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Less than half of Americans support any level of student loan forgiveness: Poll

Less than half of Americans support any level of student loan forgiveness, according to a Yahoo Finance/Harris Poll. Yahoo Finance’s Jessica Smith shares the details.

Video Transcript

- Separately from that, Jess, we've been watching what is a very vigorous debate playing out among Democratic lawmakers about the issue of student loan forgiveness. The president has said he doesn't believe in putting all his efforts on that front. We've heard other lawmakers say that it shouldn't matter if you want to have public or private school. You've got a new study that you're looking at right now in terms of how much public support there is for the issue. What are you finding?

JESSICA SMITH: Well, the Harris Poll and Yahoo Finance did this survey, and we found that less than half of Americans actually support any student loan forgiveness. 46% said they supported some level. 54% oppose it.

The idea was actually the most popular among college graduates and households making more than $100,000 a year, the higher income households more likely to have student debt. And even though the majority of people surveyed opposed forgiveness, they still think it would help the economy. 55% said it would help the economy.

And why this is all front and center is because progressives in Congress are really pushing President Biden to use his executive authority to cancel up to $50,000 in debt per person. President Biden, as you said, has made it clear he won't do that. But he would sign legislation that forgives up to $10,000. The poll found that most people, 59%, think if there is going to be forgiveness, Congress should do it, not the president. And this issue could sway how people vote in future elections. We found that 2/3 of respondents said politicians' stances on issues like this, on student debt forgiveness, is at least somewhat important to them when they're thinking about who they're going to vote for.

And advocates for forgiveness say that this is not only going to help individuals, but it would speed up the economic recovery. Because people might start a business or buy a house, make other investments. And the survey did find that 30% of people who have student debt have delayed buying a home.

More than 1/4 of them have delayed health care. 21% have delayed starting a business. And there were some other really interesting findings in this survey that we did. We have a couple of stories that you can see on our Yahoo Finance website.

[INAUDIBLE]

- Yeah, it's interesting to see how this has really emerged as an election issue more and more. A lot of lawmakers have their eyes on the midterm elections already. So we'll see how this pans out. Thanks so much for that.

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