It’s Up to Us to Demand a Jubilee to Wipe the Debts of the Masses

Ahead of another fraught election cycle, 40 million Americans could see their “October surprise” approaching well in advance: a massive student loan bill. When the Biden-Harris administration resumed student debt payments in October 2023 after a nearly four-year pause, they implemented a one-year grace period. This “on ramp” would spare debtors of the harsh consequences of a missed or late payment — such as falling into default, hits to one’s credit, Social Security and wage garnishment or capitalized interest. A year later, those punitive measures have resumed, plunging debtors back into the throes of the student debt crisis.

But it’s not just student debt that’s burdening our economy and siphoning workers’ paychecks to feed greedy creditors. Household debt has skyrocketed in recent years, forcing Americans to borrow to make ends meet for just about every single need possible: housing, health care, sustenance, transportation or even one’s own incarceration. With a record-breaking $18 trillion of debt weighing families down, folks need a debt jubilee now more than ever. Fortunately, debtors have been organizing around these issues for years, with a track record of forcing politicians to listen.

When it became clear this summer that Vice President Kamala Harris would be the Democratic nominee after Joe Biden was pushed aside by voters and donors alike, the race to complement the ticket began immediately. Battleground governors — from Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Andy Beshear in Kentucky — seemed ripe for the picking, but ultimately, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz won over Harris. No doubt Tim Walz’s “dad energy” and pointed rhetoric against Republicans helped gain him a spot on the 2024 ticket, but in many ways, Walz’s legislative record sealed the deal. Notably, Walz, a former teacher, signed a 2023 bill into law providing breakfast and lunch to public school students at no charge — no matter their income. This debt prevention measure alone helped propel Walz into the limelight and thrust the populist policy on the national stage.

Before Walz signed that bill into law, Black and Latino families were two or three times as likely as white families to face food insecurity. Now, Minnesota joins seven other states with a universal school meal program so kids and their families don’t go into debt in the first place for chocolate milk and french fries. But Walz didn’t pass this legislation on his own.

In 2022, Democratic Socialists in the Twin Cities doubled the size of their caucus and won a Minnesota House leadership position, helping to get progressive legislation like universal school meals to Walz’s desk. In 2017, a Minnesota woman named Valerie helped drive the meals legislation forward after starting a foundation in her son’s honor to support families burdened by K-12 school lunch debt. Her son, a school nutrition supervisor, had a passion for combating food insecurity, often reaching into his own pocket to cover students’ needs. That woman, Valerie Castile, is the mother of Philando Castile — who was tragically murdered by Minnesota police.

Walz isn’t the only person on the ticket who has taken notes from activists when looking for policy prescriptions on debt. Around 100 million Americans are burdened with the cost of health care. Medical debt — a concept which doesn’t exist in any other industrialized nation — is the number one cause of bankruptcy for families in the U.S. Though lesser known, Harris made tackling medical debt one of her key pet projects as vice president, frequently touting her work with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to eliminate medical debt from credit scores. When Kamala Harris unveiled her first proposed economic agenda and vision for cutting costs for families in battleground North Carolina, chief among it was a promise to tackle medical debt. Harris is taking on an idea first pushed by Occupy Wall Street activists, whose Rolling Jubilee Fund made history more than a decade ago by purchasing household debts for pennies on the dollar and then canceling it with no-strings attached.

During her 2020 bid for president, Harris often advertised her work on behalf of students defrauded and indebted by for-profit colleges. In 2014, the nation’s first union of debtors — the Debt Collective — organized the first ever student debt strike in U.S. history. Students had been taken advantage of by Corinthian College and refused to pay back their illegitimate debts while demanding relief from the federal government. Years later, as attorney general, Harris successfully sued the predatory chain, a major domino that ultimately knocked over the behemoth scam school. Seven years after those debtors went on strike, Harris, then as vice president, helped deliver relief to everyone who Corinthian wronged. And at the Democratic National Convention months ago, one of the student debt strikers spoke during prime time just before Harris took the national stage.

A jubilee won’t simply be handed to debtors, nor are we likely to see national politicians take action out of goodness of their hearts alone — we’ll have to fight for it. And it can be done. Just look at what Debt Collective has been able to win under a tough Biden administration. At the beginning of his term, Biden said he wouldn’t take steps to relieve student debt. Early on, Biden falsely conflated student debtors with wealthy, white Ivy League graduates too privileged to deserve relief. Now, Biden champions the more than 5 million borrowers whose debts he’s rightfully canceled, and the White House has scored political points for clapping back at hypocrites like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green for enjoying PPP loan forgiveness while opposing student debt cancellation.

If organized debtors can push a bank-friendly, creditor-loving senator from the credit card capital of the world into going toe-to-toe with the Supreme Court on debt cancellation, imagine what organizers can shift with the momentum they’ve created. We deserve a biblical-style jubilee to wipe the debts of the masses clean — but it’s up to us to demand it.