How it feels
How it feels
Comments
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The goverment paying off student loans is like bucketing water out of your boat and ignoring the hole. Like sure, its gonna keep some people afloat for a little longer but the issue hasn't really been addressed, the problem is still there and the cycle remains a perpetual shit storm. The cost of education is preposterous, the people taking these loans dont have jobs to support paying it back, and most of them are too young to have the experience informing them of what a monumental undertaking paying it back will be. If they tried to get the same loan for a house or business they would be denied. There are so many issues to tackle but paying off the loans rewards the groups who created the problem in the first place. It incentivizes them to continue the foul play and prey upon vulnerable youth. Without some systematic reform accompanying the loan payoffs to ensure this doesn't continue we will end up in the same situation over and over again.
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While I fully agree the issue is the underlying problem... that is some All Lives Matter shit.
Because basically anyone who brings that up as an excuse to not wipe the slate clean are in that same "We need to think really hard about how we do this and not do anything for another 30 years". Same as most "Banning guns won't stop gun violence" people. It is a bad faith argument that boils down to insisting that the perfect MUST be the enemy of the good.
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Im not saying we shouldn't pay off the loans or delay doing so. I'm saying that alone will not solve the problem. We must do both. I never hear discussion on that second part. Ignoring it is foolish.
And yes, the snails pace at which reform would occur is infuriating. It shouldn't take 30 years because some asshats will continue to argue in the nature of "how dare we hurt these businesses?!" while people continue to suffer. It sucks that it likely will, but if we dont start now it will never happen instead of eventually.
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Same as most "Banning guns won't stop gun violence" people.
This one doesn't fit your argument. It might affect gun violence, but you're ignoring the fact that people have access to a ton of ways of killing others.
The main driver of violent crime is poverty and income inequality. The solution is to tax the rich, give everyone fair wages, provide universal healthcare, properly fund schools, etc. All things that are already part of the core liberals stance, and none of those involve introducing unpopular legislation that stomps all over constitutional rights.
But heaven forbid we talk about actually fixing the root causes of violent crime. No, some people just want to ban guns to own the conservatives, and get mad when anyone pokes holes in the plan.
Being pro-gun control is the liberal equivalent of being "pro-life".
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At no point does the comment say your government shouldn't pay off loans. It sounds more like they want the perfect and the good.
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Way too many jobs require degrees to apply as well. Yeah, if you're a doctor, scientist, engineer, or other specialist that really does require advanced education, you need that level of education.
But I'm hiring a new permit tech to process contractor registrations, take permit payments, and answer the phone. It's ludicrous that the city wants them to have a degree in "Public Administration, Fiance, Construction Science, or a related field."
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The solution, as always, is a land value tax and UBI. Don't need to fret over needing an education to live comfortably if you can already afford and place to live and food.
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For me, I do kind of think that if someone paid and then forgiveness happened, they ought to be at least partially compensated if they have any history of being low income. They could have put their loan payments into something else but they didn't so they'd kind of end up screwed over by their slavishly responsible bill paying.
That said: its stupid to not want broad student loan forgiveness because the student loan crisis is literally damaging the economy. Its hurting everyone, even people who already paid their loans off.
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Pretty much. It would be more broadly acceptable if it was like 'if you had student loans in the past decade you get a $5000 tax credit'. Maybe more if your reported income for the past 10 years was below a certain threshold.
That would benefit everyone, including those who paid off their loans and they could then tax that money from the tax credit and spend it elsewhere.
This type of thing was huge beneficial for child care too. The Child Care Tax Credits during the pandemic were a huge benefit and halved the child poverty rate. It's sheer stupidity they were cancelled.
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I like that idea. Phase in tax credits based on the student loans you have paid in the last X years, with higher weight given to more recent payments.
To be clear, even though I've just about finished paying mine off, I'd vote for full forgiveness in a heartbeat with or without that provision, but I think it would make it much more pallatable for a large chunk of the population.
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because it would be fair and equitable and it would avoid the moral hazard of giving someone with 90K in debt a free ride.
Not all student debt is the same either. There are different types of debt... and frankly some people literally took out 50K in loans and blew it on partying rather than studying/tuition. I knew several people who did this in both my undergrad and graduate schools. One of my ex girlfriends took out a 50K student loan and bought a 30K car with it as a 'living expense'... and then later quit her program w/o the degree, sold the car, but then used the money from the car say to go travel for a few months. All while piling up interest on the loan. Her tutition, btw cost nothing, she was a grad student getting paid to go to this program. She had something like 80K in debt from this stupid selfish choice. But her getting a 5000 tax credit isn't going to really absolve her of that debt.
She was also working a decent job making 50K a year... and still was not paying back her loans.
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Id be ok if there was some kind of reimbursement, but I wouldn't stop student loan reform from happening if it didn't include reimbursement.
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That mindset sure is a great way to make sure nothing ever gets better for anyone.
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Congratulations.
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nothing will get better until college enrollments start to plummet. then you will see price adjustments.
