That's my point. Trillions of dollars were not "given" to the banks as you are suggesting. Inflation wasn't crazy during this period, but again the "loans" (I use quotes because "help" was given in various forms, including the government taking over fanny/Freddie/AIG). The scope of what you are proposing: printing money to just give / forgive 1.5T in student loans, is not nearly the same as what went on during the bail out.
Please don't take this the wrong way, I think lots of bankers should have been arrested / jailed for what they did to absolutely ruin the economy during that period. But my point is the recovery effort actually had a pretty positive impact and tax payers came out ahead. I disagree with the idea of "too big to fail," but the US economy failing would surely have hurt a hell of a lot of people.
Let me ask, yet again.
After trillions of dollars were given to banks, in however you want to measure it. How much was currency devalued? You bring up inflation. What's the inflation rate been averaging, the, uh, last 20 years of close-to-TRILLION dollar deficits?
What's the difference between the government running a trillion dollars in deficit over 2 years, and the government creating a deficit of a trillion dollars over a few years to pay off student loans? How come one isn't devaluing currency, yet the other one has to, because economics 101 textbook?
That really was a special case. The banks were already over leveraged and deleveraging like mad so the overall money supply wasn't growing in proportion to the scale of the bailout. That was one argument for spending even more back then. Pumping up the money supply now would likely have a different effect. Though if we were combine student loan forgiveness with restoring taxes on the wealthy, we could cancel out any inflationary pressure.
What is the current inflation rate?
How would handing money over to BANKS to cancel student loans, cause runaway inflation? Why hasn't the trillions in deficits over the past 20 years caused runaway inflation?
What do you think the inflation rate is going to go to if student loan debt was paid by the government over 5 years?
How would this 1.5 T "bailout" of students not be a stimulus that directly helps millions of people, helps out banks?
Is there some argument that if 1.5 T were used to deleverage millions of individuals, wouldn't cause an increase in the economy by tens/hundreds of billions a year starting immediately and essentially continuing indefinitely as individuals aren't paying hundreds/thousands a year on a piece of paper?
I mean, sure, you can recite an economics textbook answer or whatever, but..what is the inflation rate? What was it after trillions were given to banks? What is the inflation rate even though the government is basically running a trillion dollar deficit (printing money with no revenue) on average every 2 years?
Why is paying off 1.5T in student loan debt some kind of special deficit that wouldn't work the same exact way the 1.5T deficits created on average every 2 years, over the past 20 years, have worked?