Giorgos Gouzoulis reads the administration’s debt policy as one coherent class project: capital’s debt is provisional and forgivable, workers’ debt is a disciplinary mechanism. The White House touts credit-card spending as consumer strength while subprime auto delinquencies hit a thirty-two-year high and personal debt passes $18.8 trillion.
The comparison that makes the argument:
- PPP: $792.7 billion in forgivable business loans, roughly 92 percent written off — including an estimated $64 billion in fraud — with no wage garnishment and no op-eds about how “debt doesn’t go away”
- Student debt: the SAVE plan terminated July 1, 2026; collections and credit reporting resumed after a five-year pause; 20.5 percent of borrowers ninety-plus days delinquent — the highest rate ever recorded
- Close to 2.2 million borrowers saw their credit scores drop more than one hundred points; Education Secretary McMahon’s logic is explicit — a degree can’t be collateral, so the seizure happens in credit scores and garnished wages
- The CFPB, under Russell Vought, rescinded sixty-seven guidance documents in 2025; Trump’s 10 percent credit-card cap was announced and never enacted (the average rate stands at 20.94 percent)
The thesis: personal debt is not a passive symptom of stagnant wages — it is an active mechanism of labor discipline. A worker carrying a mortgage, car payment, student loan, or medical bill has a narrower set of choices about jobs, schedules, and walking away; wage garnishment is a legal claim on labor power that follows the worker into the next job. Student loans become debt bondage with the career itself as collateral.
Debt can disappear — it just depends on who owes it. Gouzoulis points to the $11 billion borrower-defense win for 170,000 borrowers and to collective action around personal debt as the way forward.