Did the means testing become significantly more strict than initially proposed? I thought it was yearly income of 125k (individual) or 250k (household). The reason I ask is I'm not even sure if there are 10s of millions of hits for that let alone 10s of millions of hits for that that were also interested in getting rid of their student loan debt and then miffed. Doubly surprised this had any significant impact on how many voters supported the plan. But it'd all make a lot more sense if those numbers since dropped quite a bit.
Here's a simple example. Suppose that I loan you $20. Then later I say, you know what, don't worry about it, your debt to me is forgiven. Do I have to "print" $20 to do that? No, of course not. Do you have to somehow come up with $20? Also obviously not. My net worth decreases by $20, and yours stays constant. Clearly the total supply of financial assets has been reduced, not increased.
As for "backing by a bond," clearly you're aware that's just a shell game, because the Fed will issue and front the Primary Dealers whatever reserves they need to buy whatever bonds the Treasury issues. It's operationally impossible for a treasury auction to fail because Congress, via the Fed, backstops it using their constitutional money creating power. It's a kind of fig leaf to hide the fact that in the end it's all just naked money creation.
That's not to say that a sovereign currency issuer doesn't face real limits on their spending[1] power, but that would be a rather lengthy digression and I'm fairly certain you understand at least the gist of it anyhow.
[1] But not money creating power! Nobody denies that Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany were able to create money, they really truly did. It just had greatly diminished purchasing power.
The above is not correct. When I forgive your $20 loan, my net worth decreases by $20, and yours increases by $20.
That's accounting 101.
The $20 debt is your liability and my asset. It contributes –$20 (negative $20) to your net worth, until it is forgiven or settled. Then it stops contributing –$20. When it was lent in the first place, you also gained a +$20 cash asset at the time, but that's not relevant at the time of forgiveness as you aren't paying it back .
(The question of whether money is "printed" is subtler. As the comment I'm replying to says, we usually say government or bank issued loans are "printed" when they are lent out in the first place. It'd be a strange extension to the metaphor to call the same money "printed" for a second time when forgiven.)
You're correct, I oversimplified to the point of error. This is the salient point though. No money is created or "printed" as part of the operation of forgiving a debt.