Proposed Student Debt Forgiveness Simulations

Using the Student Debt Issue to Enhance Democratic Candidate Vibes via Policy Simulations

Why has the student debt issue been so salient among Democrats—so much so that we have explored novel legal theories to financially benefit some constituencies without congressional action? It seems that since Obama’s second term, there has been growing support among limited yet influential parts of our party for our electoral determinant. So much so that it can commonly become a core liability among primary candidates, the general election, and even our administration’s public image when in office. By extension, we could also imagine this issue being heavily correlated with other fringe positions, e.g., “supporting government-funded sex change operations for illegal immigrants.”

It is my hope that we can flip the dynamics to better isolate these extremists in our own party while developing broadly popular proposals. Combined with sufficient reforms to lending criteria, we could even imagine a bill passing Congress that would avoid future exploitative lending from both private and public institutions, as well as help out existing borrowers who have been unfairly burdened with debt relative to earnings. We may even hope that alleviating this burden will better motivate them in their vocational planning and thereby increase their tax contributions going forward. And with such an aim toward policy development, we may hopefully enhance our Democratic political success moving forward.

To all of these ends, I am proposing that we develop interactive simulation tools to refine both forgiveness and lending criteria. These will initially be quite simple and just help us refine our understanding of the challenges within existing frameworks. From there, we can develop a minimalistic, interactive, browser-based simulation to allow for broader experimentation and commenting on the work so far. Over time, our methods can be refined, and tools like GitHub will allow for outside contributions—or even just commenting and documenting issues.

It’s quite uncertain whether any of this would actually be productive toward helping Democrats. Yet at most, it’ll be a fun project to work on for myself and anyone else interested. While we may risk just learning the lesson of “let’s not do that again” and best just learn how to better work with certain modern tools, we may aspire to have some growing positive contribution. The following image from an unrelated project shows how we could be both quite uncertain about the future while still imagining this working well in a probabilistic sense.

Using the following list to share some related ideas that excite me at this stage for future reference in developing this project.

• Used GenAI to convert between narrative structure and quantitative models in the simulation

• Conversely, use GenAI to generate narratives about how candidates could be perceived by different segments of the population

• Define hypothetical people this could apply to in terms of either:

  • Current voter

  • Recipient as current debt holder

  • Future debt holders looking to borrow for education: Both in terms of

    • Changes to student debt issuing policies

    • What are they borrowing for: how much does it cost and how do we expect it to impact their contributions to our economy in terms of income

• Quantify aggregate impact across above populations

• Refine above methods using increasingly accurate and fine-grained statistics about our actual American population

• Allow participants in this project to show their commitment with various measures

  • Commenting in various parts of the project like this blog and future mechanisms in a future GitHub project that includes issues and pull requests

  • Contributing code, analysis, relevant statistics, etc. in their above comments

  • Credibly showing their commitment by donating to candidates that roughly match certain criteria

    • Definitely not donations laundered through this project for a fixed fee. This shouldn’t need funding for a long time and if someone ever did convert this into a funded project then that needs to be very explicit in terms of how it is being funded. We certainly don’t need another exploitative voting/gambling project that deceitfully just takes it’s own cut.