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.
As a Gen-X, if I was a kid these days I'd be pissed too. It seems as much grief as they're given by adults, they understand early on they've been given the worst hand.
Our gen made such a big deal about being cynical, yet life ended up being SO MUCH WORSE than even we imagined. Although it does show we were right to be cynical.
Ya, m gut tells me teenagers are much more aware of just how bad it is because of their generation's social media. I was pretty unaware at that age. I think there was a bit of a shift in societal values and the youth reflect it more as well.
It has also steadily been getting worse and we keep telling them they are the ones who are going to get seriously shafted compared to the rest of us. That probably doesn't help.
I wasn't really aware of it as a kid either, but I don't think I ever really heard about climate change stuff until Inconvenient Truth came out. It just wasn:t something that was talked about, because we weren't really feeling the effects.
I'm amazed (in a bad way) at how far we've fallen in 25 years, and I fear for the life my child will have as an adult.
Honestly, I think we underestimate how much of an impact telling them that is. Realism isn't bad, but kids' only real point of reference is their past experience and what adults tell them. So if we set them up to think it'll be terrible compared to us, while we complain that everything is bad, they're gonna assume that's truly awful to have to be told about it.
The ones that survive will have it good. It's like in the movie 300 when they send their kids into the forest. The mines is how you separate the wheat from the chaff
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.
my nephews have a better life than me. but their lives are way harder and stressful than mine was. they have zero free time apart from holidays. they do nothing creative or exploratory, every minute of everyday is scheduled.
their college educations are paid for. mine wasn't. but they will work way harder to achieve less. but they eat way better food/healthcare, have better clothes, have better homes, etc than I ever did.
of course they are growing up this way and thus they don't and never will appreciate how good they have it. they already are razor focused on the fact that someone else has it better than them and how unfair it is they aren't traveling to europe for family vacations like their friends are.
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.
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.
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.
My brother is a big fan of law and governance, and he said that American society was set up so that laws move at a snail's pace.
The shit that the current turd in chief is doing by writing hundreds of executive orders to constantly shake things up and make people constantly have to keep adapting to changes until they don't know from one day to the next what the laws are going to be are what they originally attempted to prevent by making it so slow and arduous to change the laws.
Dampnut issuing executive orders like they're leftover wads of tissue on the toilet paper he has to wipe his gigantic, flabby ass with is destabilizing the country and also making it so that stupid people think that good laws can be made quickly.
The foul swine in a bad orange toupee is causing multiple levels of damage to the country, and one of the side effects of that is making it so that it feels like we can solve something like a $1 trillion student loan debt crisis by signing a couple of sheets of paper.
What a good law would be would be something more like making it so that the interest on student loans can no longer accrue interest, or reducing the interest on student loans to something reasonable, like 1% over the federal interest rates.
It could do things like allowing student loans to be discharged through bankruptcy, or by setting a maximum on how much can be paid off over the life of the loan before it is automatically forgiven, no matter how long that takes.
Right now, the issue with student loans are manifold.
Some of them are things like the interest accruing interest, which means that people can take out a loan for $60,000 or $70,000, pay back $120,000 over 15 years, and owe over $100,000 still on the student loans.
Some of the other issues are things like people taking out loans for careers that are interesting but that leave them bankrupt or like does not provide them income. I know somebody who went to a Mormon college in Utah and got her master's degree in fucking pottery and ceramics.
Her student loans were like $90,000 so that she can make pots at home because there are no fucking jobs in America for potters.
Five years of education, and after student loans, well in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, and what she's doing is the thing she was doing while she was going to college, which is working as a jewelry artist for a small jewelry firm, which is something she did not need the degree for, and that her degree does not apply to.
So there should be some limits or some hard rules on what colleges can charge based off of how well what you are learning gives you the ability to pay back the cost of the education.
I'm not smart enough to figure out what those are, but I am smart enough to say that it is a problem to charge someone six figures of their total lifetime income for something that they are passionate about, but that is ultimately incapable of paying back the original cost, and that also saps the happiness out of their life.
I don't disagree with you, but at the same time... the government can't stop being from making bad life choices if they decide to make them. Your friend made an awful choice and will now pay the consequences of it for the rest of her life. And the onus is on her to correct that. It is her choice to stay and work in that jewelry shop instead of move or try to apply he skills elsewhere or to another industry. I know art grads who took their skills and moved them into machining and other industrial areas where there are plenty of good jobs and demand for them. But cleraly your friend doesn't sound like they would be interested in that, so much as staying in the same place doing the same thing forever, which is weird why they even got a masters anyway.
Well, I only brought them up because it was a relevant event that I am aware of. While I also agree that getting a master's degree in pottery is not exactly an ideal career path for most people.
It's not like she's given up on pottery, it's just that it's no longer 1300 BC and there are no viziers that pay excellent money for ceramics.
She is also running a business in her spare time and working on developing a name for herself and forming an art studio and collective with other people, and it's possible that the knowledge and experience that she has gained will not only help her be successful, but will also help her help her friends be successful in this because there is money to be made in custom artwork and tchotchskis.
I also know a truck driver that got a law degree, and they worked their ass off, they got burned out on law, and now they just sit on their butt and drive a truck back and forth from California to Atlanta, 48 weeks out of the year.
What I mean to say is that a one-size-fits-all system of student loans and college fees is not really an appropriate way to handle the task, the obligation, the opportunity of educating Americans.
I want people, if they so choose, to be truck drivers and ceramists and beauticians and anything else. I- but I also want the price to fit the education and for the system to allow for artists. I want there to be artists and "non-financially viable" education and life paths that still make financial sense when it comes to education fees.
And I also want there to be a pressure release valve for when a person makes a mistake, so that their lives, their potential future, are not destroyed by the consequences of their mistake.
We treat education as if it actually is a functioning part of our capitalistic society that can operate under the same rules that profit-driven businesses do, instead of treating it as a social good that benefits us regardless of what kind of society we live in.
Education should be treated more like libraries and fire departments instead of banks and bookstores.
I dated someone who makes bank making ceramics for rich people. But they live in a city full of rich people who will pay $5000 for someone to make them 20 custom ceramic coffee mugs. I doubt Utah has that type of customer base.
i also have another friend who wants to work in the art world... but they refuse to understand that their degree from no name university means they will never get hired in that field but they keep naively applying to jobs that require ivy league degrees to get an interview.
Who is going to pay for that valve though? someone has to eat those costs. I mean, also even if education was cheap, plenty of people would also still waste it and screw up their lives.
Yeah, I mean, you are right, it has to be paid for, and that payment is a pain, and it's $1.6 trillion dollars, and as prosperous as America is, we can't casually brush aside $1.6 trillion dollars worth of outstanding debt.
But at the same time, I feel like if the financial constraint was not the defining factor that after people go through a process of self-discovery and attempting, you know, underwater basket weaving, or ceramics or whatever, and finding out that it's a dead end for them, they might end up going back to college and getting a degree in law, or going to a trade school, or finding some other path to where their capabilities and the needs of society interact in a financially successful way.
I want people to have more choices, more options, and the more choices they make, the higher likelihood that they will find something that is wildly successful for them.
I want people to succeed.
Iwant people to do something that is wildly successful for them, and when they do they will generate tax revenues for the country far in excess of what it cost for them to make that mistake.
That's the purpose of social programs and society itself, in my opinion.
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".
Also pretty clear that it was specifically for a "well-armed and regulated militia"
Don't get me wrong, I own guns, I like guns, I believe that guns can be owned safely, and I also believe that there should be more controls on who owns guns and what kinds of guns they own under which circumstances.
I feel like hunting equipment and 22s and stuff like that, semi-automatic handguns, perfectly fine for home ownership, home defense, etc..
But sniper rifles and machine guns and rocket launchers and everything above that basic home gun ownership tier should be placed in a sort of library-type militia system where people can join that militia, be trained in its proper and effective use, and be like a volunteer reserve national guard-type thing.
Kind of like we have volunteer fire departments where tax payers and donations provide them with the tools, but they go through the training so that they can back up the actual paid fire department.
Of course, we should have a gun-owner license.
A licensing system where you have to attend a basic safety course, possibly register for some sort of gun-owner insurance to pay for possible injuries to other people through negligent gun ownership usage, things like that would massively increase the safety factor of guns and massively increase the number of people that are qualified to use a gun in case of emergency and have the training needed to do so effectively.
Further, it's not beyond the pale to make it that our weapons should be registered so that if they're used in committing a crime, the weapon itself can help identify the criminal that committed a crime with the weapon, even if they stole the weapon from you to commit the crime.
I'm all for gun ownership. I just want more responsibility, more accountability, and more maturity about it.
It's not really cool that any 18-year-old can pop down to a local Walmart and get enough ammunition to blow away a supermarket full of children.
Also pretty clear that it was specifically for a "well-armed and regulated militia"
Except that's not the case. Here is the full text:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
If you go through writings from that era you'll notice that while the vocabulary changes (I'll get to that), the grammar is virtually identical to modern English.
If you reread the amendment with that in mind, you'll notice that the first clause doesn't actually say anything actionable. It's just an explanation. Isolating the second clause of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" doesn't change the meaning of what's being said.
Now, why did the Framers decide to include an explanation into the 2nd Amendment, but not the others? That's hard to say. But I can at least expand on the context of the first clause.
Remembered how I said that vocabulary has changed? That's unfortunately what happened with the first clause a bit At the time, the term "regulated" actually referred to being trained and equipped.
The term "militia" has also been distorted over time in common vernacular. What most people commonly think of as a "militia" like the National Guard is more precisely called an "organized militia". In contrast, an "unorganized militia" refers to all able-bodied men of military age, at the time considered to be ages 16-45. Basically anyone that could be drafted in war.
This is important when you consider US military doctrine up until WWII. In times of peace, the US Army kept a small corp of professional officers, with the intent to draft men into the Army as needed whenever war is declared. Then once war was over, all the drafted men were sent back and the Army was shrunk back down.