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I mean I sold 4 years of my life to the military to not have to take loans out, so I get the gut reaction
The main cause of the student loan issue is the commodification of education. Everyone wanted to go to college and at first it was optional but then as more people did it it became a requirement, then they realized they can charge more and more for education that is worse and worse because a good chunk of people dont actually want to learn / be there. They're just there for the paper that'll let them get jobs and not be unemployed, or even just to say that they went.
I look around and people are playing damn Pokémon Showdown in class, there was that one scandal of an influencer girl who was the daughter of someone important that bought her admission to Stanford(?) and would stream literally about how she didn't care about education she just wanted the college experience.
Hot take: Not everyone should be going to college, High School should just prepare people better. Even if we forgive all loans right now it doesn't fix the issue. Instead of your problem it will just be your kids' problem
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While I agree in theory, I'm not really sure there's much that can be done in practice. The genie is out of the bottle here: jobs want the paper, so people get the paper, leading to jobs expecting people to have the paper. An employer is unlikely to deliberately "lower their standards" (in their view) if the pool of potential employees with a degree is large enough for their needs already. Since you can't legislate that employers are not allowed to require a degree, and you can't expect people to not get a degree and sacrifice their own potential future to break that cycle, we're kind of at an impasse.
That's why the only way forward that anyone's figured out so far is government funded higher education.
Edit:typos
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It also reinforces the class system. 'elite' employers won't even look at you if you don't come from an ivy or a top 5/10 school.
and there are fewer and fewer of these 'elite' jobs to go around, hence the paranoia among the upper middle classes that their children will have zero future if they don't get into an ivy.
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There is a lot that can be done in practice. One, employers are asking for degrees because they can. If you lower the number of graduates and they can't get them without higher pay, they will stop. Two, you could put a price on the degree, e.g. higher minimum wage for positions requiring a degree to make employers pay for the extra education.
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I agree, but there is things we can move towards, but some are more... radical solutions.
I think the Swiss do something where after a certain point in the education pipeline (Age 16?) they decide either university or vocational school.
I think the ratio is 20-80.
If the decision is made for you (via being evaluated by the institutions in charge of the students) it definitely would be filled with bribes and scandals where the rich try to subvert it.
But if that wasn't a problem I think it would definitely help university degrees "matter" again and it would be more feasible to make free for those who pursue it.
Again this requires a whole restructuring-- and would not see results for atleast a generation-- and red-lining would potentially have very visible effects on this depending on how its done.
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Trades are a good option, but how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers?
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how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers
That would be lit
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What makes you think they aren't already?
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You don't need to cure cancer, you need to be able to prevent it in the first place.
Ofc this is following the metaphor, for actual cancer you need both.
For student loans you need to fix the system, higher education in Europe is free, but it really isn't, you pay for your education over your lifetime by earning more money with your higher education and thus paying more in taxes and social security.
Ofc it's not a perfect system, but much better than having young idiots be purposely exposed to predatory lending.
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european education system is very different than american one. from top to bottom and from birth to death.
american system treats education as a privilege, not a right. and higher education as a private luxury good rather than a public good.
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I totally agree with this. If someone is opposed to student loan forgiveness because they had to pay theirs off, that person sucks. But if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too, and not as part of opposition, then I am sympathetic.
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if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too
I think every one of them assumes they will never get a cent of that money back. They do live in America, after all, the land of "fuck you; got mine."
Change the legislation to give every living person back every cent they ever paid towards student loans, and many opinions would change.
The Republican party would still be completely against it though, so we'd still have millions of boot lickers out there arguing to hurt their own financial situation in order to please their superiors.
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Don't take out a loan that you cannot afford.
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How do you know what loan you can afford before you have any income? How do you expect a 17 year old who's never lived on their own and only financial experience is maybe a part time job to be able to comprehend money on the scale of 10s of thousands of dollars?
Sure you can try to be smart and look at the BLS data to get an estimate of your income after college, but a ton of minutae gets lost when doing so, such as what you'll make early on in that position vs after 20 years in that position, regional pay differences, etc. that also assumes you'll graduate and get a job like you researched in your field but maybe you picked a field that's about to collapse for reasons outside of your control, maybe the field you picked is already saturated with talent, or is experiencing some other significant shift.
I worked with one person who had gone to university to be a biologist just to graduate right after a significant number of university research positions were closed and laid off, leaving him fighting with folks who have 20+ years of experience for a handful of job openings
Student loans are the one type of loan you can't simply perform a debt to income calculation to determine if you can afford the loan. There's a million and one things that can happen between when you accept the loan and when you start paying on it that can greatly impact the affordability. The risk of course grows with the cost of education, but so does the potential reward.
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What if Im against it because "fuck you, you took out the loan knowing full well what it meant"?
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I would argue that people didn't know what it meant, or were in a position where they could not refuse the loan.
Kids grow up being taught that they had to have a college education to have a good job, and that a good job is necessary to have a good life. Parents and counselors reinforce this, so they have no reasonable means believe otherwise.
Employers DO require college education more and more. Not all, true, but the competition for those jobs is higher, so expect lower pay and greater difficulties in getting hired. Often that pay is not even enough to make rent. For the rest, the number of people who have a degree is in increasing, so the competition for those jobs is increasing as well, with the same decrease in pay.
