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Please Cancel Student Debt So People Can Buy My Book: An Open Letter to President Biden

Dan Canon
4 min readFeb 3, 2022
Photo by mk. s on Unsplash

Dear Joe:

I have a book coming out on March 8, and I need a favor. The publisher has priced my book at $30.00. It turns out that a lot of people don’t have thirty extra bucks to spend on a book right now. So I’d like you to cancel the student loan debt of all my potential readers. Since the book is intended for general audiences, that means you’d have to cancel student debt for everyone.

I know this is a big ask. But there are good reasons to forgive student loan debt apart from my naked desire to have penned a bestseller. Here are a few.

I won’t insult you with the whole “you said you would do it” routine, though during the 2020 campaign you did say you’d “Forgive all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities and private HBCUs and MSIs for debt-holders earning up to $125,000.” No one put much stock in that. Most of us who have been around a while understand that during a presidential campaign, words just sort of happen. Whether or not those words mean anything is the province of historians and art critics, not go-getting men of the world like us, right? Semantics is boring and we’ve got business to tend to.

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Dan Canon
Dan Canon

Written by Dan Canon

Civil rights lawyer, law professor, and high school dropout. Writes about the Midwest, class struggle, and the untold horrors of the legal system.

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