This doctrine present a major logistics problem: when war breaks out, you need a lot of fighting men in a short amount of time. To alleviate this problem, you want the draftees (aka the unorganized militia) to already have much of the skills and equipment needed to fight, with one of these critical skills being marksmanship. Hence why the Framers found it necessary to national defense for the populous to be able to have their own weapons.
To change gears, there's another argument I want to make: gutting and/or removing one of the amendments in the Bill of Rights sets a dangerous precedent. While the 21st amendment exists to nullify the 18th, we've never done that to any of the original 10 amendments. If the 2nd is abolished, why why not abolish the 4th, or the 5th, or even the 1st? That's a dangerous precedent.
And while there's the stereotypical argument of "you can't take on jets and tanks with AR15's", the US lost Vietnam and Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq too. And that's with the coffers and supply lines protected by an entire ocean. While a civil war would be horrifying, having that proverbial nuclear button pressures the government into somewhat caring what the populous thinks.
Further, it's not beyond the pale to make it that our weapons should be registered so that if they're used in committing a crime
Unfortunately, with the particular "administration" in charge at the moment I wouldn't feel comfortable with them having a list of who has weapons. That'd make it easier for them to go after potential armed resistance early, allowing them to go full authoritarian.
Honestly, it's in our best bet to stop pushing for gun control. That'd get rid of one of the big reasons that more moderate conservatives don't vote for Democrats. Especially since we could instead put that effort into education, healthcare, labor rights, etc. which would do a much better job of reducing violent crime while making everyone's lives better. There's only so much political capital that a candidate and party can have, and it's best spent where it would do the most good.
I'm not in favor of abolishing any rights accorded to the people by the Constitution.
If anything, I feel like we should have more rights and that the government itself should have fewer rights.
That being said, I also believe that we should open the doors and allow more people to have guns, but we should also attach educational requirements, location requirements, insurance requirements, and third-party checks on who has what gun when because, as you know the unbelievable spate of school shootings has shown, irresponsible gun ownership is one of the primary causes of death in what should be the richest and safest country in the world.
Implementing these checks would not infringe upon the rights of gun owners, it would expand them, it would allow bump stocks, silencers, fully automatic machine guns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, grenades themselves, landmines, tanks, surface-to-air missiles...
I literally could not give the first fuck over who has what weaponry as long as there is a reasonable, sane, and balanced check on how that weaponry can be used, and who has oversight on it.
The bigger issue is that we have irresponsible gun ownership and because of one clause in the Bill of Rights and how it is interpreted, these continued escalations of murders and travesties are happening so often that a school shooting is barely even front page news at this point.
That is incredibly terrifying, and sad.
We should do something about it because we are a sane society, and one of the best things that we can do about it is to institute licensing, registration, insurance, education, and taking weaponry above the level of self-defense and placing them in places where people can responsibly monitor their access, where they can actually be used and enjoyed for what they are, but they are not casually lying around unguarded by negligent parents and made available to disgruntled teenagers.
limiting mag capacity or bump stocks isn't an infringement on your right to own a gun. it just makes it so you have a gun that can't shoot as fast or as much. or do you think automatic weapons should be purchasable? what about heavy weapons like autocannons? should i be able to throw a .50 BMG on the back of my pickup and drive around with it?
Going with the other stuff I was saying, I definitely think you should be able to purchase 50 cals and machine guns and everything else, but like, you shouldn't be allowed to keep them at your house.
They should have to go to a public storage facility where they are kept under lock and key, and only let out to the registered owner or to the people that the registered owner permits, like a gun bank that also serves as a volunteer militia registration and training center.
I'm totally okay with people having their cake and eating it too, as long as that is done with the overall safety and happiness of society in mind.
Blowing shit up is a hell of a lot of fun, and if you have the money to do it, you should be allowed to do it. It's a great stress reliever, it's an excellent opportunity to hang out with your boys or your girls or your pals of indeterminate gender.
You are describing the national guard. It's a public service you join up, get training, and have service obligations.
If you want to blow shit up become an explosives engineer or work in demolition. Just because you have a personal fetish for high calibre guns is a pretty bad reason to claim everyone should do it too.
limiting mag capacity or bump stocks isn't an infringement on your right to own a gun.
And those limits do little to protect anyone that would be victims of a crime. Swapping magazines can be done faster than you think, and full auto is difficult ro control. Banning them does nothing to actually help people, it's just security theater.
Also, the states that ban larger magazines also are more likely to ban suppressors, which is ridiculous because suppressors are personal protective equipment. Pretty much every other country leaves suppressors unregulated, because there's no point to regulating them.
The OP is a comic about people being opposed to student loans for the most stupid and selfish of reasons.
Screen Shatter proceeds to, at best, make a non sequitor about why student loan forgiveness is actually not a good thing. I then point out that while there are many arguments in favor of focusing on the root cause (that I agree should be the goal), people who bring that up in response to "should we forgive student loans" are almost always arguing in bad faith.
Think less in terms of reading completely unrelated twitter posts and more about an actual conversation and why someone would say X in response to Y. Because Context. It's a B.
In conversations I find it's best to operate with a positive view of the person I'm talking to. Rather than assuming intent, I go with what they've said and hope for the best until I know otherwise.
You assumed Screen_Shatter disagreed with loan forgiveness, even though they didn't say that in their comment. Happily, the Screen_Shatter replied to you, and they agreed with it! It turns out you have something in common! Just because they have other ideas doesn't mean they disagree on this one.
Assuming Screen_Shatter disagreed was a mistake and it made the conversation less pleasant. Just like telling someone:
Think less in terms of reading completely unrelated twitter posts and ...
Lemmy is a small community. Assume the best about folks on here and help make it more welcoming. Hopefully it'll grow.
Yeah. I prefer to operate under the assumption that people are at least trying to have a conversation. Rather than just walking around spewing non sequitors. If someone feels they were misinterpreted, they can reply and clarify... rather than get angry that people interpreted what they wrote rather than what they were thinking. That is, again, how you have a conversation.
Lemmy is a small community.
STRONG disagree. Lemmy is a small (for the modern internet) userbase. Not a community. A community is one where you regularly get to know others and... communicate. Lemmy, like basically all modern social media, is people shouting into a void. Hell, Lemmy is on the worse end of that since so many of us came from reddit where all that matters is looking for keywords and writing the right canned/meme response to get the most updoots.
Think about it this way: How often have you actually interacted with someone and thought "I want to get to know that person better" or even "Hey, it is so and so. I wonder how the event they were talking about went?". I personally have a few new internet friends from Mastodon funny enough. But Lemmy? We reddit up in here.
And... you know a great way to never make those connections? By assuming nobody is communicating or responding to anyone else and considering every comment to be made in a void.
I'll also refrain from pointing out the difference between clarifying intent and doubling down or how often chuds have used this very same "assume the best of everyone" to spread hate over the decades of the modern internet.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
So the higher minimum wage is already a thing in some countries (e.g. Germany, where degrees are also mostly free) and there is still the trend of many more ppl. studying.
In general, our world is getting more complicated and we live longer. So i dont really see the problem of more education?
More education is a balance of costs and benefits. There is no harm in even a supermarket cashier having a collage degree. God knows our democracies could use more educated voters. But in many professions, it is not worth the cost. The same knowledge could be gained by a few months of on the job training. If employers are really willing to pay more for those degrees like in Germany than that is fine. But I am pretty sure in some places, people are asking for degrees not because they are needed (worth the cost), but because people with degrees are available cheaply.
After all, if the degrees were worth their price to employers, and the employers paid for them adequately, student loans wouldn't be an issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was saving for college and aware of the costs from the age of 14. That's why I got a job at 15.
It was pretty easy to understand. They showed me a piece of paper with all the numbers. Basic mathematics.
The issue is that people 'follow their passions' and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair. But... if you need a job after school that pays a certain amount... well you need to plan for that too.
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position. His lack of research is his own fault. Not anyone else's. Nobody is owed a job inbiology just because they studied it, and most people who get those jobs go to top programs and are top performers.
Your friend needs to get a job in an office, pushing papers, like vast majority of us. Those are the jobs that are available. Take their bio dataset skills, and join a marketing firm, like the rest of us.
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn't get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are 'below' them. FWIW I have a brother who is in this rut right now. He refuses to get jobs that are 'below' him so he has been unemployed for 3 years now. He's a prideful idiot.
I went to an ivy league school and my first job was pushing papers because it was the first job I could get. And I built up my job skills and my career. I didn't sit around living at home for months/years whining about how there are 'no good jobs'. I got to work and started paying off my loans. I have zero empathy for the people who sit around and refuse to work because they feel it is 'below' them to work outside of a certain field/industry or income level.
The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair.
We should be building a world where this is not the case! We should be building a world where people can become skilled at something without significant cost and shift careers when they decide they need to. Even better, a world where careers are optional and people just do what they need to to contribute to society and can otherwise enjoy life
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them.
Remember these are life-changing decisions made by teenagers, a cohort specifically known for making poor decisions and not considering long term ramifications of these decisions. Yes everyone can name someone who made poor decisions in college and is paying the price for them, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't build a world that's less harsh to people who do so!
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position.
I love the projection here as you make up a story for someone you never met. I met this individual when we both worked at a callcenter making $12/hr. He did everything right, he got his Masters from a good university, he published research while in college, continued to do what independent research he could outside of college, yet because some idiot in power who themselves never graduated college decided to demolish state funded university research with a single stroke of a pen, my colleague was left to fight for whatever scraps he could get after doing everything right. He did everything right and still ended up royally fucked, yet he still continued to do the right thing and eventually found himself finally in a job in his field a decade after graduation. This is not a system that's setup optimally, this is a system that badly needs to be fixed!
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.
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.
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.
