Asklemmy

I am presumably a lot less qualified to speak on matters of economics than an economics teacher (assuming they became one through a background or qualification in economics), I'm also not even from the US. That disclosure aside, given you put this question to the masses and to the world here's my take.

I can't figure out how your teacher could have come to this conclusion with intellectual honesty. If my amateur's understanding is correct, this forgiveness program is achieved by the US government paying for the loans, so it's difficult to say on a basic level how any theft can have occurred. This is especially plain given the program is limited specifically to loans issued by US government in the first place as Federal student loans. If I loan you money and then tell you not to worry about paying it back after all because I've decided to forgive the loan I can't find a way to frame that as theft. Who's been stolen from?

If I really stretch I could see people who paid their own loans in full before this happened feeling like it was pretty unfair, but they weren't stolen from, just unlucky in timing. Some people will say of taxes generally, that they feel like the money taken from them by the government in taxes is theft, but in that case this specific instance of government expenditure is no more theft then the latest batch of F35 fighter jets bought by the military or the wages paid to the local garbage collector to take out your garbage or any government spending at all, since that money all comes from taxes. Maybe your teacher is trying to tie the potential economic costs of the policy in to a narrative of stealing from US taxpayers. Maybe the costs of the program could theoretically mean taxes have to be raised at some point, but again though, you already have to pay taxes and how much, more taxes or less, is up to the administration in charge at any given time based on what they think is necessary. This is how the US or any country has a government at all which is generally considered necessary by most. When the government operates and uses taxes to do so, the citizens essentially pay for a service, that service involves the government making decisions on your behalf on what to do with the taxes you paid them. If most of the taxpayers don't like the decisions and think they were bad choices they change their government and lobby representatives, it doesn't make the decisions themselves theft if you just don't like them.

That's about all I can think of in the absence of your teacher's justification, for how the loan forgiveness can be called theft, trying to be as fair as possible to those potential reasons, I still can't find a way to make the statement true.