It's a meaningless semantic argument, you're both right. One valid way of looking at this is that the debt cancellation costs nothing: the value of the loan do

It's a meaningless semantic argument, you're both right. One valid way of looking at this is that the debt cancellation costs nothing: the value of the loan doesn't end up being paid by anybody else, it genuinely ceases to exist. The direct cost is $0. But obviously, you've reduced the future income of the government by that amount: that necessarily means that at some future time, taxes must be raised or spending must be cut (or the deficit increased...) to preserve the status quo and cover the shortfall ($300B - $980B over the next decade for the original plan, according to the CBO). The argument that forgiving the debt has no cost to society is disingenuous. But so is the argument that "the remaining value of the debt will have to be paid by other people". The reality is somewhere in between.