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People who routinely borrow 20k USD for a car usually have a better job or job prospects than the median people coming out of college, and especially better than the median debtor, since income is right up there with credit score for something required to qualify for such a auto loan that isn't for education loans. They also have an asset that can, in a majority of cases, be meaningfully repossessed, and while such repossessions are janky and unpleasant for everyone, they happen at scale in a way that discharges the loan without unspooling significant portions of the United States economy.
College loans guaranteed by the government, at least on paper, make up a value equivalent around 6% of GDP, which isn't quite the right comparison but it's as useful of one as I can provide. It's plausible that this just goes on forever with a bunch of barely-serviced loans, but another fun stat is that people with active loans make up around 13% of the population. And they're kinda the historical go-to example for people who vote, and the last three Democratic Presidential primaries have been full of people fighting with each other to see who can pander the most while dangling 20k USD bills in front of this particular audience; the current sitting President has tried to push a blatantly illegal policies to do so, that was specifically 10k-20k USD per person.
There are other issues on top of this -- proposals that don't change the system mean that this exact same problem will come about again in another decade or two, the problem's particularly galling because university administration where a lot of this money is getting funneled is filled with awful and awfully anti-Red-Tribe people, just as this failure mode was obvious back in the ACA debate era the next step where this debt forgiveness/nullification breaks down will be funny when Red Tribers are joking about nationalizing the university endowments and significantly less so when the actual policy response has considered ten years of its worst enemy's public plans. But it's Bad Enough.
That exaggerates their significance by at least an order of magnitude. Assuming that they're paid off on a ten-year schedule, student loan payments would be more like 0.6% of GDP, and well under 1% of aggregate personal income.
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