Some issues warrant immediate reaction. Others take a few weeks to sort through and reach a conclusion.

In that latter category, let’s reflect on President Joe Biden’s announced plan to cancel up to $10,000 of student loan debt for borrowers earning up to $125,000 per year ($250,000 for married couples) and to provide $20,000 of debt relief for those who received Pell grants while in college.

First, it is important to acknowledge that the plan could have been far worse. Some on the very progressive left – those ceaseless champions of equity – argued for up to $50,000 of loan forgiveness. A few elements even pushed for blanket, total eradication of all such obligations. Biden went sort-of big, but not nearly as big as some in his ranks were urging him.

While a $125,000 annual income cap is high, at least it offers a degree of means-testing and limits the magnitude of the economic transfer in the direction of the well off. Doubling up on the benefit to Pell grant recipients is the most defensible piece, as those awards are reserved for college students of demonstrated financial need.

It must be said that the whole thing, no matter the twelve-digit price tag, pales in comparison to a whole lot of loan forbearance and forgiveness our government has handed out, often to those who least need it.

Oklahoma Republican Rep. Markwayne Mullin, soon to be a U.S. senator, famously responded to Biden’s action, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

While Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee tweeted, “If you take out a loan, you pay it back. Period.”

Mullin and his colleagues have woefully short memories, amnesia perhaps, as dozens of businesses owned by members of Congress received massive relief when their Paycheck Protection Program loans were written off. That included at least $988,000 of forgiveness extended to Mullin’s plumbing company.

Readers, no doubt, will be shocked at such hypocrisy on the part of those high on political and financial ladders.

And let’s not get started with the trillions of dollars of obligations that went poof during the Great Recession 14 years ago or the savings and loan crisis that preceded it by two decades. Beneficiaries of student loan assistance are subject to criticism because they fail to be “too big to fail.”

Still, there is much in Biden’s plan not to like. It is constitutionally marginal, economically questionable, politically precarious, contrary to the consuming pursuit of equity and even morally dubious.

In more than one conversation I have eavesdropped upon in the intervening weeks, I have been struck by not just the disagreement with Biden’s plan, but the vehemence and outright anger with which it is expressed. The reaction is visceral and intense. Further alienation is the by-product.

The courts ultimately will decide on the legality of the president’s order. But it is arguable, at a very minimum, that this is a misuse of presidential emergency jurisdiction. The power of the purse belongs to Congress, no matter how dysfunctional that institution. Wiping out $600 billion in debt obligations with the stroke of a presidential pen seems a stretch.

Others with far more expertise in constitutional law equate this to Donald Trump’s use of emergency authority to divert mass sums of military funding to the construction of his border wall. If Trump was wrong in that exercise of power, regardless of one’s views on the wall, then Biden is on thin ice here.

In a time of high inflation, it is reasonable to at least question the wisdom of this injection of spendable money. Do we really want even more such discretionary income chasing too few goods?

Moreover, the effect almost assuredly will be to ramp up the already steep inflation in higher education costs. If students have an additional $10,000 or $20,000 of spending power, how do you expect schools to respond? Hardly with greater affordability. How many more vice presidents of this and that can they hire?

In response to the passage of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, Ford increased the price of its F-150 Lightning electric trucks by anywhere from $6,000 to $8,500 and General Motors boosted the MSRP on its electric Hummer by $6,250. Leaving aside the perception that the audience for electric Hummers would seem narrow and schizophrenic, the same pattern will inevitably repeat on university campuses.

The politics and equity, or counter-equity, of this go hand in hand. The central divide these days is between college-educated Americans, often urban and doing quite well, versus non-college-educated citizens in the trades or the front lines of customer service or still toiling in fields or just lacking in both job prospects and hope.

Even with some measure of income qualification, this is a pre-election gift for the former and one more snub of the latter that will only breed further resentment, as if that bucket is not already overflowing.

There is no way around it. This is a wealth transfer from the auto parts salesman to the blogger; from the grain elevator operator to the software programmer; from the trucker to the foundation staffer.

How exactly does that serve the cause of equity?

A 30-something mechanical engineer close to our family with a degree from a flagship state university, which he left with well over $50,000 of student loans, talks of how he dealt with little disposable income for years while earnestly putting every available dollar toward loan repayment. He regarded his loans as “an investment” but now considers his commitment to paying them off a “fool’s errand” in light of the large-scale remuneration.

Like our younger friend, I am waiting to hear a defense of the rightness of penalizing those who played by the rules only to now feel played.

Similarly, I would welcome a rationale for taking from those with limited prospects and earning potential to give to those with degree in hand and the expectation of vastly greater career income.

There may be worse examples of wealth transfers and moral hazards. Nonetheless, this one flunks the smell test.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. He writes regularly for Colorado Politics and the Gazette newspapers. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann