Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a new plan, and it involves getting rid of your student-loan debt. On Monday, the 2020 presidential candidate wrote on her Medium page about her proposed higher-education plan, which would partially cancel student-loan debt for 42 million Americans and create universal free public college. According to Warren, here’s what her plan would do:
- Cancel $50,000 in student loan debt for every person with a household income under $100,000
- Cancel debt for every person with a household income between $100,000 and $250,000, with the debt decreasing by $1 for every $3 in income above $100,000; for example, if you had a household income of $160,000, you would receive $30,000 in debt cancellation
- Canceled debt would not be taxed as income
According to an analysis, which was provided to Rolling Stone by the Warren campaign, experts believe Warren’s plan would give “total loan forgiveness” to 76 percent of Americans who have student-loan debt, while granting partial debt cancellation to 95 percent of households with student-loan debt.
But her plan also extends beyond debt. Warren hopes to eliminate the cost of tuition and fees at every public two-year and four-year college in America, invest an additional $100 billion in Pell Grants over the next ten years, and create a fund of at least $50 billion for Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions. She also writes that “after an appropriate transition period,” her plan would ban for-profit colleges from receiving federal money.
The entire program—debt cancellation and universal free college—is expected to cost about $1.25 trillion over ten years, according to Warren, but she also has a plan to pay for it: Warren’s Ultra-Millionaire Tax would institute an annual two percent tax on families with $50 million or more in wealth, with an additional one percent tax on families with above $1 billion in wealth.
Read more about her plan here.