UNBURDENED: How Harris could take on student debt and educational access

Introducing UNBURDENED, The Ink's new series helping to imagine a transformational Harris agenda

The vibes, as they say, are immaculate. The joy is palpable. The energy is real. The crowds are vast. This is what has felt missing from the cause for some time now.

But America needs more than vibes. So, starting today, The Ink is publishing a series of interviews with some of the smartest policy minds out there, asking them to envision a truly bold, aggressive Harris agenda that would materially improve people’s lives.

In a nod to Vice President Harris’s catchphrase, we’re calling the series Unburdened. We’re not intending to serve up boilerplate ideas that have been circulating forever or that can already be downloaded on a website. Rather, we asked these big thinkers to dream up transformational policies that could be, unburdened by what has been.

In the first installment of the series, we talk to organizer and author and anti-debt campaigner Astra Taylor about her notion of “unburdenomics”: how a Harris-Walz administration could transform Americans’ lives through debt relief, the idea of a “solidarity state” that replaces the old welfare state,” revolutionary new access to college, and a better grasp of the connection between policy and human emotion.

Don’t get us wrong. Bask in the vibes, we say. We have been advocating for a more vibey politics for some time now at The Ink. But it’s time for more than vibes. Here is our attempt to help envision what could be.

Welcome to Unburdened.

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“Unburdenomics”: a conversation with Astra Taylor

Let's say the Harris-Walz campaign calls you and they say, "Hey, would you like to be our advisor on student debt and other economic issues.” What's your wishlist? Go big.

I would suggest a program I call “unburdenomics,” riffing on Kamala Harris's motif of being unburdened by what has been, and also her powerful emphasis on freedom.

I'm very impressed by the fact that the campaign is trying to reclaim freedom, which I think naturally is a progressive concept. This is something that liberals should have been owning all along, and it's kind of a travesty that the right has been able to claim it.

Unburdenomics would be a robust program of debt relief across debt types with the aim of liberating people from debts they have incurred to provide themselves and their families the basic necessities of life. So we could continue down the path of student debt relief, really lean into medical debt relief, and add school lunch debt cancellation to the mix.

These are all very achievable policies. These are policies that have proven track records of success at the state and the national level. 

Governor Tim Walz, for instance, has experimented in this area pretty successfully

Tim Walz is making my dream of unburdenomics feel that much more real. I mean, school lunch debt is an abomination that should not exist. I mean, it's something that is so morally reprehensible. It's a wonderful thing to make your opponents defend, to say, "OK, so you're against feeding kids. You want kids to be hungry at school." Meanwhile, what you're talking about in the classroom is banning books, allowing folks to bring assault rifles into schools. And we're talking about fucking feeding kids and not leaving them humiliated and hungry with school lunch debt, which is a huge problem. Mostly in rural school districts, actually.

The idea of unburdening is so real. So I've spent the last 10 years organizing with debtors. When you talk to debtors, they talk about being dragged down. They talk about debt as an anchor. They talk about drowning. The way compound interest works is that it keeps accumulating. The debt keeps getting heavier and heavier.

What does this do?