He is doing it bit by bit, in the face of resistance from the US Supreme Court. He has already cut 4.3 million debts, and on Friday cancelled 277,000 more.

The benefits, as he keeps telling anyone who will listen in the leadup to the November election, are likely to be increased consumer spending, better mental health and credit scores for borrowers, and increased home ownership.

In Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is under pressure to do something - anything - for Australians feeling under the same sort of pressure.

Every June the amount that someone who has borrowed under the Higher Education Loan Program (HELP) jumps. Because the jump is linked to inflation, and because inflation has been low for decades, in most Junes the jump has been small, until last June.

On June 1, 2023, Australians who had made no payments over the previous year faced a jump of 7.1 per cent. Someone who had owned A$25,000, suddenly owed $26,770, and so on.

A quarter of a million Australians have signed a petition asking for change.

The good news is there's likely to be some change, and we are likely to hear about it soon, in the lead-up to the May budget.

The bad news is it won't be debt relief of the kind Biden is offering.

While in both Australia and the US it's the government that lends to pay student fees rather than private lenders (who don't like the risks) in the US the loans are really onerous, requiring fixed monthly repayments over a fixed period of time, regardless of the borrower's circumstances.

In Australia and the United Kingdom and New Zealand and other countries that have copied Australia's system, the loans are income contingent, meaning they only need to be repaid when the borrower's income rises to a certain level.

At the moment Australia's repayment threshold is A$51,550, meaning anyone who earns less than that doesn't need to repay a cent, perhaps forever if their income never climbs that high. Where payments are required, they are taken out as tax, each fortnight for pay-as-you-earn employees.

Buried within Biden's announcement is a decision to move towards an Australian-style plan he has called SAVE, which stands for Saving on a Valuable Education. Single Americans won't have to repay until they earn US$32,800. For an American supporting families of four the threshold will be US$67,500.

While Australia's system is much better than the one in the US and has been copied around the world, it is far from perfect.

A simple change, identified by the report of the Australian Universities Accord delivered to Education Minister Jason Clare, in February is to increase the amount owing each year by either the rate of increase in prices or the rate of increase in wages, whichever is lower.

Usually, prices increase by less than wages, which is why the system was set up in 1988 to index amounts owed to prices.

But last year, unusually, prices increased faster than wages. In those years it would be simple to lift the amount owed only in line wages, as the report recommends.

The amount owed needs to increase in line with something, because otherwise its value would shrink rapidly as prices rose. The government doesn't charge interest (which would hurt) so instead it lifts the amount owed in line with prices to ensure that compared to other things it remains little changed.

Although we repay student loans to the Tax Office, we don't do it like tax.

Here's how it works for tax: on our first $18,200 of income we pay nothing, then we pay 19 cents in the dollar for each extra dollar we earn up to the next threshold, and so on. The key words here are "for each extra dollar". We continue to pay nothing on the first $18,200 we earn.

Higher education loans work differently. For them, we repay nothing until we earn $51,550, and then at that point, even if earn just one dollar more, we pay 1 per cent of all of our income, the entire $51,550 (which amounts to $515).

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It's a repayment cliff that sends us backwards. It means earning an extra dollar costs us more than $500. It means an effective marginal tax rate of 500 per cent.

The cliff matters. Each year, there's an impressive cluster of taxpayers who happen to be earning just under the threshold. More likely to be women than men, they appear to be deciding not to work in order to keep below the threshold.

Britain and other nations that copied Australia's system don't impose large repayments in one hit, and the economist who designed Australia's system now says what he did was "an error, a mistake".

That economist, Bruce Chapman, has suggested a redesign that would require collections only on extra rather than total incomes, a proposal the report that is with the government endorses.

And there's something else Albanese can do. Right now Australia's banking regulator requires banks to count student loans as debt for the purpose of determining who can get a housing loan, knocking some former students out.

Chapman says it would make more sense to treat the compulsory payments as tax, which is how they function. All they do is reduce after-tax income, and for low earners, they don't even do that. It'd get more people into housing.

Now it's over to Albo.