For years, American lawmakers have chipped away at the fringes of reforming the student-loan system. They’ve flirted with it in doomed bills that would have reauthorized the Higher Education Act—which is typically renewed every five to 10 years, but has not received an update since 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s student-debt portfolio has steadily grown to more than $1.5 trillion.

Today, calls for relief were answered when President Joe Biden announced that his administration would be canceling up to $10,000 in student loans for those with federal debt, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. As long as a borrower makes less than $125,000 a year, or makes less than $250,000 alongside a spouse, they would be eligible for cancellation. The president will also extend the current loan-repayment pause—originally enacted by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020, as a pandemic-relief measure—until December 31.

The debt relief—which by one estimate could cost a total of $300 billion—is a massive benefit for Americans who have struggled to repay loans they accrued attending college, whether they completed a degree or not. But equally as important as addressing the damage that student loans have caused is ensuring that Americans aren’t saddled with overwhelming debt again. And the underlying issue of college affordability can be addressed only if America once again views higher education as a public good. Belatedly canceling some student debt is what a country does when it refuses to support students up front.

According to a White House fact sheet, 90 percent of Biden’s debt relief will go to those who earn less than $75,000 a year—and the administration estimates that 20 million people will have their debt completely canceled.  “An entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for an attempt, at least, for a college degree,” Biden said at a White House event. “The burden is so heavy that even if you graduate, you may not have access to the middle-class life that the college degree once provided.” That Democrats arrived at this point at all, though, is a testament to how grim the student-loan crisis has become. A decade and a half ago, Democrats were advocating for small increases in the federal grant program to help low-income students afford college. Over successive presidential campaigns, Democratic hopefuls, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for canceling most, or all, student debt issued by the government—effectively hitting reset on a broken system. And now the party is announcing one of the largest federal investments in higher education in recent memory.

[Read: How the Democrats got radical on student debt]

When he was running for president in 2007, Biden advocated for a tax credit for college students and a marginal increase in the size of individual Pell Grant awards—tinkering around the edges of solving a brewing mess as America lurched toward a deep recession. From 2006 to 2011, college enrollment grew by 3 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; at the same time, states began to cut back on their higher-education spending. On average, by 2018, states were spending 13 percent less per student than they were in 2008.

Historically, when states look to cut their budgets, higher education is one of the first sectors to feel the blade. Polling shows that the majority of Americans agree that a college degree pays off. But college, unlike K–12 schooling, is not universal, and a majority of Republicans believe that investment in higher education benefits graduates more than anyone else. So lawmakers have been willing to make students shoulder a greater share of the burden. But this shift leaves those with the fewest resources to pay for college—and those whose families earn a little too much to qualify for Pell Grants—taking on significant debt.

The shift flies in the face of the Framers’ view of higher education, though. “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature,” George Washington, an early proponent of the idea of a national university, said in his first address before Congress, in 1790. “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, and others believed that colleges might be a place where Americans could build a national identity—a place where they could, for lack of better words, become good citizens.

In that spirit, the federal government provided massive investments in the nation’s colleges, albeit inequitably—through the Morrill Act, which formed the backbone of state higher-education systems as we know them; the GI Bill; and the Pell Grant program, which directly subsidize students’ expenses. But in the past half century, radical investments in higher-education access have dried up. Now a political divide has opened up: Conservative lawmakers—whose voters are more likely not to have attended college—have grown not only suspicious of but in some cases openly hostile toward the enterprise.

[Read: America is divided by education]

Meanwhile, 77 percent of Democrats believe that the government should subsidize college education. “We want our young people to realize that they can have a good future,” Senator Chuck Schumer said in April.“One of the best, very best, top-of-the-list ways to do it is by canceling student debt.” He wanted the president to be ambitious and called for giving borrowers $50,000 in relief—“even going higher after that.” A month into his administration, though, Biden shot down the idea of $50,000, to the chagrin of relief advocates. “Canceling just $10,000 of debt is like pouring a bucket of ice water on a forest fire,” the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson and Wisdom Cole argued today. “It hardly achieves anything—only making a mere dent in the problem.”

The administration is coupling its announcement with a redesign of payment plans that allows borrowers to cap their monthly loan payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income. But the basic problem remains: Young Americans of modest means can no longer afford to attend their state university by getting a part-time job and taking out a small loan. For millions of students, borrowing thousands of dollars has become the key to paying for an undergraduate degree. Biden’s plan will give graduates—and those who have taken out loans but not finished school—some relief, but the need to overhaul a system reliant on debt remains as urgent as ever.

Contests across key states offer preview of midterm elections as Republicans will push to regain control of Congress.

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All carrots, no sticks. That is the story of the Inflation Reduction Act. Since the law was unveiled last month, savvy commentators have noted that its policies consist almost entirely of “carrots,” incentives meant to encourage companies to decarbonize, with very few “sticks,” policies meant to punish them for using fossil fuels or emitting carbon. (Just so we’re clear: This analogy is meant to invoke a stubborn donkey that, Looney Tunes–style, is craning to reach a carrot hanging in front of its face while its driver whacks its behind with a stick.)

