Parents, here’s a line that you probably read to your small children many times over:

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant
An elephant is faithful — one hundred percent!

That, of course, is the central theme of the book Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss.

Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) wrote that classic in 1940, and it’s been entertaining kids ever since. In it, Horton is the gullible elephant who promises the ditzy Maisie bird that he will keep her egg warm while she takes a needed break — whereupon she promptly bails to Palm Beach, leaving Horton to sit resolutely on the egg through the long cold winter. But a promise is a promise. Horton never wavers, ushering the baby bird into the world just in time for Maisie to show up back on the scene, tanned and rested. Sucker!

OK, Horton is a make-believe elephant in a fun story for little kids — he’s hardly an American role model. But I remember his words, and I’ll bet that most readers of this column remember them too.

Their underlying message — that our word is our bond, and that promises, no matter how painful, are meant to be kept — was once a bedrock principle of American culture. And it’s disappearing before our eyes.

Our president obviously believes that such noble ideas are passé. Last week, he “forgave” student loans for about 43 million Americans, allowing each borrower to walk away from up to $10,000 (and in many cases $20,000) of debt, and saddling American taxpayers with the enormous price tag.

Accumulating personal debt has become a very big problem in this country, more so for young adults than for traditionally debt-averse seniors. Credit card debt in the U.S. is currently nearly $900 billion, and automobile loans total over $1.4 trillion. Student debt is higher than both, now well over $1.7 trillion. Those amounts are incomprehensibly huge.

Waving a magic wand to make student debt go away (the Biden fix) may seem like a solution, but it’s not a remedy that will help young Americans take accountability for debt that they willingly take on.

And what exactly does it mean to “forgive” a debt? And who can do it?

When you borrow money — for example, from a friend or from a bank — that money comes with an implicit or explicit commitment to pay it back. The lender, the one who gives you the money, could choose to forgive the loan (notice that the words “give” and “forgive” have the same root). But only the lender — the giver — has that right.

The same is true for student loans from the government. The lenders in that case are the taxpayers, not Joe Biden. When Mr. Biden “forgives” 40 million loans, he is in effect telling the lenders that he’s decided that their contract is not to be repaid; instead, and without their consent, taxpayers who chose not to attend college, or who managed to pay their own way through college, are now footing the bill for those who attended college on borrowed money — their money.

The Biden student loan directive is misguided at every level. It’s flagrantly political and quite possibly illegal — an election year giveaway of other people’s money to a targeted political constituency, authorized under the guise of a continuing COVID emergency that somehow affects only individuals with outstanding college debt.

Worse, it is dangerously inflationary, a dead weight hitting an economy already staggering under record inflation and completely erasing any economic benefit that might accrue from last month’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act. It is frightfully expensive — by far the priciest peacetime executive order in our nation’s history — with no identified way to make up for the trillion dollars that will not be recovered from those who borrowed it.

In my view, the most compelling deficiency of the Biden edict is its casual dismissal of the commitments of millions of Americans, most of whom are fully capable of living up to their financial responsibility. Every one of the beneficiaries of Biden’s largesse at one point promised to pay back the loans that allowed them to follow their preferred academic paths using money borrowed from American taxpayers. Now they’re told to ignore those promises.

Our childhood hero Horton the Elephant’s ideal of being one hundred percent faithful extends way beyond money matters — it’s a principle applicable to relationships, integrity, and personal responsibility in every aspect of life. I suppose only an imaginary elephant can achieve “one hundred percent” — but it’s a worthy goal for everyone, children and adults alike.