So out of the gate, children are put in a situation where, from everything they can see and are told, they need a degree. But most can't afford one. Therefore, they are placed in a position where they must take a loan with no guarantee that the degree will get them a job that pays well enough for them to pay back loan.
So it's a bit more than "you took a loan, you pay for it." It better described as "you were cooreced into taking this loan on false pretences presented to you by all of society." Society should take responsibility for that.
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I paid off my student loans at the beginning of this month. it took me 16 years and like $65,000, right? If someone else comes in behind me, goes through the same shit that I went through, and then gets their loan forgiven or paid off in a couple of years?
Then I'm happy for them. Good for them, their life is gonna be so much easier without that burden over their head, and happier people means I get to live in a happier society, which means that I get to be happier too.
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are you happy for them if they had the ability to pay off their loans and refused to do so so they could travel, eat out, and buy luxury goods? should their luxury lifestyle subsidized by the government?
Because i've met plenty of people who have done that instead of pay back their loans. not everyone involved in this is some noble actor who is struggling... many are just assholes who refuse to pay their debts w/ the expectation that is someone else's job. not that different than kids who go to school and party and then end up dropping out. should their loans be forgiven too?
I paid down my debts too. I lived cheap and prioritized paying them back early and haven't had any debt for almost 10 years now. at one point I was paying 30-40% of my income to my debt but I knocked down almost 40K in loans in 5 years by doing that and paying down the high interest debt ASAP. I really little empathy for people who have student loans who are traveling, partying, and spending 40% of their paycheck on luxuries while they make minimum or no payment son their debts because they expect someone else to pay it back for them.
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Honestly, why would you even care?
In America student loans cannot be discharged unless you have a fatal disease or you die, and sometimes not even death causes your student loans to go away.
If they would rather sacrifice their late 30s and 40s to paying off debt the hard way that they could have paid off the easy way in their 20s, then what does it matter to you?
They're going to actually pay more back because the interest is going to keep accruing on their debts for all of those years.
You've saved yourself a lot of money, you've opened the door for yourself to have a higher quality retirement or possibly even an earlier retirement because you're being financially smart and that's good on you.
Why would you take the thing that is good on you and make it a bad on somebody else?
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What happened to all that student loan vote-for-me-again (or so it felt for a European, IMO) relief stuff in the end?
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The Supreme Court put a stop to it in 2023. Biden v. Nebraska, one of the many recent 6-3 decisions.
After first establishing that at least Missouri had Article III standing to challenge the debt forgiveness program, Roberts held that the statutory grant of authority to the Secretary of Education to "waive or modify" loan terms could not be extended to the student loan forgiveness program, and that debt cancellation of this scale required clear congressional authorization and fell under the major questions doctrine.
If only those same six judges were as willing to (properly, IMO) limit Presidential authority now that their guy is in office...
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It's next to the Epstein's files.
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I cant believe how many time I have to say "just because I was hungry yesterday doesn't mean you sould starve tomorrow." That line was fundamental in my upbringing, it's so simple and do correct and now,no one understands this very basic concept for children
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I think there are three problems with loan forgiveness:
- We can't just keep bailing people out. If you're going to forgive loans, you need to actually address the root cause first.
- Why do the people who did the right thing by paying back the loans get shafted? They made sure they could pay back their loans and made sacrifices to do so, and now youre letting people unprepared for the loans leap frog them?
- It's almost like "too big to fail" but for people.
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It’s almost like “too big to fail” but for people.
How? "Too big to fail" is bad because companies have multiple other methods of dealing with debt, like selling assets and declaring bankruptcy. Student loans can't be discharged via bankruptcy, and most people with loans don't have enough assets to cover their loans.
My loans were discharged under Biden, but that's because the government fucked me over on the PSLF and changed their mind after I'd done the time doing palliative care for developmentally disabled adults.
You want to talk about sacrifice? I did a decade of dealing with literal feces because I was providing care to autistic people that had developed dementia, and I was only getting a couple bucks more than minimum wage. The payoff was supposed to be student loan forgiveness, but the fucking government went back on their word, and now Biden's the bad guy for doing what was originally promised? C'mon.
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Bingo.
I agree with incentive structures... like forgive debt for people who become teachers or other lower wage professions who are doing a public good. but general bail outs are just horrible policy. but some art grad who has spent 10 years struggling and can't hold down steady employment and has a massive debt load... the responsibility is on them to pay that shit back. if they want to become a teacher and then qualify for the program... great, if they want to continue to be unproductive than it's BS that my taxes should be subsidizing them.
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Why do the people who did the right thing by paying back the loans get shafted?
This is literally the guy in the OP. For a closer comparison, this is like saying "you're freeing all slaves? What about people like me who bought their own freedom? We made so many sacrifices to do it and now we're just being shafted?!"
A good thing happening to me is not a bad thing happening to you and vice versa.
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Well
- The us bails out people and companies all the time,to the tune of billions. And they learn nothing. So maybe instead of blaming poor people who want an education ( which is free in a lot of countries) maybe stop handing out free money to Wall Street.
