Joe Biden isn’t exactly popular with the Bernie Bros.

But now that Sen. Bernie Sanders has dropped out of the 2020 race, leaving the former vice president almost sure to be the Democratic Party’s nominee, Biden is trying to make some concessions to try and nab some of Sanders’s support.

For example, Biden recently shifted leftward on higher education, endorsing a more limited version of student debt cancellation.

Whereas Sanders had backed a sweeping cancellation of almost all student debt, Biden has now put forward a substantial debt cancellation plan targeted toward public university graduates who have taken out government, not private, student loans.

“Biden’s proposal would forgive all undergraduate federal student loan debt for borrowers who attended public colleges and universities, as well as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and private minority-serving institutions (MSIs),” Forbes reports . “Borrowers who earn an income of less than $125,000 per year would be eligible for student loan forgiveness.”

BREAKING: Presidential candidate @JoeBiden just proposed forgiving all undergraduate federal #studentloan debt for borrowers who attended public colleges and universities. https://t.co/jwJfX5Ast8 — StudentDebtCrisis (@DebtCrisisOrg) April 9, 2020

“We have to do more to ease the economic burden on working people," Biden wrote while touting his new proposals. “So today, I'm adopting two new policies to help deliver relief ... as president, I will ... forgive student debt for low-income and middle class families.”

Sure, Biden deserves some credit for not going full socialist and backing Sanders’s radical plan, but his proposed policy is still an unnecessary bailout that would have fundamentally unfair distributional effects.

Think about how the mechanics of such a policy would work. The federal government currently offers prospective students both subsidized student loans (below market interest rates) and unsubsidized loans. The government funds their educational expenses, and the student pays taxpayers back after graduating. Currently, the feds hold about $1.5 trillion in student loan debt , and Biden’s proposal would "cancel" a large, if hard to estimate, chunk of that total.

“Canceling” these student loans wouldn’t make the debt just disappear — it’s the same as forcing taxpayers to pay all of it off. And that amounts to welfare for the rich.

Why? Well, we’d been forcing working-class and middle-class taxpayers — the two-thirds of people in the United States do not have a 4-year college degree — to pay for college graduates' obligations, even though these beneficiaries, as a subgroup, earn substantially more than their less-educated counterparts.

“Biden's proposal is regressive,” Reason Foundation Education Analyst Corey DeAngelis told me. “It forces a lot of disadvantaged people who missed out on a college education to pay for people who voluntarily reaped the benefits of higher education.”

And that’s not the only problem with it, either.

“We’re forgiving folks who borrowed money to go to public institutions, which means if you opted to go to a cheaper public institution, rather than a more expensive one, your reward for being responsible is to be a sucker,” American Enterprise Institute Education Director Frederick M. Hess explained to me. He outlined this additional flaw in Biden’s plan:

If you worked while you were in college, or if your parents scrimped and saved, you’re a sucker. If you took a scholarship offer to go to a private institution, you’re on your own, even though it’s not clear that you made a less responsible choice. The big lesson here is that [under Biden’s plan] the subset of people who went and got college degrees at public institutions, the most responsible people, are taught to regret their decisions.

With this in mind, the proposal does indeed seem arbitrary and unfair.

Sure, there are a few things to like about Biden’s plan, at least, relative to some of the other plans that came out of this Democratic field. It has some degree of means-testing, and it exempts graduate student loans, unlike some of the more radical proposals. But it’s still, frankly, a hot mess — and a signing on to such a flawed, regressive policy proposal clearly reveals just how desperate Biden is for disenchanted Sanders supporters to back him.