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?
because if you fuck yourself over I shouldn't have to bail you out. your personal choices are not my responsibility. go ahead and party in your 20s and let your debt accrue to 200K. but don't whine about how unfair your life is when you are living paycheck to paycheck at 40 and have nothing for retirement. you did that to yourself and life is not 'unfair and cruel' because you made bad choices.
this is like you getting drunk crashing you car, and demanding someone else pay for the damages, because 'it's not your fault'. It is your fault entirely, and nobody else's. But by a lot of lemmy logic it's the fault of the alcohol company, the bar owner, and etc. as if they were suppose to prevent you from doing all of that.
personal responsibility exists. college students are not hapless victims of a cruel system. they are making choices and now they are crying that they should not have to face the consequences of the choices. I wanted to go to grad school at my dream school, but it turns out i'd have 60K in debt from going there, so I went to a place where they gave me a scholarship, even if it wasn't what I 'truly' wanted.
But plenty of people make the other choice, and go to schools and get degrees they can't afford. And further, they do nothing responsible/productive with that degree. I had a friend I stopped interacting with who got a comp sci degree from a top uni, had lots of debt, but now works part time in a bicycle shop for 15/hr and refuses to pay back loans and keeps ranting about how the govt should pay off their debt for them. I stopped interacting with this person once I realized what pathetic joke of a human being they. And they love ranting about how everyone is privledged and should pay more tax and they are so poor and helpless and they have financially abused many people with this routine. They are just a lazy entitled jerk who is throwing away their life because it's cool be a bicycle hipster and 'uncool' to work a computer programming job.
Why in the hell would anyone think this person deserves loan forgiveness? They do not. They should use their degree, get a good job, and pay back their loans themselves.
If this person however, got a degree teaching computer science and was doing something productive to society should they qualify for a partial loan forgiveness, totally.
your mistake is you assume all people are well intention ed an good actors. many are not. many human beings are exploiters, abusers, cheats, and generally shitty people who are seeking to exploit everyone/everything they can for personal gain at the loss of other people. lemmy assumes that all such people are billionaires or something... there are plenty of them who are poor who are like this as well.
I feel like that's an incredibly harsh analogy, and I don't really think it's appropriate.
It implies, relating your analogy back to student loans, that people who are incredibly intelligent and capable and good with technology chose to take a $200,000 PhD in underwater basket weaving and then they don't want to pay their student loans.
I would say a more apt analogy would be if an orchard owner didn't take proper care of their orchard and then their neighbors came over and helped them dig out all of the stumps so that they could plant new seeds.
i'm not implying anything dude. there are lots and lots of people in the real world who do stupid crap like that. for real. I have know dozen and dozens of them over the past 20 years.
but you seem to assume all people are fundamentally good by default. they are not. there is a significant percentage of people who you would hire for your orchard, and kill your trees, and then sue you for firing them. why would you want to reward these people?
FWIW I have worked with community non profits much of my adult life. A good 1/3 of the people involved, both providers and clients, are immoral shitheads. I'm not talking analogies here, I'm talking the real world. You have to setup litmus tests, waiting periods, and lots of other mechanisms to prevent those people from getting/access resources, and rooting them out even when they do. a significant part of the job, sadly. One of the reasons many 'assistance' programs are so fucking onerous w/ paper work and waiting periods is because so many bad actors seek to exploit them to the detriment of those who actually need the assistance.
and those systems break down when shitty people come in and hoover up all the resources and exploit the generosity of others. and most of those shitty people... don't need help. they just seek a method to avoid hard work.
I know there's a lot of bastards out there. I'm related to half of them. Like, I know how it is.
That doesn't mean that I have to abandon my optimism, or to intentionally choose to see the evil in people.
These resources would not be handed out carte blanche, and I am not the person who is arguing for them to be handed out carte blanche.
I am saying that we should change the way the interest is counted so that there is no interest being charged on the interest that has been charged.
Doing that one thing would change the debt structure of student loans so that when people make consistent payments over a decade, it will almost always, in and of itself, completely pay off their student loans, and that would be the money they borrowed, plus the interest on the money that was borrowed.
It would give people who are struggling a light at the end of the tunnel that they can strive towards and that they can know for a fact will not be taken away from them, and that is powerful.
I would also argue that student loans should be able to be discharged through bankruptcy with maybe a moderate justification adjudicated by a judge, so that for the people at the very bottom of the scale who are most oppressed by their bad choices, they can wreck their credit and completely and totally wipe the slate clean and be able to start over.
Do you disagree with either of those two premises?
I'm a bit confused. If they choose to pay "the hard way" in their 40s but get the payments discharged by the government, they get both an easier 20s, 30s, and 40s then you, and would then be actively competing with you for other cost item, like housing. I'm all for forgiveness honestly, but your argument doesn't seem entirely honest.
I mean, I'm arguing under this supposition that actual complete student loan forgiveness will not happen in America in our lifetimes.
Even well-meaning people are radically opposed to it because they feel like it's giving some random person a one up in life that they did not get and their own greed and world viewpoints won't allow them to support that.
A very small select group of people that provide a crucial good for society do get that, and people are still mad about it, like underpaid teachers who work in the teaching field for ten years, and pay their student loans for ten years, and owe more on the student loans after ten years of paying it in a job they're underpaid for, that they worked their asses off to get, and had to fight tooth and nail to keep, and we still have asshole politicians who work their asses off night and day to trying to find a way to prevent them from getting their student loans forgiven.
And those assholes are elected by other assholes who are electing them specifically because they're the kind of assholes that would try to make sure that the teachers that trained their children how to be educated adults remain in poverty.
That being said, I do reiterate that if all student loans were forgiven, even though I literally this year alone paid $32,000 of my own money towards my student loans to finish paying them off, because you know your boy be ballin' like that, then I will not be mad or sad or upset that somebody else got a one up in life.
Instead, I will join in the celebration with all of my other peeps who now have that tiny couple of hundred extra dollars a month to spend on more important things like uber eats and facials and massages.
Yes, it is. And the reason why we have taxes in the first place is because we are a society. And the key thing that makes a society a society is that the people that have a strength use that strength to help the people that do not have that strength.
That is the social contract. The helping of other people is why we pay taxes.
That help comes in many forms. That help pays for police departments so that the victims of criminals have defenders to either stop the crime from happening or to capture and punish the person that committed the crime.
That pays for fire departments, for hospitals, for roads, for public services, for parks, for electricity lines to be installed, for data lines, for the internet. It pays for social programs, and it pays the salaries of the people that put the work in to make all of these things happen.
If instead of, a couple of extra bombers for our military every year, that money was used to alleviate the financial burden of student loans that were taken on by people who tried to get training to do a job, to earn more money, to then themselves pay more taxes, to contribute more to society, I'm perfectly fine with that outcome.
It's kind of concerning that you're not seeing the bigger picture.
I'm sure other people in your life have explained this exact same scenario to you. I don't believe that I am unveiling new knowledge or a new viewpoint.
Why would you not want your tax money to go to help people?
because we want to help the right people. i want to help an immigrant mom who gets a degree to be a nurse.
i don't want to help some entitled kid who got an art degree and refuses to get a job because it's not cool for their 'brand' to have a job. If the loan forgiveness was contingent on this person getting a productive job then it would be different.
Incentives need to be structured and targeted to be effective. Throwing money arbitrarily at a problem and hoping for the best is not effective.
Well yes, I also agree, like anybody that's just saying "throw away $1.6 trillion so that everyone can sing "Tra-la-La" all the way to the bank" should be put into a straight jacket and not listened to until they are heavily medicated.
But at the same time, I feel like the current system is too rigid, and too unforgiving, and too based in capitalism to actually be something that our society should continue using as-is.
I believe there should be changes in the interest structure of our student loan debts so that compound interest is not a portion of them, and that they should be charged in such a way that making 120 appropriate payments equals the debt is paid even if there is a small balance remaining.
I believe there should be release valves for the people who are so financially oppressed by the burden of their student loans that they cannot function at their optimum in society, and that using that release valve should be akin to declaring bankruptcy, it should have massive consequences that ultimately are lesser than the consequences of continuing to struggle to pay onerous student loan debt.
And finally, I believe that implementing these social resources, this restructuring of the way we handle student loans, would make America a happier place for the people like me and you who have paid off our student loans, or are successfully paying off our student loans.
We would have fewer, sad, upset, miserable people to interact with because of the student loan debt crisis, and that happier society would be our reward for the small percentage of our taxes that go towards covering over the mistakes of others. Not a blank slate, not us going into debt to help assholes, just making the world a better place for people that made stupid mistakes.
And the key thing that makes a society a society is that the people that have a strength use that strength to help the people that do not have that strength.
And this is exactly why taxpayers without college educations shouldn't be subsidizing those who do. The lion's share of the "strength" is in the latter category.
You write "help people", but you specifically want to help the (educational) demographic of people who least need it, statistically.
I never can quite understand the concept of casting aspersions on a person you're having a debate with.
Accusing me of being educationally elitist does not serve your side of the conversation.
It only increases the divide between us, and it makes me not like you as a person.
If your goal is to be disliked, you're very, very close to your goal.
But if your goal is instead to argue, which is what my assumption was, that people who make financially bad decisions regarding their education should suffer the consequences of those decisions... Well, I mean, it's not like I was going to like you for your stance anyway, but at least you wouldn't be attacking me for no reason.
This accusation exists only in your mind. I pointed out that, in advocating for student loan forgiveness, you are advocating for a financial incentive that is going solely to the demographic of people who are the least impoverished, on average.
And that is a simple, plain, objective fact, not an accusation on any moral axis, or "casting aspersions". I didn't say a single word about you as a person, you pulled that literally out of thin air. Not appreciated.
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...
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
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.
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.
Too big to fail means that the failure of a business or industry would take the country down with it. The college industry (as it's more an industry than anything else) has effectively become "too big to fail". But what's so insidious about it is that rather than all these schools carrying the debt, they've literally pushed it onto the students.
Forgiving student loans without a plan is a bailout for colleges and only accelerates the broken system.
As for screwing people over with changes to forgiveness plans (or making them too rigid in structure) is an example of something that needs to be fixed because it's clearly not working.
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.
I would say that I'm okay with having some rules and not just giving people carte blanche to blow through however many hundreds of thousands of dollars they can get in student loans.
But at the same time, I feel like there should be some checks and balances.
