It’s easy to dismiss the blight of student loan debt if you’re not someone crushed by it. It’s easy to see why “cancellation” of student loan debt is critical if you are. Addressing the issue, however, is anything but easy.

But pressure is building to enact some kind of dramatic giveaway before the midterms. And word from the White House is that Biden has magically found his legal authority.

Before the leak of the Alito draft opinion, this might have been seen as a pandering ploy, a payoff to the progressive wing of the party to get them motivated enough to give the Dems a fighting chance in the midterms that they were almost assured to lose. In the alternative, if the Dems were going to lose the midterms anyway, Biden might as well do something he  promised during his campaign that was deeply desired by the Warren and Sanders supporters.

Of course, there is no such thing as cancellation of debt. There is only the shifting of it off the party who signed for it and received the education onto those who didn’t go to college, those who suffered to pay for it and those who understood what they were doing. While there are, obviously, a great many variations on this theme, these are people who played by the rules.

Here’s the problem, though: A lot of other families made the difficult decision not to accrue that debt. Parents chose to forgo retirement savings or nicer houses in order to sock money away for college. Students chose cheaper state schools over private colleges, or they decided to pass on college altogether.

Millions of other graduates who did take out loans worked for years or decades to pay them off, making their own set of painful career and family sacrifices along the way.

Do those Americans who played by the rules deserve to be rewarded or punished for their responsibility? But it’s important to remember that they aren’t the only ones playing by the rules.

The students who borrowed all that money were following the rules, just as previous generations did. But as the cost of college rose dramatically, so did the debt burden, even as salaries in many industries failed to keep up.

We told students that if they worked hard, got into college and studied, they would find success in their career and be rewarded for their effort. It didn’t necessarily turn out that way.

Some come to college academically unprepared. They accrue debt but can’t graduate. Others have a “life happens” moment. Maybe a parent gets sick, and they have to quit school to support the family. Some attended subpar colleges that, they discover later, did nothing to make them more valuable in the marketplace.

These precarious students and grads are trying to make the leap at a historically difficult moment. The financial crisis and Covid pummeled young adult career trajectories. Education and real estate prices have soared. By the time the boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 22 percent of the nation’s wealth. Millennials — who will hit a median age of 35 in 2023 — own about 6 percent of the nation’s wealth.

And then there are the progressive overlays to the problems, that student debt is largely an elite problem that will benefit the wealthy far more than the poor and whites more than blacks. That doesn’t mean, however, that black students who played by the rules haven’t been hit hard.

According to a 2016 Brookings report, the average Black graduate owes $52,726 four years after graduation, compared with $28,006 for the average white graduate. Black borrowers are also much more likely to be behind on their payments.

While Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are the three most important words in higher education at the moment, they’ve been a cruel joke for many black students suckered into playing the college game they were ill-equipped to win. They leave without a degree but with a ton of debt. They get very expensive worthless degrees whether from garbage schools or decent schools with garbage majors.

And then there’s the fact that student loan debt is the symptom, not the disease. Colleges got this money from students who may have a diploma in hand but a paycheck too meager to pay off the debt and eat. And colleges aren’t giving it back. As long as the student loan debt pipeline continues to gush money, tuition can soar and the next generation of debtors crushed by loans will be born. And yet, nobody tells them what they will earn with their shiny new grievance studies degree.

It’s easy to be for or against dealing with students loan debt. It’s easy to embrace the rationale the best serves your situation. If you were burdened with debt, wouldn’t you want it forgiven? And if you scrimped and saved to pay for college, wouldn’t you be against a handout to the irresponsible? Sure, there are people who are more generous on either side, but siding with your enlightened self-interest is certainly the majority view.

There are some obvious potential solutions, such as making student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, eliminating interest but not principal on current debt and forgiveness for those who were scammed by for-profit colleges, who are below the poverty line, who have suffered secondary problems such as health issues that have made their circumstances untenable through no fault of their own.

What about perpetuating the myth that any college diploma is worth it, that any student of color, no matter how ill-prepared, should go to college? What about colleges whose tuition costs have skyrocketed and now can’t walk back their DEI and Title IX departments, even though they suck up huge amounts of money? What about issuing more debt for majors that will never earn enough to pay it back. Won’t the next gen student assume his debt will be “canceled” as well? Isn’t that a right? So why bother to scrimp and save when you can take out debt that will be forgiven?

It’s a huge, complicated problem and fixing it is anything but easy. Will Biden address these many complications or just push the “easy button” and make it magically disappear, to the appreciation of some at the expense of others, while the disease still festers?