Elizabeth Warren doesn’t appear to be capturing the imagination of American voters, but her policy proposals are a guide to where Democrats are heading if they win the White House in 2020. So check out her new plan to cancel some $640 billion in student loans, which Democrats once promised would be a money maker for government.

Ms. Warren proposed this week to erase a substantial portion of more than $1.5 trillion in student debt held by Americans. Her plan would cancel up to $50,000 of student debt for every person with household income under $100,000. The loan forgiveness amount phases out as income rises. No one who earns more than $250,000 would qualify, though the forgiveness would extend to plenty of upper middle-class earners who have the means to repay.

She claims this will eliminate student debt for 75% of the 45 million Americans. “For most Americans,” she wrote in a post on Medium, “cancellation will take place automatically using data already available to the federal government about income and outstanding student loan debt.” Click, delete.

The irony is that when Democrats nationalized the student loan market in 2010, they swore it’d be a profit center for government and devoted “savings” to finance the Affordable Care Act. Part of the pitch was that the government could save on administrative costs. This was always a trick. The Obama Administration would claim profits from interest-rate arbitrage—borrowing at lower rates and charging more to students—even though a sizable portion of loans aren’t in repayment.

The Congressional Budget Office said the student-loan takeover would save $87 billion over 10 years, later revised to $61 billion. We questioned this bogus accounting at the time, and during the debate in 2009 wrote that “parents will soon have no choice beyond a Washington bureaucracy to borrow money for their college-bound children, and taxpayers will pay a fortune for the privilege.” File that one as: Vindication is overrated.