We should make debt forgiveness an attainable thing for everyone. I feel like that's not really a controversial statement.
Your art student, who maybe racked up $100k, they've been paying on it for ten years. Interest has caused it to become $115k.
Like, something is not right, right?
If you pay on a debt for ten years, the balance should go down, right?
I would say, carte blanche forgiveness for anyone, regardless of who they are or what has happened, if they make 10 years of the given payments. Not even 10 years successively, like 120 payments, the debt is paid.
That should be structured so that people are being told, "once you graduate college you will be paying $XXX per month for ten full years to pay this off."
For the people who are college educated, but unfortunately, for whatever reason, could not get a job that enabled them to pay the full amount of their student loans back, well, you know, that sucks for America.
But that is going to be the smaller portion of the total.
They're still going to make 120 payments.
They are still going to be financially burdened with paying for their education for a decade.
If you look ahead to the outcomes for the country, do that for 20 years, then the generation 20 years from now will be well-educated and aware of the risks of getting a college degree that maybe sounds fun but pays bupkis.
In the meantime we would have more people motivated and working hard to make those 120 payments.
We would ultimately recoup the grand majority of that trillion dollars within the next 10 years.
And after that 10 years has passed from the day that that law was signed into place, you would have 90 million employed people with a track history of paying 120 payments and a trillion dollars worth of debt.
Now those 90,000,000 people are free of the burden of their student loans and looking to buy houses and having better income and buying cars and revitalizing the economy with their extra spare cash to burn.
I think the real answer is to find ways to make state schools free (or with set affordable loan programs). That would provide massive pressure for private schools to lower there prices and hopefully have a deflationary effect.
Yeah, and private schools shouldn't have a problem with that because that would make their education elite tier by default.
Like I know a couple of law firms and some of them will not hire if you didn't graduate from one of the big four or from the top college in the state.
And if they have two applicants, and one graduated from the top college and the state, and the other graduated from one of the big four, like Yale, they're going to take the top four and I know that this is a very much a law specific thing that's fairly common, but I feel like a lot of other high paying jobs would be like that also.
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.
People chose to take out these loans, this isn't like cancer or slavery.
Someone has to pay for the loans. When forgiven that means every tax payer is taking on that burden. So yes a good thing happening to you can be a bad thing for other people.
Most importantly, forgiving current loans doesn't prevent more people from falling into the same pitfalls. Meaning you're just perpetuating the problem
My point is don't forgive loans if you haven't fixed the problem because all your doing then is perpetuating the broken system and burdening everyone with student debt.
People chose to take out these loans, this isn't like cancer or slavery.
So what? Would someone who chose to have unprotected sex not deserve to have their AIDS cured? It's completely messed up that it's even necessary to take on backbreaking debt to get higher education—to many people their only shot at social mobility. It's technically a choice, yes, but the fact that anyone even needs to make that choice is a travesty. Telling someone "take on tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands after interests) of dollars or lock yourself out of most social mobility" is messed up no matter what they choose, but partial justice is better than total injustice.
Someone has to pay for the loans. When forgiven that means every tax payer is taking on that burden. So yes a good thing happening to you can be a bad thing for other people.
That's how society works. You want others to help you you have to help them. This is no difference than child tax credits, food stamps or the myriad of other programs the government runs with the taxes of people who won't necessarily benefit from them.
Most importantly, forgiving current loans doesn't prevent more people from falling into the same pitfalls. Meaning you're just perpetuating the problem
Forgiving current debt and preventing future debt are completely unrelated positions. Current debt needs to be forgiven and future debt needs to be prevented, but there's no reason to lock one of these behind the other. The problem is being perpetuated either way, just with more human suffering on one side.
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".
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
"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?"
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.
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.
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.
Exactly, it's like when you look at US median wealth distribution, if you don't strip off the 0.1% at the top that have over a billion dollars in assets, then it makes everything massively lopsided and skews incredibly higher than reality.
Being told that at the age of 35, your average peers have a net worth of $175,000 is not anywhere near true for most people that's actually 35 and surrounded by peers.
You just have a couple of money bag multi-billionaires massively counterbalancing the far higher number of people with negative net worth.
Sure that's how it's supposed to work but I imagine we'll find the higher the income the less you pay as a percentage given the plethora of tax evasion schemes available.
It's highly dependent. Your doctor that makes $250,000 a year probably pays his fair share of $250,000 following the tax codes.
He doesn't really have the time or interest in finding loopholes in order to save the few thousands of dollars it might save him.
Most likely, he hires a qualified CPA and allows the CPA to manage his tax returns.
The people that are doing the tax dodging are the businesses that make millions a year, and they're using their business assets in order to decrease the amount of taxes they and their business pays.
They hire accountants and they do everything they can to not pay taxes, wherever the law allows for you to legally not pay them.
My opinion is that the actual solution is not to villainize the businesses for taking advantage of the tax loopholes but rather it is to villainize our politicians who created the tax loopholes as kickbacks for their friends that give them perks in real life.
There have been proposals to fix this, things like the VAT in England, and they are always loudly shouted down by the news corporations who are in the pocket and owned by the businesses that would be most negatively affected by them.
I mean, I'm pretty sure that petty tax dodging happens even amongst the poorest of people, but if you look at what you would get out of going after the perpetrators, doing things like closing tax loopholes and instituting a VAT, things like that, would do more to solve the problem than auditing every single family that makes under $70,000 a year and finding out where they have made mistakes, accidental or otherwise, in their tax filings.
Instituting a corporate flat tax on any company that has revenues of over $500 million a year would put hundreds of billions of dollars into the federal economy.
With that money, corporations would actually save quite a bit of money because they wouldn't have to hire so many freaking accountants, and that much income could take care of the $1.6 trillion student loan debt crisis in half a decade.
After that was taken care of, it could all be thrown into Social Security and take care of that looming crisis. It would alleviate so many financial concerns from the country that it's actually concerning that we are not even beginning to consider doing such a thing.
Tax enforcement has costs. Some taxes cost more than others to institution, and tax enforcement makes zero sense for poor people where the cost of enforcement exceeds the revenue.
Which is precisely why the IRS has been so gutted, because a broke IRS has no money to audit rich people who are doing massive, illegal, and blatant tax evasion systematically.
And the media focuses on what people buy with food stamps as if they should only be able to buy beans with them.
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.
I don't need my own you just proved my point, 100k is not middle class.
The report, which crunched the numbers for all 50 states, is based on Pew Research’s definition of middle class: two-thirds to double the median household income.
i believe your source even makes note that the American "middle class" is considered working class just about everywhere else.
That's not how most of the world defines middle class because it's a useless stat that does not reflect societal issues via economics.
I looked at the article.
‘Middle class’ goes beyond income
For many people, being “middle class” goes beyond a certain income level, says Brad Klontz, a certified financial planner and expert in financial psychology and behavioral finance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
That's why there was a large push for student debt forgiveness literally a year ago. But the right still flipped their shit. It's not about fairness to the people in the past, it's about fairness for those in the future. Children should not be in massive debt at 16 or 17. Hell, I feel like nobody should be taking on debt until they can fully understand what it takes to pay a debt off. So, not a student.
"Debt forgiveness" is why it failed. That's bullshit. Free pass to everyone who already went to college and still had debt, doesn't help anyone else, doesn't make college more affordable, just bails out former college grads.
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.
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.
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?
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.
By this logic all public services are regressive, since everyone pays into them and there will always be someone poorer who pays in and someone wealthier who benefits. That's why progressive tax rates exist, so that the amount of tax people pay is proportional to how much they are able to contribute. Our progressive tax system only breaks down at the upper levels with the obscenely wealthy. Despite this - on average - the poor benefit the most from student loan forgiveness and the (relatively) rich contribute the most. This is because even though the rich and poor alike would have their student debt forgiven, the rich would be paying more tax to make up for it. It's really a very simple concept, and should not be so difficult for you to understand.
Now, as an extra note, if we corrected our progressive tax system to tax the obscenely wealthy at the highest possible rate (as a progressive tax system is supposed to - and used to - do), there would be absolutely no question as to where the wealth is being distributed, because the wealthiest people who currently pay little to no tax hold more wealth than the rest of us combined.
By this logic all public services are regressive, since everyone pays into them and there will always be someone poorer who pays in and someone wealthier who benefits.
This is not a valid analogy, unless those public services went only to the wealthiest people. Student loan forgiveness goes only to college students (obviously), who are statistically the wealthiest among us, over their lifetimes.
It's like if there was a financial government benefit/incentive to buying a second house. Only the wealthiest among us are buying more than one house, so that would be an obviously-regressive policy.
The same money that would forgive the loans of college students, instead being used as grants for people who, for financial reasons, never went to college, would be put to much better use.
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.
You are against making studying more accessable for less wealthy people because that would mean taxing the general public and that is a wealth transfer from poor to rich?
You understand that it would allow poor people to study and consequently make it less relevant how wealthy you are to be able to study. Resulting in much more a merit based system than wealth based system.
You understand that by giving more people access to completing a university degree, you get more people with university degree. So e.g. more doctors, more doctors cheaper prices.
And of course, you can make the tax based on whether or not you have an university degree. Now you could call it a wash but obvious it would a display of great ignorance about the practical options that exists. In such a system, you don't need a loan, so you don't need to pay interest, you don't need someone who is willing to grant you the loan, temporary unemployment would be less of an issue...
And these are the reasons why poor people don't study.
You are against making studying more accessable for less wealthy people
For the wealthiest people*
The point is that if you're a college student, you're already in the richest category statistically; you literally are less in need than everyone else, on average. The same money would be much better suited to give grants to people who have, for financial reasons, never set foot in college to begin with.
You understand that by giving more people access to completing a university degree
Having student loans is no obstacle to completing a degree, this is non-sequitur. No one is expected to pay student loans off pre-graduation.
You've done quite a poor job of 'getting this straight', I have to say—quite a crop of straw men you've assembled.
If you don't have to pay for university as there is no loan to be paid back, the people who can't go for financial reasons can step their foot into university.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, that's correct and I'm hardly the only person without student loans it would be bad for.