2.what the hell are you talking about,did you not see the post? No one if leap froging anyone. If you payed back the loan you where conned,blame the load company.
I'm.really sorry you feel the way you do but it's not like that,you've been lied too. Like I said " just because I went hungry yesterday doesn't mean you should starve tomorrow"
Also,I don't think you understand what "too big to fail means".
- The us bails out people and companies all the time,to the tune of billions. And they learn nothing. So maybe instead of blaming poor people who want an education ( which is free in a lot of countries) maybe stop handing out free money to Wall Street.
2.what the hell are you talking about,did you not see the post? No one if leap froging anyone. If you payed back the loan you where conned,blame the load company.
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I cant believe how many time I have to say "just because I was hungry yesterday doesn't mean you sound stave tomorrow." That line was fundamental in my upbringing, it's so simple and do correct and now,no one understands this very basic concept for children
What does "sound stave" mean?
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I might be wrong here, but it looks like autocorrect got them and it’s supposed to be ‘should starve’.
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"Should starve" I don't know what happened there
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Should starve
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"If they cure cancer after I beat the shit out of it, I'll have to beat it up again and possibly kill it this time. Who the fuck cured the twat of the injuries I gave him anyway? I thought we hated cancer?"
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Dude.
Fuck cancer, AND fuck people that have that logic about school loans or anything else.
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Totally! If I got cancer free and then a simple and quick cure for cancer came out, I'd obviously wish that that came out earlier, but one would have to be a royal asshole to with that others suffered and died because one had to suffer as well.
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Don't take out a loan that you cannot afford, that is on you.
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Plot twist, he actually beat up every single kid in the paediatric cancer ward at his local hospital.
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This is som weird metaphor... So some people get voluntary "cancer" in hope theycan fight it and it will benefit them in the long run, and some don't. While someone will have just the benefits and not the cancer while everyone chips in.
I get that in the long run highly educated people tend to pay more taxes. So makeing education affordable in is a net benefit for everyone. But this analogy is just weird...
I don't know man, at the end of the day it is unfair, and making fun of that seems inappropriate.
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I get that in the long run highly educated people tend to pay more taxes.
Sounds wrong, in general the more you make the less you pay in the Usa, in other countries it probably sounds a bit more plausible.
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The US has a progressive income tax, so it is true that people with higher education pay more income tax as a whole. The main difference with other countries is that it has a fairly low percentage cap and an absurdly low capital gains tax. The wealthy paying a low tax rate because of most of their earnings being asset based instead of income based doesn't change the fact that the people who get paid higher incomes from their jobs that required higher education pay more income tax.
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Nah, our tax structure is all kinds of fucked up and the middle class pays the most in tax. You don't start getting to skip out on taxes until you make 50x what the average college graduate earns.
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Do we all think loan forgiveness is the cure for student loans?
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Not at all, but loan forgiveness wasn't mentioned in the comic. It's just putting a bandaid on a capitalized educational system that should not be for making money but rather a societal investment into our betterment. Id keep my loans I have left and vote for free education any day of the week if we had the option. (Of course I wouldn't say no to both) But I think some people were trying to use loan forgiveness to breach the doors of free education.
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I don't feel like the comparison works, because we don't know a clear cure for cancer right now, but loan forgiveness is something we can technically do just fine (it's entirely human made after all)
I don't think you can feel unfairness about something not happening that, to our current knowledge, is not possible. You can feel a bit unfairness if something that might as well have helped you, won't be done for you... For no clear reason.
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I'm somewhat torn on this:
Yes, I totally agree that federal loans should be forgiven even if someone pays theirs off.
Private loans though? Not so much. That's basically the same as a mortgage from a bank. Or a car loan even. That money ultimately ends up in the borrower's possession after the school balance is paid. That? I am not so willing to share the cost of.
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I, somewhat, feel you. My hang up is federal loans are often s pittance
Maybe my FAFSA has the wrong code(at this point, for my oldest). Maybe I should have lied about my assets? I haven't done my research, but it did not seem like my lack of home or non-beater factor in
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Debt itself has a history of forgiveness. Western Societies could benefit from being more forgiving imo. 30% apr loans should absolutely be illegal, but thats a lot of credit debt today.
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30% apr loans should absolutely be illegal
Are you talking of a specific instance? Because, we do have anti-usery laws.
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My first car loan had a 26% interest rate. Over that 36 month loan I would have literally paid over twice the total value of the loan if I didn't refinance it after 6 months.
I learned a lot through the mistakes I made that day and have endeavored to not repeat any of those mistakes (and so far I haven't!)
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I mean I wouldn't want it to not exist but if I just nearly died of chemo + cancer I'd be a little mad if they found an EASIER way to cure cancer...
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Cancer survivor here. Nothing would make me more happy to see a simple cure for what almost killed me, the sooner the better. Even if it was just after I finished chemo; perhaps even especially right after it to be honest. Remember that there's always the 5-year time where the danger of the cancer coming back is constantly lingering (especially during the first 12 months). Even if you just finished chemo, that new drug means you won't have to go through chemo again for that cancer no matter what happens from now on. Nothing, and I mean abso-fucking-lutely nothing, would've given me more peace of mind at that time.
