Should student loans be forgiven for “public sector” workers?

No.  Next question?

That’s one of instapundit.com’s rhetorical devices, but it works well here, because this shouldn’t even be an issue.

In this case, Instapundit links to Breitbart, who quotes from a Huffington Post article quoting Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as promoting employer efforts to expand their employees awareness of loan forgiveness programs:

Teachers, soldiers, firefighters, policeman – public sector careers invariably involve some effort, some inconvenience or some sacrifice. People give up higher incomes to serve their city, their state or their country. . .

We estimate that one in four working Americans has a job that meets the definition of public service under this program. Many of these teachers, health care workers and other public servants could be eligible to have their college loans wiped out after ten years.

This is, of course, referencing current income-based repayment programs in which ordinary employees have loan forgiveness after 20 years, government employees after 10 years. 

Brietbart rightly points out that “public sector” jobs eligible for this generous loan forgiveness stretch beyond the “community service” jobs to everything from mail carrier to DMV clerk, and that the standard claim that government workers sacrifice by accepting lower pay, so they should benefit from more generous student loan terms, is often, or generally, not true any longer, based on various studies that find public sector workers are well compensated, especially when adding in benefits such as retirement programs and health care. 

This loan forgiveness program is taking what should be a narrowly-tailored program for those number of government jobs which are public service and where recruiting is difficult as a result, and expanding it beyond all reason.  One in four workers qualifying as “public service workers”?  It’s not credible to say that 25% percent of all workers are in jobs where they sacrifice pay for the sake of serving the community.  (What’s the long-term consequence?  Do we get the best possible DMV workers because every law student grad fights for the opportunity to put in 10 years and get $200,000 in debt forgiveness?  Or do some workers just hit the lottery at the expense of the rest of us?)

What’s more, it’s a violation of good governance and good accounting principles.  If we need more doctors in government programs to staff poor urban and rural areas, can’t recruit because doctors can’t afford their student loan payments due to the low pay, and it’s deemed to be a better recruiting tool to forgive loans than to just raise pay, then that government program should be doing the loan-forgiving, not the completely different entity of the Department of Education.