That's... not how that works. When people (who aren't already filthy rich, anyway) get money, they spend it, strengthening the economy as a whole and benefiting everyone but the filthy rich. Your logic would apply equally well to wage increases or anything else that benefits people other than you, but in reality a rising tide lifts all boats. Also, rich pricks already have all the money in the world to buy up housing, so it's not like there's any shortage for demand for the stuff.
Why do only people with student loan debts deserve help?
The whole point of social welfare is to help people, but different people can get help in different ways. There's no reason for one policy to help everyone, for the same reason one doesn't expect food stamps to necessarily benefit prospective homeowners. Also student loans are exploitative and fucked up and shouldn't exist period.
Why not give everyone a flat 50/100/whatever thousand dollars and let us do with it what we will.
Because it'd break the government's budget and/or inflate everything to hell and back. If we assume it's realistic then sure, do that and also forgive student loans. If you want the government to help you, sure that's perfectly fine and frankly your right, but there's no reason for that to have anything to do with them helping other people too.
Yes, and I haven't heard anyone put forth any kind of solution for that.
You haven't seen corporate media or the corporate-captured political establishment put forth any kind of solution for that. There, off the top of my head. You'll likely see something similar in your own local progressive politics scene. There are plenty of policies both proposed and implemented that attempt to help prospective homeowners. Rather than push against student loan forgiveness (which wouldn't help anyway), you can push for affordable housing policies. In the end people eho want student loan forgiveness aren't your enemies; they're your allies against the ultra-rich. There's enough wealth in the world's wealthiest nation to pay for your home and their student loans, but it's being hoarded by rich pricks who want you both to suffer.
When people (who aren’t already filthy rich, anyway) get money, they spend it, strengthening the economy as a whole and benefiting everyone but the filthy rich.
No... when people spend it that money just goes right back to the top. None of it passes through our hands. I don't get paid more when the company I work for does better. Products don't get cheaper when costs go down. They continue to squeeze us for everything they can. So when only one group can afford these now increased prices everyone else gets fucked. Yeah, rich people are the problem but picking and choosing who gets handouts is not the solution.
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.
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?
I honestly have no problem with that. I think housing is actually more critical than student loan forgiveness. A debt driven payment to every American under a certain income threshold would go a long way towards repairing the dwindling middle class, and 99% of that money would go towards big businesses anyway.
That said, your individual experience is based on your socioeconomic upbringing and yours alone. You had opportunities others did not, even if they don't feel like opportunities to you. Student loans were sold on a lie to every American high school age child, that the money would work itself out after college. Something no reasonable adult could actually believe to be true but no high school age child had the worldly awareness to doubt.
You buy a house knowing what your monthly payments are going to be. You buy a house on credit you spent a decade or more building. Multiple people have to sign off on you being able to repay that debt and even those are thrown around like candy. Giving 100,000 dollars to a teenager with no credit history who's probably never had a job is irresponsible and crazy. It should fall on the debtors to write that money off because they were crazy ignorant or stupid to expect it to be repaid in the first place.
To be clear, I don't just want debt forgiveness. I want the college lending system rewritten entirely. I want debt forgiveness to those that need it even if that means my debts aren't wiped out.
To be extra clear, I should not have been given that loan, 90% of the literal children signing for those loans should not be able to access them. But there is no other path to college for almost all of those kids, because college has become so unreasonably expensive.
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.
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.
So because you know a couple people who maybe didnt make the best decisions, forget everybody else. How many students who take out those high loans go on to become something useful and needed by society. Cause the people I know that took out that much mostly went on the become doctor's.
That's an argument for the government to help college students less, not to help them more.
Yes cause the students have the power to set the prices. It's the loan givers dealing with the universities that keep driving up prices. If the government was to step in and say we're only paying this much the prices wouldn't be so exorbitant. You know, like the other developed countries do.
Doctors borrow that much for medical school. Their undergrad degree doesn't cost more than anyone else's.
The government does step in and run state schools where it sets the prices, and its prices are reasonable. In this context, private universities are a luxury.
So the $98,000 it costs for an in-state student to go to my nearest local state college for 4 years is fairly set by the state? What about the $101,000 for the next closest.
In the state I am most familiar with, a four-year degree costs about that much only if you live on-campus. The degree itself (without room and board) is $56,160, and that's if you get no financial aid whatsoever (and need all four years to finish - I finished mine in three by taking no classes except the ones mandatory for my diploma, but that's not possible in some universities). Most people are eligible for a lot of financial aid.
So as long as you live close enough to commute from your parents house, get to live there for free or real cheap, and jump through the hoops and hurdles without any issues, you too can get by relatively cheap!
Everybody else can get fucked cause this person was one of the lucky ones!
Also, make sure you go to what is considered one of the more affordable universities while living in that state for over a year before hand!
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...
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.
The actual college debt per person is much closer to $40,000 right now ($1.6 trillion split between 43 million borrowers), and the income difference between a high school diploma and an associate's degree is like $150 a week lifetime income on average.
Also remember that that is a lifetime income difference, so that $150 a week average may not actually be realized until the borrower is in their late 50s or early 60s.
Once again, applying the median, bachelors degrees can add another $500 to that, but once again, that is lifetime income that may not be realized until towards the end of their working career and we're applying the median, and the thing about the median is, is the median lies to you.
The median makes things look like they're better than the whole. The median allows one billionaire to counterbalance the poverty income of 10,000 poor and homeless people. The median allows the six-figure job you got in your sixties managing other people to counterbalance the four-figure jobs you worked from the ages of 16-30.
The median paints a rosy picture because it throws everything into one giant blender.
Also, this does not include the number of people that attended college, accrued student loans, and then did not complete college, and so they have no advanced degree to get them a higher income job, but they have bills associated with such a degree, and yeah, those people tend to only make like an extra fifty or sixty dollars a week over their high school graduate-only counterparts lifetime income.
I said all of that to say, using the median to justify your emotional condoning of bad practices is in and of itself a bad practice.
If instead you were to say, "Yes, I want good things to happen to other people, America make it happen," and another million or two people joined in with you, then collectively, we can do something about it that works for both the people who worked hard and paid things off for themselves, like myself, and for the people in the future to prevent them from ending up in such a terrible situation.
Lots do. When I lived in Florida I would hear all the time from the snow birds there that they didn't want to pay taxes for the local kids' education, they already paid for theirs up North. A real twisted version of "I got mine".
If it's income tax, then only the place that the money is earned gets that. If it's property taxes, again it's location dependent. So, it really depends on which pot they are complaining about.
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.
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.
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.
As a Gen-X, if I was a kid these days I'd be pissed too. It seems as much grief as they're given by adults, they understand early on they've been given the worst hand.
Our gen made such a big deal about being cynical, yet life ended up being SO MUCH WORSE than even we imagined. Although it does show we were right to be cynical.
Ya, m gut tells me teenagers are much more aware of just how bad it is because of their generation's social media. I was pretty unaware at that age. I think there was a bit of a shift in societal values and the youth reflect it more as well.
It has also steadily been getting worse and we keep telling them they are the ones who are going to get seriously shafted compared to the rest of us. That probably doesn't help.
I wasn't really aware of it as a kid either, but I don't think I ever really heard about climate change stuff until Inconvenient Truth came out. It just wasn:t something that was talked about, because we weren't really feeling the effects.
I'm amazed (in a bad way) at how far we've fallen in 25 years, and I fear for the life my child will have as an adult.
Honestly, I think we underestimate how much of an impact telling them that is. Realism isn't bad, but kids' only real point of reference is their past experience and what adults tell them. So if we set them up to think it'll be terrible compared to us, while we complain that everything is bad, they're gonna assume that's truly awful to have to be told about it.
Note: not to say things are going great.
And what a righteous 15 years of uneducated adulthood it'll be before they die of black lung.
yeah but think of all the pituitary glands we could harvest
The ones that survive will have it good. It's like in the movie 300 when they send their kids into the forest. The mines is how you separate the wheat from the chaff
Chaff is responsible for all the faults in society. We need a wheats only country.
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?
my nephews have a better life than me. but their lives are way harder and stressful than mine was. they have zero free time apart from holidays. they do nothing creative or exploratory, every minute of everyday is scheduled.
their college educations are paid for. mine wasn't. but they will work way harder to achieve less. but they eat way better food/healthcare, have better clothes, have better homes, etc than I ever did.
of course they are growing up this way and thus they don't and never will appreciate how good they have it. they already are razor focused on the fact that someone else has it better than them and how unfair it is they aren't traveling to europe for family vacations like their friends are.
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.
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.
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.
My brother is a big fan of law and governance, and he said that American society was set up so that laws move at a snail's pace.
The shit that the current turd in chief is doing by writing hundreds of executive orders to constantly shake things up and make people constantly have to keep adapting to changes until they don't know from one day to the next what the laws are going to be are what they originally attempted to prevent by making it so slow and arduous to change the laws.
Dampnut issuing executive orders like they're leftover wads of tissue on the toilet paper he has to wipe his gigantic, flabby ass with is destabilizing the country and also making it so that stupid people think that good laws can be made quickly.
The foul swine in a bad orange toupee is causing multiple levels of damage to the country, and one of the side effects of that is making it so that it feels like we can solve something like a $1 trillion student loan debt crisis by signing a couple of sheets of paper.
What a good law would be would be something more like making it so that the interest on student loans can no longer accrue interest, or reducing the interest on student loans to something reasonable, like 1% over the federal interest rates.
It could do things like allowing student loans to be discharged through bankruptcy, or by setting a maximum on how much can be paid off over the life of the loan before it is automatically forgiven, no matter how long that takes.
Right now, the issue with student loans are manifold.
Some of them are things like the interest accruing interest, which means that people can take out a loan for $60,000 or $70,000, pay back $120,000 over 15 years, and owe over $100,000 still on the student loans.
Some of the other issues are things like people taking out loans for careers that are interesting but that leave them bankrupt or like does not provide them income. I know somebody who went to a Mormon college in Utah and got her master's degree in fucking pottery and ceramics.
