loan interest alone costs taxpayers $1.4 billion dollars. Instead of taking $1.4 billion dollars and directly making college cheaper, students take out massive amounts of student loan debt and we alter the tax code to make that debt $1.4 billion dollars cheaper. Read more....