Indeed, although the IRA includes dozens of new benefits, it creates only one new penalty for pollution: the methane-emissions fee, which will charge oil and gas companies at least $900 for every ton of methane that they leak into the atmosphere.

However you feel about the IRA, it probably has something to do with this fact. While some climate activists have fretted that the law does not punish fossil-fuel companies enough, centrists have argued that its complicated industrial policy would have been better as a simple carbon tax. But just about everyone has recognized that this all-carrots, no-sticks aspect is why the law passed in the first place. It’s a big part of why Senator Joe Manchin, who has criticized and even directed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency during his political career, could champion the IRA.

But this pat formulation overlooks something important. While it’s true that the IRA itself consists almost only of carrots, that is not true of the broader structure of American climate law. There is, in fact, a big “stick” for tackling carbon pollution already on the books in the United States, as well as an agency tasked with wielding that stick. I’m talking about the Clean Air Act and the EPA. And the IRA, by design, strengthens the government’s ability to wield that stick.

It does this in at least two ways. The first is that the IRA confirms that carbon dioxide is a type of air pollution covered by the Clean Air Act, as initially reported by The New York Times earlier this week.

This has broader consequences than it might seem. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that carbon dioxide counted as an air pollutant, and that, if the EPA decided that CO2 harmed human health and the environment, it could regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act. That ruling—and the EPA’s official determination, a few years later, that CO2 is dangerous—has anchored the agency’s climate regulations on cars and trucks, and its proposed rules for the power grid.

But then in June, the Court circumscribed some of the EPA’s authority over the power grid. Conservative justices have harped on the fact that Congress has never clearly delegated the power to regulate greenhouse gases to the EPA.

Now it has. The IRA repeatedly defines greenhouse gas as a form of air pollution. It amends several sections of the Clean Air Act to define “greenhouse gas” as encompassing “the air pollutants carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.” In another section, it grants money under the Clean Air Act for any project that “reduces or avoids greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of air pollution.”

Congress has now clearly spoken: Carbon dioxide is a form of air pollution. And though this will not undo this year’s ruling, it buttresses the EPA’s underlying legal authority to regulate climate pollution.

But that change is not the only—or even the most important—way that the IRA strengthens the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. The law will also allow the EPA to pass much stricter rules than it could have previously.

The reason has to do with a quirk of American law. Since the 1980s, every major proposed regulation has had to show that it passes a cost-benefit analysis demonstrating that its benefits to the economy as a whole exceed its costs. In the EPA’s case, that means that the cost of complying with a regulation can’t exceed the benefit to society of cleaner air or water. Over the years, this has turned out not to be much of an impediment to the EPA, because even small amounts of air pollution are massively damaging to public health, so preventing any air pollution has very high benefits.

But the IRA’s many carrot-like policies, such as its clean-electricity subsidies and carbon-capture incentives, would functionally lower these limitations on the EPA even more by skewing the cost-benefit analysis in the agency’s favor.

That will happen in two ways. First, the IRA’s economy-wide tax credits and subsidies will reduce the costs that companies face in complying with broad EPA rules that encourage wind, solar, or electric-vehicle adoption. Second, the IRA contains new grants that will allow the EPA to subsidize the cost of compliance directly by writing checks or issuing loans to oil and gas firms and other regulated companies so that they can meet the terms of the rules. This works in the EPA’s favor because the cost-benefit analysis looks only at the effect of the regulation itself; it does not include any funding from Congress that makes achieving that regulation more feasible. Both of these moves will lower the costs of regulation, allowing the EPA to pass much more expansive rules.

This effect is important, but it was not accounted for in the law’s projected 40 percent reduction of U.S. carbon emissions. That was not a mistake—the modelers design their studies to look at what the new law alone will do, and so they assume zero further EPA action—but it means that the IRA’s emissions-cutting power could very well exceed what the models suggest today.

The whole point of the IRA is that it brings down the cost of clean energy. It makes renewables cheaper, it makes nuclear power cheaper, and, as I wrote last week, it even makes the technologies that we’ll need to fight climate change in the 2030s cheaper. So far, most commentary on the law has focused on the immediate effects of that shift, and on how the law’s new incentives will reduce emissions simply by driving turnover in the energy system. But in the weeks and years to come, the secondary effects could become more important. Now that the IRA has passed, it will be easier for states and cities to pursue aggressive climate policy, and it will be simpler for companies to cut their emissions faster than would otherwise be economical.

That’s why looking at the modeled emissions effects of the IRA—something that, to be clear, I did in this newsletter—is a little silly. The IRA isn’t like an EPA regulation that will modestly bend the curve of U.S. emissions. Instead, it catapults the country into a whole new landscape where the economics of every other climate action are different.

We thought the IRA was doling out carrots. It was actually planting an entirely new garden.

A higher rate should be paid to all workers, including under-23s, the Trades Union Congress says