Her student loans were like $90,000 so that she can make pots at home because there are no fucking jobs in America for potters.
Five years of education, and after student loans, well in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, and what she's doing is the thing she was doing while she was going to college, which is working as a jewelry artist for a small jewelry firm, which is something she did not need the degree for, and that her degree does not apply to.
So there should be some limits or some hard rules on what colleges can charge based off of how well what you are learning gives you the ability to pay back the cost of the education.
I'm not smart enough to figure out what those are, but I am smart enough to say that it is a problem to charge someone six figures of their total lifetime income for something that they are passionate about, but that is ultimately incapable of paying back the original cost, and that also saps the happiness out of their life.
I don't disagree with you, but at the same time... the government can't stop being from making bad life choices if they decide to make them. Your friend made an awful choice and will now pay the consequences of it for the rest of her life. And the onus is on her to correct that. It is her choice to stay and work in that jewelry shop instead of move or try to apply he skills elsewhere or to another industry. I know art grads who took their skills and moved them into machining and other industrial areas where there are plenty of good jobs and demand for them. But cleraly your friend doesn't sound like they would be interested in that, so much as staying in the same place doing the same thing forever, which is weird why they even got a masters anyway.
Well, I only brought them up because it was a relevant event that I am aware of. While I also agree that getting a master's degree in pottery is not exactly an ideal career path for most people.
It's not like she's given up on pottery, it's just that it's no longer 1300 BC and there are no viziers that pay excellent money for ceramics.
She is also running a business in her spare time and working on developing a name for herself and forming an art studio and collective with other people, and it's possible that the knowledge and experience that she has gained will not only help her be successful, but will also help her help her friends be successful in this because there is money to be made in custom artwork and tchotchskis.
I also know a truck driver that got a law degree, and they worked their ass off, they got burned out on law, and now they just sit on their butt and drive a truck back and forth from California to Atlanta, 48 weeks out of the year.
What I mean to say is that a one-size-fits-all system of student loans and college fees is not really an appropriate way to handle the task, the obligation, the opportunity of educating Americans.
I want people, if they so choose, to be truck drivers and ceramists and beauticians and anything else. I- but I also want the price to fit the education and for the system to allow for artists. I want there to be artists and "non-financially viable" education and life paths that still make financial sense when it comes to education fees.
And I also want there to be a pressure release valve for when a person makes a mistake, so that their lives, their potential future, are not destroyed by the consequences of their mistake.
We treat education as if it actually is a functioning part of our capitalistic society that can operate under the same rules that profit-driven businesses do, instead of treating it as a social good that benefits us regardless of what kind of society we live in.
Education should be treated more like libraries and fire departments instead of banks and bookstores.
I dated someone who makes bank making ceramics for rich people. But they live in a city full of rich people who will pay $5000 for someone to make them 20 custom ceramic coffee mugs. I doubt Utah has that type of customer base.
i also have another friend who wants to work in the art world... but they refuse to understand that their degree from no name university means they will never get hired in that field but they keep naively applying to jobs that require ivy league degrees to get an interview.
Who is going to pay for that valve though? someone has to eat those costs. I mean, also even if education was cheap, plenty of people would also still waste it and screw up their lives.
Yeah, I mean, you are right, it has to be paid for, and that payment is a pain, and it's $1.6 trillion dollars, and as prosperous as America is, we can't casually brush aside $1.6 trillion dollars worth of outstanding debt.
But at the same time, I feel like if the financial constraint was not the defining factor that after people go through a process of self-discovery and attempting, you know, underwater basket weaving, or ceramics or whatever, and finding out that it's a dead end for them, they might end up going back to college and getting a degree in law, or going to a trade school, or finding some other path to where their capabilities and the needs of society interact in a financially successful way.
I want people to have more choices, more options, and the more choices they make, the higher likelihood that they will find something that is wildly successful for them.
I want people to succeed.
Iwant people to do something that is wildly successful for them, and when they do they will generate tax revenues for the country far in excess of what it cost for them to make that mistake.
That's the purpose of social programs and society itself, in my opinion.
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".
Not really. You can have a huge range of levels of control and regulation on guns. You can't really have anything between life and not life.
2nd Amendment is pretty clear: shall not be infringed
Also pretty clear that it was specifically for a "well-armed and regulated militia"
Don't get me wrong, I own guns, I like guns, I believe that guns can be owned safely, and I also believe that there should be more controls on who owns guns and what kinds of guns they own under which circumstances.
I feel like hunting equipment and 22s and stuff like that, semi-automatic handguns, perfectly fine for home ownership, home defense, etc..
But sniper rifles and machine guns and rocket launchers and everything above that basic home gun ownership tier should be placed in a sort of library-type militia system where people can join that militia, be trained in its proper and effective use, and be like a volunteer reserve national guard-type thing.
Kind of like we have volunteer fire departments where tax payers and donations provide them with the tools, but they go through the training so that they can back up the actual paid fire department.
Of course, we should have a gun-owner license.
A licensing system where you have to attend a basic safety course, possibly register for some sort of gun-owner insurance to pay for possible injuries to other people through negligent gun ownership usage, things like that would massively increase the safety factor of guns and massively increase the number of people that are qualified to use a gun in case of emergency and have the training needed to do so effectively.
Further, it's not beyond the pale to make it that our weapons should be registered so that if they're used in committing a crime, the weapon itself can help identify the criminal that committed a crime with the weapon, even if they stole the weapon from you to commit the crime.
I'm all for gun ownership. I just want more responsibility, more accountability, and more maturity about it.
It's not really cool that any 18-year-old can pop down to a local Walmart and get enough ammunition to blow away a supermarket full of children.
Except that's not the case. Here is the full text:
If you go through writings from that era you'll notice that while the vocabulary changes (I'll get to that), the grammar is virtually identical to modern English.
If you reread the amendment with that in mind, you'll notice that the first clause doesn't actually say anything actionable. It's just an explanation. Isolating the second clause of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" doesn't change the meaning of what's being said.
Now, why did the Framers decide to include an explanation into the 2nd Amendment, but not the others? That's hard to say. But I can at least expand on the context of the first clause.
Remembered how I said that vocabulary has changed? That's unfortunately what happened with the first clause a bit At the time, the term "regulated" actually referred to being trained and equipped.
The term "militia" has also been distorted over time in common vernacular. What most people commonly think of as a "militia" like the National Guard is more precisely called an "organized militia". In contrast, an "unorganized militia" refers to all able-bodied men of military age, at the time considered to be ages 16-45. Basically anyone that could be drafted in war.
This is important when you consider US military doctrine up until WWII. In times of peace, the US Army kept a small corp of professional officers, with the intent to draft men into the Army as needed whenever war is declared. Then once war was over, all the drafted men were sent back and the Army was shrunk back down.
This doctrine present a major logistics problem: when war breaks out, you need a lot of fighting men in a short amount of time. To alleviate this problem, you want the draftees (aka the unorganized militia) to already have much of the skills and equipment needed to fight, with one of these critical skills being marksmanship. Hence why the Framers found it necessary to national defense for the populous to be able to have their own weapons.
To change gears, there's another argument I want to make: gutting and/or removing one of the amendments in the Bill of Rights sets a dangerous precedent. While the 21st amendment exists to nullify the 18th, we've never done that to any of the original 10 amendments. If the 2nd is abolished, why why not abolish the 4th, or the 5th, or even the 1st? That's a dangerous precedent.
And while there's the stereotypical argument of "you can't take on jets and tanks with AR15's", the US lost Vietnam and Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq too. And that's with the coffers and supply lines protected by an entire ocean. While a civil war would be horrifying, having that proverbial nuclear button pressures the government into somewhat caring what the populous thinks.
Unfortunately, with the particular "administration" in charge at the moment I wouldn't feel comfortable with them having a list of who has weapons. That'd make it easier for them to go after potential armed resistance early, allowing them to go full authoritarian.
Honestly, it's in our best bet to stop pushing for gun control. That'd get rid of one of the big reasons that more moderate conservatives don't vote for Democrats. Especially since we could instead put that effort into education, healthcare, labor rights, etc. which would do a much better job of reducing violent crime while making everyone's lives better. There's only so much political capital that a candidate and party can have, and it's best spent where it would do the most good.
I'm not in favor of abolishing any rights accorded to the people by the Constitution.
If anything, I feel like we should have more rights and that the government itself should have fewer rights.
That being said, I also believe that we should open the doors and allow more people to have guns, but we should also attach educational requirements, location requirements, insurance requirements, and third-party checks on who has what gun when because, as you know the unbelievable spate of school shootings has shown, irresponsible gun ownership is one of the primary causes of death in what should be the richest and safest country in the world.
Implementing these checks would not infringe upon the rights of gun owners, it would expand them, it would allow bump stocks, silencers, fully automatic machine guns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, grenades themselves, landmines, tanks, surface-to-air missiles...
I literally could not give the first fuck over who has what weaponry as long as there is a reasonable, sane, and balanced check on how that weaponry can be used, and who has oversight on it.
The bigger issue is that we have irresponsible gun ownership and because of one clause in the Bill of Rights and how it is interpreted, these continued escalations of murders and travesties are happening so often that a school shooting is barely even front page news at this point.
That is incredibly terrifying, and sad.
We should do something about it because we are a sane society, and one of the best things that we can do about it is to institute licensing, registration, insurance, education, and taking weaponry above the level of self-defense and placing them in places where people can responsibly monitor their access, where they can actually be used and enjoyed for what they are, but they are not casually lying around unguarded by negligent parents and made available to disgruntled teenagers.
limiting mag capacity or bump stocks isn't an infringement on your right to own a gun. it just makes it so you have a gun that can't shoot as fast or as much. or do you think automatic weapons should be purchasable? what about heavy weapons like autocannons? should i be able to throw a .50 BMG on the back of my pickup and drive around with it?
Going with the other stuff I was saying, I definitely think you should be able to purchase 50 cals and machine guns and everything else, but like, you shouldn't be allowed to keep them at your house.