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That would actually kind of be funny in retrospect. Like, if you survived it, and it was the most horrible, painful year of your life, and then the day the doctor gave you the all-clear, the FDA released a drug that takes care of it in seven days with minimum side effects.
Like any time anybody said anything to me, I would be whipping out my cancer photos and then using that to explain that the universe hates me, and so therefore I am absolved of all sin.
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I am once again reminded: Humanity is fucking ugly. I'm starting to get nihilists.
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Yeah I don't think this covers the situation as much as it's a nice feel good story.
Imagine for a second you are relatively poor, you go to a state school or community college in order to afford it. You have loans, but they are small.
Now imagine you're upper middle class, you go to a private or out of state school and take loans out for a much much larger amount than the other person, with the expectation that you're getting more value for your money (let's ignore the labyrinth there for a second -- this is something many people believe and believing it, for some, makes it true).
Now, both loans are forgiven
Youve succeeded in making the rich richer, giving them both the higher valued education and all of their money back.
Or imagine you're that poor student but you're smart: you got a grant or scholarship making your loans nonexistent, but only if you go to the state school.
Once again, forgiving loans makes the already wealthy person significantly more wealthy and does nothing to benefit the poorer person.
Yes, of course, there's a wide range of reasons a person might go down either route, and I'm absolutely certain there are many millions of people who have gotten loans way above their wealth in order to go to a better school and jump out of poverty (or whatever). This comic ignores the nuance.
In the cancer analogy, this would be a poor person dying or otherwise experiencing terrible health problems because they couldn't get the care they needed, then when a cure is developed, only administering it to the people who could afford care to begin with (ie american health care)
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If this is a one-time event it's hardly the solution to the problem. Education should be free or close to free in general.
If that's the case, things suddenly look different. Even only if e.g. state schools are free.
In my country the tuition fee for a state university is around €30 per semester, and that doesn't even go to the university but to fund the student governing body (not sure what's the right translation for the term).
This means, that everyone can get a quality education even if they are poor. In fact, most people I went to university with funded their flat/student accomodation and food with a part-time job while going to university. No debts or financial assistance needed.
This doesn't cover private universities, but (a) the difference in quality and reputation isn't relevant and (b) free public universities means that private universities are also somewhat price capped if they want to stay competitive.
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Of course, but that's never been a serious proposal in this country so I wasn't responding to it.
It's feasible to do this today in the US at some schools, but your parents have to really push you to get a lot of scholarships. It's not common.
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This is a great point. And yes, the system typically always rewards the rich far more than the poor.
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Read all the comments🧵. Nobody mentioned that higher education was free in the 🇺🇲 until a racist made it costly for colors to attend.
Changed the link, since folks had difficulty trickling to the sources.🥁
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made it costly for colors to attend
Are you sure that's the right link? The Wikipedia page talks about a law that mandates a permit for carrying firearms.
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changed the link so if folks want to verify sources they can.
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Are you sure you linked the right bill? The bill in uour second link is about public carrying of firearms in California.
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Refresh🧵(🔄). Even explained why.
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Capitalism is cancer, prove me wrong.
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Noo, cancer is when cells start to grow infinitely and therefore destroy the body. Capitalism is about economic infinite growth that destroys the planet and the people. Know the difference.
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When the makers of a game don’t setup rules or enforce them, then the game can suck because of how unbalanced it can get.
The issue at the end of the day is with the game makers (politicians) not making the game fair and fun. Elements could be added to balance the game, such as cash being distributed each time you pass GO (a monthly Universal Basic Income[UBI]) and setting lower costs the on the property you want to rent. More properties could even be added to the board to help lower the cost of owning a property.
The game in theory could have some interesting elements, such as innovation and competition fueling creativity. But when the game makers totally removed themselves from a judging role, those interesting features completely disappeared due to the big players being allowed to swallow up all the competition.
The big players’ greed also fuels the game to be worse for everyone, including themselves. Incentives to create the lowest priced products sounds great on paper. However, when the greed from the big players has caused the majority of players to not be able to afford even their cheapest products, then suddenly those big players start cutting corners. More and more. Until they are providing their customers with actual garbage and they might even call it ‘food’ too!
Contrast this with if people were actually getting a base amount of money (thanks to UBI) and those same people could afford to not just have the worst/cheapest versions of everything. Suddenly, the scale can be flipped to be a race geared around providing the best and highest quality goods and services. Rules can be enforced to punish wasteful, unsustainable, and unethical business practices as well, since people aren’t dependent on everything being a race to the bottom.
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Makes sense. It's like, if you think about it, the last three rounds of Monopoly, when one person clearly has all of the property and everyone else is just playing and playing, waiting to eventually go bankrupt, is the worst part of the entire game, by far.
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I admit I kinda feel this way about Ozempic after having to fight for years to finally get into better shape.
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Thing is once they stop the pounds come back unless they change their behavior. If all they do is take the shots, they're likely signing up for an expensive long-term roller-coaster of weight loss and gain and emotions.
