The Editorial Board

USA TODAY

When he ran for president in 2012, Republican Mitt Romney complained that Democrats’ fiscal policies amounted to handing out “free stuff.” Romney caught a lot of flak at the time, but to listen to the more liberal of the candidates running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination is to conclude that he wasn’t wrong, just early.

Two of the hopefuls in particular — Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — stand out from the pack in their efforts to pander to younger voters with college tuition and debt forgiveness plans.

This spring, Warren came forward with a proposal that would cost $1.25 trillion over 10 years, providing up to $50,000 in debt relief, depending on family income.

With polls showing that Warren is catching up with Sanders among Democrats favoring a more progressive candidate, Sanders had to do something. He did so Monday with a double-down plan that would cost $2.2 trillion over 10 years, including forgiving all $1.6 trillion in existing student debt.

The most obvious thing to say is that proposals like these are arbitrary and inequitable. They make fools out of people who scrimped and saved, ate ramen noodles and slaved away at jobs, to keep their borrowing down.

The repayment plans are also unfair to people who have already paid back their loans. They undermine the concept of debts as legal obligations. And they perpetuate the myth that taxing "the rich" and "Wall Street" can painlessly finance any matter of costly education, health care and environmental programs.

BERNIE SANDERS:Free Americans by canceling $1.6 trillion in debt

Beyond the fairness question is the efficacy question. In recent years, college costs have soared along with the amount of federal money pouring into grants and loans for higher education.

This is happening not in spite of all of the federal assistance but because of it. A study by the New York Federal Reserve found that every dollar of new federally subsidized loans results 60 cents in added tuition.

Tuition has skyrocketed because of professors who spend too much time out of classrooms, money-losing sports, resistance to online instruction, underused facilities, expansive bureaucracies, lavish building campaigns and efforts to buy higher magazine rankings.

The best thing any politician could do is call for fewer carrots and more sticks. His or her message to colleges should go something like this: Washington won’t tell you what to do, but if you want to keep enrolling students funded through federal grants and loans, find ways to cut costs and keep them under control.

By the time students are in college, they've learned the lesson that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. And that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' plan to wipe away college debt, unveiled the week of the first Democratic debates, violates both maxims and insults the intelligence of the intended beneficiaries.

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