They should have to go to a public storage facility where they are kept under lock and key, and only let out to the registered owner or to the people that the registered owner permits, like a gun bank that also serves as a volunteer militia registration and training center.
I'm totally okay with people having their cake and eating it too, as long as that is done with the overall safety and happiness of society in mind.
Blowing shit up is a hell of a lot of fun, and if you have the money to do it, you should be allowed to do it. It's a great stress reliever, it's an excellent opportunity to hang out with your boys or your girls or your pals of indeterminate gender.
You are describing the national guard. It's a public service you join up, get training, and have service obligations.
If you want to blow shit up become an explosives engineer or work in demolition. Just because you have a personal fetish for high calibre guns is a pretty bad reason to claim everyone should do it too.
And those limits do little to protect anyone that would be victims of a crime. Swapping magazines can be done faster than you think, and full auto is difficult ro control. Banning them does nothing to actually help people, it's just security theater.
Also, the states that ban larger magazines also are more likely to ban suppressors, which is ridiculous because suppressors are personal protective equipment. Pretty much every other country leaves suppressors unregulated, because there's no point to regulating them.
I think the comic strip in the OP was already a sufficient example of a bad faith argument but thanks for adding another one, I guess?
Ah, yes, more snarky comments that don't actually address any points. Congrats on being a stereotypical pro-gun control pundit.
It's pretty clear that you aren't worth bothering with
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.
The OP is a comic about people being opposed to student loans for the most stupid and selfish of reasons.
Screen Shatter proceeds to, at best, make a non sequitor about why student loan forgiveness is actually not a good thing. I then point out that while there are many arguments in favor of focusing on the root cause (that I agree should be the goal), people who bring that up in response to "should we forgive student loans" are almost always arguing in bad faith.
Think less in terms of reading completely unrelated twitter posts and more about an actual conversation and why someone would say X in response to Y. Because Context. It's a B.
In conversations I find it's best to operate with a positive view of the person I'm talking to. Rather than assuming intent, I go with what they've said and hope for the best until I know otherwise.
You assumed Screen_Shatter disagreed with loan forgiveness, even though they didn't say that in their comment. Happily, the Screen_Shatter replied to you, and they agreed with it! It turns out you have something in common! Just because they have other ideas doesn't mean they disagree on this one.
Assuming Screen_Shatter disagreed was a mistake and it made the conversation less pleasant. Just like telling someone:
Lemmy is a small community. Assume the best about folks on here and help make it more welcoming. Hopefully it'll grow.
Yeah. I prefer to operate under the assumption that people are at least trying to have a conversation. Rather than just walking around spewing non sequitors. If someone feels they were misinterpreted, they can reply and clarify... rather than get angry that people interpreted what they wrote rather than what they were thinking. That is, again, how you have a conversation.
STRONG disagree. Lemmy is a small (for the modern internet) userbase. Not a community. A community is one where you regularly get to know others and... communicate. Lemmy, like basically all modern social media, is people shouting into a void. Hell, Lemmy is on the worse end of that since so many of us came from reddit where all that matters is looking for keywords and writing the right canned/meme response to get the most updoots.
Think about it this way: How often have you actually interacted with someone and thought "I want to get to know that person better" or even "Hey, it is so and so. I wonder how the event they were talking about went?". I personally have a few new internet friends from Mastodon funny enough. But Lemmy? We reddit up in here.
And... you know a great way to never make those connections? By assuming nobody is communicating or responding to anyone else and considering every comment to be made in a void.
I'll also refrain from pointing out the difference between clarifying intent and doubling down or how often chuds have used this very same "assume the best of everyone" to spread hate over the decades of the modern internet.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That mindset sure is a great way to make sure nothing ever gets better for anyone.
Congratulations.
nothing will get better until college enrollments start to plummet. then you will see price adjustments.
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
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
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.
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.
So the higher minimum wage is already a thing in some countries (e.g. Germany, where degrees are also mostly free) and there is still the trend of many more ppl. studying.
In general, our world is getting more complicated and we live longer. So i dont really see the problem of more education?
More education is a balance of costs and benefits. There is no harm in even a supermarket cashier having a collage degree. God knows our democracies could use more educated voters. But in many professions, it is not worth the cost. The same knowledge could be gained by a few months of on the job training. If employers are really willing to pay more for those degrees like in Germany than that is fine. But I am pretty sure in some places, people are asking for degrees not because they are needed (worth the cost), but because people with degrees are available cheaply.
After all, if the degrees were worth their price to employers, and the employers paid for them adequately, student loans wouldn't be an issue.
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.
Trades are a good option, but how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers?
That would be lit
What makes you think they aren't already?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't take out a loan that you cannot afford.
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.
I was saving for college and aware of the costs from the age of 14. That's why I got a job at 15.
It was pretty easy to understand. They showed me a piece of paper with all the numbers. Basic mathematics.
The issue is that people 'follow their passions' and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair. But... if you need a job after school that pays a certain amount... well you need to plan for that too.
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position. His lack of research is his own fault. Not anyone else's. Nobody is owed a job inbiology just because they studied it, and most people who get those jobs go to top programs and are top performers.
Your friend needs to get a job in an office, pushing papers, like vast majority of us. Those are the jobs that are available. Take their bio dataset skills, and join a marketing firm, like the rest of us.
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn't get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are 'below' them. FWIW I have a brother who is in this rut right now. He refuses to get jobs that are 'below' him so he has been unemployed for 3 years now. He's a prideful idiot.
I went to an ivy league school and my first job was pushing papers because it was the first job I could get. And I built up my job skills and my career. I didn't sit around living at home for months/years whining about how there are 'no good jobs'. I got to work and started paying off my loans. I have zero empathy for the people who sit around and refuse to work because they feel it is 'below' them to work outside of a certain field/industry or income level.
We should be building a world where this is not the case! We should be building a world where people can become skilled at something without significant cost and shift careers when they decide they need to. Even better, a world where careers are optional and people just do what they need to to contribute to society and can otherwise enjoy life
Remember these are life-changing decisions made by teenagers, a cohort specifically known for making poor decisions and not considering long term ramifications of these decisions. Yes everyone can name someone who made poor decisions in college and is paying the price for them, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't build a world that's less harsh to people who do so!
I love the projection here as you make up a story for someone you never met. I met this individual when we both worked at a callcenter making $12/hr. He did everything right, he got his Masters from a good university, he published research while in college, continued to do what independent research he could outside of college, yet because some idiot in power who themselves never graduated college decided to demolish state funded university research with a single stroke of a pen, my colleague was left to fight for whatever scraps he could get after doing everything right. He did everything right and still ended up royally fucked, yet he still continued to do the right thing and eventually found himself finally in a job in his field a decade after graduation. This is not a system that's setup optimally, this is a system that badly needs to be fixed!
What if Im against it because "fuck you, you took out the loan knowing full well what it meant"?
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.
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.
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.
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?
because if you fuck yourself over I shouldn't have to bail you out. your personal choices are not my responsibility. go ahead and party in your 20s and let your debt accrue to 200K. but don't whine about how unfair your life is when you are living paycheck to paycheck at 40 and have nothing for retirement. you did that to yourself and life is not 'unfair and cruel' because you made bad choices.
this is like you getting drunk crashing you car, and demanding someone else pay for the damages, because 'it's not your fault'. It is your fault entirely, and nobody else's. But by a lot of lemmy logic it's the fault of the alcohol company, the bar owner, and etc. as if they were suppose to prevent you from doing all of that.
personal responsibility exists. college students are not hapless victims of a cruel system. they are making choices and now they are crying that they should not have to face the consequences of the choices. I wanted to go to grad school at my dream school, but it turns out i'd have 60K in debt from going there, so I went to a place where they gave me a scholarship, even if it wasn't what I 'truly' wanted.
But plenty of people make the other choice, and go to schools and get degrees they can't afford. And further, they do nothing responsible/productive with that degree. I had a friend I stopped interacting with who got a comp sci degree from a top uni, had lots of debt, but now works part time in a bicycle shop for 15/hr and refuses to pay back loans and keeps ranting about how the govt should pay off their debt for them. I stopped interacting with this person once I realized what pathetic joke of a human being they. And they love ranting about how everyone is privledged and should pay more tax and they are so poor and helpless and they have financially abused many people with this routine. They are just a lazy entitled jerk who is throwing away their life because it's cool be a bicycle hipster and 'uncool' to work a computer programming job.
Why in the hell would anyone think this person deserves loan forgiveness? They do not. They should use their degree, get a good job, and pay back their loans themselves.
If this person however, got a degree teaching computer science and was doing something productive to society should they qualify for a partial loan forgiveness, totally.
your mistake is you assume all people are well intention ed an good actors. many are not. many human beings are exploiters, abusers, cheats, and generally shitty people who are seeking to exploit everyone/everything they can for personal gain at the loss of other people. lemmy assumes that all such people are billionaires or something... there are plenty of them who are poor who are like this as well.
I feel like that's an incredibly harsh analogy, and I don't really think it's appropriate.
It implies, relating your analogy back to student loans, that people who are incredibly intelligent and capable and good with technology chose to take a $200,000 PhD in underwater basket weaving and then they don't want to pay their student loans.
I would say a more apt analogy would be if an orchard owner didn't take proper care of their orchard and then their neighbors came over and helped them dig out all of the stumps so that they could plant new seeds.
i'm not implying anything dude. there are lots and lots of people in the real world who do stupid crap like that. for real. I have know dozen and dozens of them over the past 20 years.
but you seem to assume all people are fundamentally good by default. they are not. there is a significant percentage of people who you would hire for your orchard, and kill your trees, and then sue you for firing them. why would you want to reward these people?