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Behavioural change is the crucial part of getting in shape, Ozempic is helpful for those who already did change their behaviour but still can't lose weight. Your fight is never wasted, you're significantly more healthy and fitter than those solely rely on Ozempic and never do the work, and that should be worth it.
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Did you voluntarily give yourself cancer for odds at a better and less laborous job?
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Like with student loans, we shouldn't have to.
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Well we're nowhere near a dystopia and life is full of choices. Some chose things like labor or lower paying job opportunities and no debt. Others chose debt for less labor or higher paying job opportunities. Both paths have risk, negatives, and positives.
Using tax dollars to remove all college debt is a big FU to anyone who chose not to go that route, because anyone who didn't go to college is still stuck with all their negatives.
Making all future college free all of a sudden would be great for capitalist companies that aren't in blue collar fields and bad for any current college required employees when colleges start pumping out more people with no debt so they're willing to take 9ver your job for less money.
You want your utopia, halt interest on college debt and then start putting a price cap on tuition\books\expenses that slowly lowers over the course of the next 30 years until it's free. No one's jobs get destabilized. No one feels like they got screwed over. The end goal of free college is still accomplished.
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You didn't have to. There's been several other options besides going to a 4 year college for decades now.
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I don't live in the USA and I never had student loans. So, this isn't personal for me. I have to say, this seems like a ridiculous characterization to me.
People take out student loans to go to school, which improves their prospects of a higher paying job. I don't really care about people who went to school and paid off their debt and whether they think that future generations should also have to pay off their crippling debt. What I care about are the opinions of the people who could have gone to university but didn't because the debt required seemed outrageous.
Imagine co-valedictorians at a high school. One gets into university, takes on huge debt, gets a good white-collar job, and starts paying off that debt. The other sees how enormous the cost would be, and instead gets a blue collar job. I would imagine that if the white collar worker got their debts wiped out, while the blue collar worker got nothing, that blue collar worker would be pretty annoyed. I would also imagine that someone choosing to go into a blue collar job out of high school would be much more common among a certain group / class of people.
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This is the same argument, just stretched out.
Why do one person’s past decisions (to not go to university / to take on and pay off debt) mean that people in the future should not benefit from a better system?
Education is great! Whether it is through college, or vocational training, or on the job learning. If removing student debt can allow people to earn one type of education with less stress, how is that not a benefit?
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mean that people in the future should not benefit from a better system?
I think there would be a lot less controversy if it were about people in the future. If the plan was to make university more affordable, that would be different. Or, if the government introduced a student loan system where the interest rate was pegged to the inflation rate, I don't think that would be so controversial.
What's controversial is the student loan forgiveness programs. Rather than fixing the broken system so that university costs were more manageable, it's structured as a targeted bailout of a certain group of people (people with a university education who haven't yet fully repaid their loans) paid for by everyone else.
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And next he will be paying for physiotherapy to treat the msd from twisting his wrists like that.
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He beat cancer by doing it the good old-fashioned hard way.
Everyone who has toiled & suffered for decades to pay off their student loans the good old-fashioned hard way, are livid that some younger people have gotten their student loans forgiven.
I get it, I just wanted to spell it out because it's an interesting comic.
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It is a false equivalent. People do not choose to have cancer, yet some people choose poorly and take loans they cannot repay. This is on them.
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Well ya gotta acknowledge that kids are brainwashed and hounded from childhood that they should probably oughta plan on going to college, so when they get to that age they think that's what they have to do and they don't know anything about debt & loans, because public school education purposely omits teaching kids about money & finances, should be a crime to make 18-year-olds incur hundred$ of thou$and$ in debt that will take them 50 years to pay off.
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I just want the playing field to be level, I prioritized paying my loans off instead of buying a home when that would have actually been affordable. Now that money is gone and the housing market has blown up so much that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to afford it. If all the people currently paying their loans suddenly get the slate cleared it will create even more competition for homes and my situation will be even worse. Reimburse me for mine and I'll shut the fuck up about it.
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Dead curious if anyone can provide a legit rebuttal to this comment rather than down voting.
This would be more like cancer treatment being made free for all after a certain date, I can def see someone who went bankrupt paying for their treatment being a bit salty. Hell, Tesla and Apple buyers get mad when there is a steep discount after they buy, and this is factored into costumer relation decisions. Ultimately, people can tell individuals making this posters argument to "get fucked," but it just alienates more people.
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Your problem is essential "if things get better for other people that'll be bad for me." The problem here isn't student loan forgiveness; it's the housing market being out of whack.
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Your problem is essential “if things get better for other people that’ll be bad for me.”
Yes, that's correct and I'm hardly the only person without student loans it would be bad for. Why do only people with student loan debts deserve help? Why not give everyone a flat 50/100/whatever thousand dollars and let us do with it what we will. I could solve a lot of problems for myself if I had all the money I spent on college back.
The problem here isn’t student loan forgiveness; it’s the housing market being out of whack.
Yes, and I haven't heard anyone put forth any kind of solution for that.
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Student loan forgiveness is regressive. College graduates earn well over $600,000 more in lifetime income than others on average, a figure far beyond the amount of student debt they are in (median is around $20-25,000).
