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Notes -
Despite being only 13% of the population…
….student loan debtors can still be a powerful self-interested bloc. Concentrated benefits vs. diffuse costs.
This could be used to argue in favor of a bailout: Only a minority of Americans carry student loan debt, so why not bail them out? It’s unfair that a minority of the population gets saddled with student loan debt, especially a minority that’s disproportionately women and BIPOC.
But what about the slave reparations bill? Why settle for disproportionately BIPOC when you can get 100% black? In the current American zeitgeist, blacks are at the top of diversity totem pole. Besides, do we really want to bail out a group (students with debt) which has privileged white women within it, not to mention white men? There's limited resources and limited political capital. The slave reparations bill benefits from being concentrated to a more coherent group which also happens to have social power, which in turn can be leveraged into political capital needed to move the needle.
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