Public union leaders have set their sights on the Trump administration again, and this time they're fighting for a policy they don't seem to fully understand.
Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), fancies herself the champion of struggling public workers, and she's further persuaded herself that wiping out student loan debt will solve all their problems.
But here's where her math fails: Weingarten pulls in a salary more than nine times that of the teachers she presumes to represent.
It's hard to take someone seriously when they're claiming to fight for working-class financial relief while living in an entirely different economic reality.
Thanks to the Biden administration's decision in 2023 to loosen requirements for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, roughly 2.5 million borrowers are now waiting to see if their debts will be canceled.
Weingarten and the AFT are suing to make sure it happens. But loan forgiveness doesn't fix the underlying problem. It just moves the financial burden from one group of people to another.
Here's the uncomfortable truth Weingarten won't talk about: Student loan forgiveness helps wealthy people far more than it helps the working class.
Think about who holds the biggest loan balances. It's not community college students or people who dropped out after a year. It's doctors, lawyers, business school graduates — people who borrowed six figures for advanced degrees and now earn six-figure salaries.
Research from the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania confirms what common sense already tells us. When you forgive student debt across the board, most of the money goes to people already doing fine financially.
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One study found that under universal forgiveness, the top 10 percent of earners would get as much benefit as the bottom 30 percent combined.
That's not fighting for the working class. That's a giant wealth transfer to people who are already ahead.
Americans currently owe $1.75 trillion in student loans. Forgiveness doesn't make that money disappear — it just shifts who pays for it. Instead of the people who borrowed the money and benefited from the education, taxpayers pick up the tab.
That includes people who never went to college, people who paid off their loans already, and those who made different financial choices specifically to avoid debt.
And let's be honest about what happens next. When you suddenly release that much money into the economy, prices go up.
Inflation rises. Housing costs more. Groceries cost more. The same working-class families Weingarten claims to represent end up worse off than before — and you can bet she'll blame the administration for it.
This lawsuit is a part of a disturbing trend. Unions exist to represent their members, and sometimes that involves legal action. But the AFT seems more interested in political fights than helping teachers.
Earlier this year, AFT and AFSCME sued over driver's license procedures for illegal immigrants — people who aren't even paying union dues. They also sued the Department of Education over loan policies.
Meanwhile, the AFT collected $189 million in dues during the 2022-2023 fiscal year, but spent less than 30 percent of it actually representing teachers.
Where's this same gusto when it comes to fighting for better working conditions? Higher salaries? Manageable class sizes? Those are the issues that affect teachers every single day, but they don't make the same political headlines.
No one's saying student debt isn't a burden for some borrowers. It absolutely is. But broad loan forgiveness is expensive, it's regressive, and it doesn't address why college got so expensive in the first place.
If Weingarten actually wanted to help working people, she'd push for policies that don't ask plumbers and electricians to subsidize lawyers' graduate school loans. She'd fight for solutions that help people struggling to make payments without giving massive windfalls to high earners who were always going to pay off their debt anyway.
Instead, she's leading a charge that benefits the wealthy while claiming to speak for the working class.
Nearly half of Americans think broad student loan forgiveness is unfair, and they're right. It asks people who never got these opportunities — or who made sacrifices to avoid debt —to pay for other people's choices.
People who paid off their loans the hard way are watching their peers get rewarded for accumulating huge debts. That's not equality.
And when the inflation gets worse, and costs keep going up for everyone, guess who'll be there blaming the administration instead of accepting responsibility for pushing a poorly targeted policy?
Union leaders like Randi Weingarten, who can afford it either way.
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