Given this fact, paying those loans off at the expense of (primarily) those who didn't go to college is a redistribution of wealth from a poorer to a richer demographic, regressive by definition.
Though forget lifetime, the difference in income is sizable right out of the gate:
Around half of young college graduates with student loans (48%) have household incomes of at least $100,000.
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It's only regressive if the tax that funds the student loan forgiveness is regressive. If we have a progressive tax system - which we do, for the most part (excepting the ultra rich who are able to dodge taxes without consequence) - then it is not a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, but at worst a horizontal wealth redistribution and at best a wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor. Whoever gave you this idea lied to you and/or was lied to.
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It’s only regressive if the tax that funds the student loan forgiveness is regressive.
If you split the population into two demographics, those who have student loan debt and those who don't, the former category is objectively wealthier on average, over their lifetime.
Therefore, forgiving student loan debt is by definition regressive. You cannot have poorer people's money going to richer people and say it's not regressive. The ones with student debt are statistically already going to end up with a lot more money than those who don't, without the extra handout paid for by all of the other taxpayers.
So why should they be getting even more, out of the pockets of poorer people, exactly?
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No. It is if you tax everyone the same. You don't have to, and you shouldn't.
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Any taxes paid by student debt holders that is used to forgive said debt is a wash, that money's going in a circle. Every taxpayer without student debt, however, takes a loss when taxes are used to forgive those debts.
It doesn't matter how much or how little the actual amount of taxation per person is. The fact is, this is literally 'tax cuts for the rich' on a smaller scale, as those with the student debts are statistically much wealthier than the rest of the population, without taxpayer-funded student loan forgiveness widening the gap.
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Student loans in the US are a problem because they are a bad deal.
If they were replaced with a more generous interest rate (eg somewhere equivalent to break even for government debt, maybe higher to compensate for low earners, but nothing like the profit making rates used), and only applied progressively (which as you point out, will be generally fine since graduates should earn plenty on average), then maybe nobody would be pushing for forgiveness.
But US student loan debt is privatised, so the government can’t easily improve the terms, thus everyone reaches for the hammer of paying it off.
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I've read arguments that those figures are misleading because various forms of privilege are correlated with a college education the other way around; connections that could help you get a job, baseline cognitive aptitude, cultural fit with a high paid workplace, having the resources to be free to socialize and network rather than working a job on top of schoolwork etc. There is likely a large group of people who go to college and end up getting little to no benefit in terms of income potential.
You also can't fairly compare average income against median debt, because the outliers at the top I believe will pull the average higher than the median in both cases.
There's also how a higher income does not necessarily mean you are better off, and people who are in debt are obligated to have a higher income rather than reducing their expenses, so the debt itself is a cause of making more. Someone working multiple mentally/physically draining jobs at the expense of their non-work life will have a higher lifetime income, but that might be a situation they wish they were not in, and debt obligations will prevent them from downsizing their lifestyle.
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You can say the same thing about child tax credits with no means testing. The idea is that it benefits society in general for people to have kids, so we subsidize it. Same with higher education.
The real crime of th student loan system though, is that the interest rates are ridiculous. I would be happy if the taxpayers just subsidized it to the extent that the loans were zero interest. Though obviously it would be far better to just guarantee free higher education instead of a convoluted system of loans.
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You can say the same thing about child tax credits with no means testing.
No, you can't, because the 'has a child' demographic is not wealthier on average than the demographic who is childless—the literal opposite is true. If there was a 'no child tax credit', I would be against it for the exact same reason I'm against college student loan forgiveness.
The idea is that it benefits society in general for people to have kids, so we subsidize it. Same with higher education.
No, this is not a valid analogy.
If you're already in college, you don't need a government handout to complete your education and in turn bring that value to society. It would be orders of magnitude more valuable for that same money, for example, to be used to get people into college who, for purely financial reasons, never went at all.
Student loan forgiveness does not increase the number of college graduates, as having student loan debt is in no way an obstacle to completing your degree. Your analogy would only work if we were talking about an incentive given to people who never began a college education.
The real crime of th student loan system though, is that the interest rates are ridiculous. I would be happy if the taxpayers just subsidized it to the extent that the loans were zero interest.
That doesn't require subsidy, since if you think about it, interest is essentially a 'fee' for borrowing the $X, and not part of what was originally borrowed. Having governmental student loans be interest-free is an idea I can get behind, for the reason you mentioned, subsidizing things that are 'profitable' to society in the long run.
Now, maybe I just didn't realize, but if there is a loan forgiveness 'policy' being put forth that defines the forgiveness as 'we'll treat everything you've paid toward the loan over its lifetime as if it was all toward principal' (basically 'pretending' it was 0% interest all along), and then from there, reducing the actual principal by that amount, and considering the loan paid off if that would bring it to zero, then I'm in favor of that. At worst, that results in the government getting 'less extra' money from the students who borrowed, without making anyone owe less than what they originally borrowed. And then going forward, have them be interest-free, so we don't have to go back and do this again in X years.
