Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on Friday responded to a man who had confronted her on student debt at a recent campaign event by saying that the country has to do better “going forward” on such issues.
“Look, we build a future going forward by making it better,” Ms. Warren, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said on “CBS This Morning.”
At a recent campaign event in Iowa, a man told Ms. Warren that he saved all his money to pay student loans and that his daughter is getting out of school without any student loan debt.
He asked if he was going to get his money back.
“Of course not,” Ms. Warren replied.
“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us [who] did the right thing get screwed,” he said.
Ms. Warren started to say it’s not like that before the man continued telling his story.
“We did the right thing, and we get screwed,” the man said before walking off in frustration.
Ms. Warren said Friday that she’s not simply saying “tough luck” to such people.
“By that same logic, what would we have done? Not started Social Security because we didn’t start it last week for you or last month for you?” she said.
“I was able to go to college and become a public school teacher because America had invested in a $50-a-semester option for me,” she said. “Today, that’s not available and our kids have taken on a trillion and a half dollars in student loan debt.
“We have got to back that up and say we’re doing better going forward, that we’re not going to say the next generation has to take on $2 trillion in debt and what? The next one 3 trillion or 4 trillion or 5 trillion?” she continued.
Ms. Warren has pushed a $640 billion plan to cancel at least some student loan debt for 42 million Americans.
The plan would cancel $50,000 in loan debt for every person with an annual household income of less than $100,000.
The maximum amount of debt forgiven would decrease for higher earners, and nobody earning more than $250,000 would get any of their debt covered.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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