What Comes after Cancellation

Building on the Student Debt Win

President Biden’s decision to cancel student debt—up to $10,000 for those making under $125,000, and an additional $10,000 for Pell Grant recipients—is a game changer.

It will offer desperately needed relief for millions of people; provide long-term economic and societal benefits; and may even reduce inflation, Roosevelt Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz explains in The Atlantic.

In acknowledging decades of policy failures that fueled intergenerational inequalities and widened the racial wealth gap, it’s “a decisive example of policymaking that directly seeks to repair past mistakes,” Roosevelt’s Suzanne Kahn argues in The Nation.

And it builds major momentum for what we need next: free college.

“Biden took a step toward an approach to higher education that would focus not on the individual rewards but on the social and economic productivity it can generate for our whole society,” Kahn writes. 

“To finish the job, we need a free-college policy.”

Learn more in A Progressive Framework for Free College.

A New Vision for Climate Migration

Across the globe, the climate crisis has forced people to leave their homes and seek new livelihoods—both within and across borders. And the levels of climate migration will only increase as the impacts of climate change become more severe. 

“In the absence of a bold, progressive vision for future migration, a dangerous feedback loop between increased migration and authoritarian politics has taken hold,” Roosevelt fellows Deepak Bhargava and Richard Stolz caution in a new report.

Their solution: the Statue of Liberty Plan, which would embrace a new narrative and policies to “counter authoritarian appeals, advance national economic and cultural renewal, and strengthen and protect multiracial democracy.”  

Read more in The Statue of Liberty Plan: A Progressive Vision for Migration in the Age of Climate Change.

What We’re Reading and Listening To

The Rebirth of Industrial Policy [podcast feat. Roosevelt’s Felicia Wong] – The Weeds

Pace of Climate Change Sends Economists Back to Drawing Board [feat. Roosevelt’s Rhiana Gunn-Wright] – New York Times

What Will Happen to Black Workers’ Gains if There’s a Recession? – New York Times

When Private Equity Takes Over a Nursing Home – The New Yorker