That sounds fine to me. But if extra money is going out, it should be going to those who need it the most. Either that, or 'universal' stuff that goes to everyone in cases where the cost of means-testing is literally more expensive than it would be to just give it to everyone.
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If you follow the analogy, then you want everyone else to go through chemo to beat your cancer... Kinda weird.
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Or ozempic. Or stopping smoking by vaping. For all the talk of folks falling for misinformation by wishful belief in miracle cures and simple solutions - the other side of people fucking hate miracle cures for no goddamn reason.
Edit: unsurprisingly dude responding to me is blocked. Lol. Like clockwork.
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What about miracle cures?
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Nailed it
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False equivalent. People do not choose to have cancer, but some people chose poorly and took out loans they could not afford; that is on them.
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What a horrible, uninformed and ignorant hot take.
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Is it? I went to a state college to take advantage of in state tuition, commuted because gas for my Geo Metro 2-seater was cheaper than a dorm room, etc to cut my costs down to where I wouldn't need to put myself in debt and got a small scholarship/grant (that in turn came with an in-state work commitment that shaped my choices after graduation). Other people my age made other choices related to college that landed them in massive amounts of debt that I avoided.
If I had known that I could borrow as much as I wanted and expect someone else to pay it off instead of being stuck holding responsibility for my debts, I likely would have made different substantially less frugal and less restrictive choices.
Tell, you what, nix an equivalent amount of my debts, and we'll call it a deal. You don't mind paying off my mortgage, right? Just because you didn't take out a mortgage doesn't mean you shouldn't be responsible for mine, right?
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If you find a cure for your student loans that doesn't involve spending from the common pool of tax money, that's great. I want it to be easy for you to pay off your loans. I just don't want to contribute my money towards that end.
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Why do you dislike living in an educated society?
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You are the guy in the OP.
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Cause it not like the loans are predatory or anything. Cause its not like the prices keep going up cause the loans keep giving more and more.
Crazy how the rest of the developed nations can send thier young adults to school for basically free but its too hard for the US.
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Cause it not like the loans are predatory or anything.
I've met people who foolishly took out six-digit loans to go to college and I agree that those loans ought to have been denied to them, but most people I know went to relatively low-cost public universities or to the private universities that gave them generous need-based scholarships. My own family wasn't poor by the time I went to college and my education at a prestigious private university cost a total of about $45,000 (in 2006) after the need-based scholarships that I got. Some of that was paid for by loans and I don't feel that those loans were predatory.
Cause its not like the prices keep going up cause the loans keep giving more and more.
That's an argument for the government to help college students less, not to help them more.
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What a dumb way to view things.
Having never gone to college, I FULLY support my tax dollars going to pay for colleges.
Tax money is to benefit society.
How have m youade it far enough in life to be voicing your opinions on the fediverse, yet haven't figured out that a well-educated society is good for EVERYONE in that society...
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College graduates already earn several hundreds of thousands of dollars more than everyone else over their lives on average, why is it more of a benefit to society to forgive their debt than it is to forgive the debt of a struggling family whose parents never went to college? The median college debt is about $25,000. Just about everyone who's never gone to college can make more use of a free $25k than someone who's already poised to outearn them by $600-900k.
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The problem isn’t the student loans per se, its that the principle has been paid off many times over and somehow moat people own many times more in interest.
Forgiving imaginary debt is not the same as paying off someones bad debt.
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And it would be trivial to solve that specific problem, which would simply require passing a law that says that the interest on student loans cannot, itself, accumulate interest. It becomes simple interest.
If you owe 5% on a $10,000 student loan, and the first year you pay nothing, you owe $10,500.
The second year you pay nothing, you owe $11,000 because you're only paying 5% on the initial $10,000.
You are still paying interest, but you are not paying interest on the interest. So if something crazy happens and your loans are in forbearance for a year because you're homeless or something, the only thing that happens is the interest builds up.
The way it's currently set up in that same scenario, the first year, at the end of the first year of paying nothing, you would owe $10,500. At the end of the second year of paying nothing, you would owe $11,025.
"Doesn't sound like that much, easy to overlook, let people deal with their own financial problems", says the heartless person.
But the thing about compound interest is, as Einstein said, it is the most powerful force in the universe.
After years of only paying minimums (which are often set by the loan handlers to be less than the amount of interest that accrues each month, because our loan handlers are scum) and allowing the interest to compound on the interest, that 5% interest can end up being an additional $10,000 or $15,000 that you have to pay off on top of the $10,000 you initially borrowed.
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Tax the rich
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Was it also sponsored by the "I want my kids to have a better life than me" crew who then complains about kids having it too easy these days?
I want them to have it better and easier. But an easier life, not just an easy childhood that doesn't prepare them for their inevitable crushing adulthood.
I want the opposite tbh, kids just don't appreciate it. Send them to the mines first, and then give them an easy adulthood.
University years aren't really "childhood", but if their childhood at the grade school level was better that would both make it happier and prepare them better for adulthood. And college.
What a better way to achieve this, than putting education behind a paywall!
better and easy are not the same thing
You man as in expensive and more difficult aren't the same thing?