FWIW I have worked with community non profits much of my adult life. A good 1/3 of the people involved, both providers and clients, are immoral shitheads. I'm not talking analogies here, I'm talking the real world. You have to setup litmus tests, waiting periods, and lots of other mechanisms to prevent those people from getting/access resources, and rooting them out even when they do. a significant part of the job, sadly. One of the reasons many 'assistance' programs are so fucking onerous w/ paper work and waiting periods is because so many bad actors seek to exploit them to the detriment of those who actually need the assistance.
and those systems break down when shitty people come in and hoover up all the resources and exploit the generosity of others. and most of those shitty people... don't need help. they just seek a method to avoid hard work.
Eh, you can't let the bastards drag you down.
I know there's a lot of bastards out there. I'm related to half of them. Like, I know how it is.
That doesn't mean that I have to abandon my optimism, or to intentionally choose to see the evil in people.
These resources would not be handed out carte blanche, and I am not the person who is arguing for them to be handed out carte blanche.
I am saying that we should change the way the interest is counted so that there is no interest being charged on the interest that has been charged.
Doing that one thing would change the debt structure of student loans so that when people make consistent payments over a decade, it will almost always, in and of itself, completely pay off their student loans, and that would be the money they borrowed, plus the interest on the money that was borrowed.
It would give people who are struggling a light at the end of the tunnel that they can strive towards and that they can know for a fact will not be taken away from them, and that is powerful.
I would also argue that student loans should be able to be discharged through bankruptcy with maybe a moderate justification adjudicated by a judge, so that for the people at the very bottom of the scale who are most oppressed by their bad choices, they can wreck their credit and completely and totally wipe the slate clean and be able to start over.
Do you disagree with either of those two premises?
I'm a bit confused. If they choose to pay "the hard way" in their 40s but get the payments discharged by the government, they get both an easier 20s, 30s, and 40s then you, and would then be actively competing with you for other cost item, like housing. I'm all for forgiveness honestly, but your argument doesn't seem entirely honest.
I mean, I'm arguing under this supposition that actual complete student loan forgiveness will not happen in America in our lifetimes.
Even well-meaning people are radically opposed to it because they feel like it's giving some random person a one up in life that they did not get and their own greed and world viewpoints won't allow them to support that.
A very small select group of people that provide a crucial good for society do get that, and people are still mad about it, like underpaid teachers who work in the teaching field for ten years, and pay their student loans for ten years, and owe more on the student loans after ten years of paying it in a job they're underpaid for, that they worked their asses off to get, and had to fight tooth and nail to keep, and we still have asshole politicians who work their asses off night and day to trying to find a way to prevent them from getting their student loans forgiven.
And those assholes are elected by other assholes who are electing them specifically because they're the kind of assholes that would try to make sure that the teachers that trained their children how to be educated adults remain in poverty.
That being said, I do reiterate that if all student loans were forgiven, even though I literally this year alone paid $32,000 of my own money towards my student loans to finish paying them off, because you know your boy be ballin' like that, then I will not be mad or sad or upset that somebody else got a one up in life.
Instead, I will join in the celebration with all of my other peeps who now have that tiny couple of hundred extra dollars a month to spend on more important things like uber eats and facials and massages.
'I don't want my tax dollars paying for people who are irresponsible with their debt.'
"Honestly, why would you even care?"
Why would they care how their tax money is spent? Is that a serious question?
Yes, it is. And the reason why we have taxes in the first place is because we are a society. And the key thing that makes a society a society is that the people that have a strength use that strength to help the people that do not have that strength.
That is the social contract. The helping of other people is why we pay taxes.
That help comes in many forms. That help pays for police departments so that the victims of criminals have defenders to either stop the crime from happening or to capture and punish the person that committed the crime.
That pays for fire departments, for hospitals, for roads, for public services, for parks, for electricity lines to be installed, for data lines, for the internet. It pays for social programs, and it pays the salaries of the people that put the work in to make all of these things happen.
If instead of, a couple of extra bombers for our military every year, that money was used to alleviate the financial burden of student loans that were taken on by people who tried to get training to do a job, to earn more money, to then themselves pay more taxes, to contribute more to society, I'm perfectly fine with that outcome.
It's kind of concerning that you're not seeing the bigger picture.
I'm sure other people in your life have explained this exact same scenario to you. I don't believe that I am unveiling new knowledge or a new viewpoint.
Why would you not want your tax money to go to help people?
What is it about that scenario that galls you?
because we want to help the right people. i want to help an immigrant mom who gets a degree to be a nurse.
i don't want to help some entitled kid who got an art degree and refuses to get a job because it's not cool for their 'brand' to have a job. If the loan forgiveness was contingent on this person getting a productive job then it would be different.
Incentives need to be structured and targeted to be effective. Throwing money arbitrarily at a problem and hoping for the best is not effective.
Well yes, I also agree, like anybody that's just saying "throw away $1.6 trillion so that everyone can sing "Tra-la-La" all the way to the bank" should be put into a straight jacket and not listened to until they are heavily medicated.
But at the same time, I feel like the current system is too rigid, and too unforgiving, and too based in capitalism to actually be something that our society should continue using as-is.
I believe there should be changes in the interest structure of our student loan debts so that compound interest is not a portion of them, and that they should be charged in such a way that making 120 appropriate payments equals the debt is paid even if there is a small balance remaining.
I believe there should be release valves for the people who are so financially oppressed by the burden of their student loans that they cannot function at their optimum in society, and that using that release valve should be akin to declaring bankruptcy, it should have massive consequences that ultimately are lesser than the consequences of continuing to struggle to pay onerous student loan debt.
And finally, I believe that implementing these social resources, this restructuring of the way we handle student loans, would make America a happier place for the people like me and you who have paid off our student loans, or are successfully paying off our student loans.
We would have fewer, sad, upset, miserable people to interact with because of the student loan debt crisis, and that happier society would be our reward for the small percentage of our taxes that go towards covering over the mistakes of others. Not a blank slate, not us going into debt to help assholes, just making the world a better place for people that made stupid mistakes.
And this is exactly why taxpayers without college educations shouldn't be subsidizing those who do. The lion's share of the "strength" is in the latter category.
You write "help people", but you specifically want to help the (educational) demographic of people who least need it, statistically.
I never can quite understand the concept of casting aspersions on a person you're having a debate with.
Accusing me of being educationally elitist does not serve your side of the conversation.
It only increases the divide between us, and it makes me not like you as a person.
If your goal is to be disliked, you're very, very close to your goal.
But if your goal is instead to argue, which is what my assumption was, that people who make financially bad decisions regarding their education should suffer the consequences of those decisions... Well, I mean, it's not like I was going to like you for your stance anyway, but at least you wouldn't be attacking me for no reason.
This accusation exists only in your mind. I pointed out that, in advocating for student loan forgiveness, you are advocating for a financial incentive that is going solely to the demographic of people who are the least impoverished, on average.
And that is a simple, plain, objective fact, not an accusation on any moral axis, or "casting aspersions". I didn't say a single word about you as a person, you pulled that literally out of thin air. Not appreciated.
for some people there is no morality or moral hazard. or apparently it only applies above a certain economic class.
and yet these people rail against the immorality of billionaires and how they shouldn't exist because they exploit people and the government.
but if you make 50K and you exploit the government and other people... well then there is nothing wrong with that!
What happened to all that student loan vote-for-me-again (or so it felt for a European, IMO) relief stuff in the end?
The Supreme Court put a stop to it in 2023. Biden v. Nebraska, one of the many recent 6-3 decisions.
If only those same six judges were as willing to (properly, IMO) limit Presidential authority now that their guy is in office...
It's next to the Epstein's files.
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
I think there are three problems with loan forgiveness:
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.
Too big to fail means that the failure of a business or industry would take the country down with it. The college industry (as it's more an industry than anything else) has effectively become "too big to fail". But what's so insidious about it is that rather than all these schools carrying the debt, they've literally pushed it onto the students.
Forgiving student loans without a plan is a bailout for colleges and only accelerates the broken system.
As for screwing people over with changes to forgiveness plans (or making them too rigid in structure) is an example of something that needs to be fixed because it's clearly not working.
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.
I would say that I'm okay with having some rules and not just giving people carte blanche to blow through however many hundreds of thousands of dollars they can get in student loans.
But at the same time, I feel like there should be some checks and balances.
We should make debt forgiveness an attainable thing for everyone. I feel like that's not really a controversial statement.
Your art student, who maybe racked up $100k, they've been paying on it for ten years. Interest has caused it to become $115k.
Like, something is not right, right?
If you pay on a debt for ten years, the balance should go down, right?
I would say, carte blanche forgiveness for anyone, regardless of who they are or what has happened, if they make 10 years of the given payments. Not even 10 years successively, like 120 payments, the debt is paid.
That should be structured so that people are being told, "once you graduate college you will be paying $XXX per month for ten full years to pay this off."
For the people who are college educated, but unfortunately, for whatever reason, could not get a job that enabled them to pay the full amount of their student loans back, well, you know, that sucks for America.
But that is going to be the smaller portion of the total.
They're still going to make 120 payments.
They are still going to be financially burdened with paying for their education for a decade.
If you look ahead to the outcomes for the country, do that for 20 years, then the generation 20 years from now will be well-educated and aware of the risks of getting a college degree that maybe sounds fun but pays bupkis.
In the meantime we would have more people motivated and working hard to make those 120 payments.
We would ultimately recoup the grand majority of that trillion dollars within the next 10 years.
And after that 10 years has passed from the day that that law was signed into place, you would have 90 million employed people with a track history of paying 120 payments and a trillion dollars worth of debt.
Now those 90,000,000 people are free of the burden of their student loans and looking to buy houses and having better income and buying cars and revitalizing the economy with their extra spare cash to burn.
I think the real answer is to find ways to make state schools free (or with set affordable loan programs). That would provide massive pressure for private schools to lower there prices and hopefully have a deflationary effect.
Yeah, and private schools shouldn't have a problem with that because that would make their education elite tier by default.
Like I know a couple of law firms and some of them will not hire if you didn't graduate from one of the big four or from the top college in the state.
And if they have two applicants, and one graduated from the top college and the state, and the other graduated from one of the big four, like Yale, they're going to take the top four and I know that this is a very much a law specific thing that's fairly common, but I feel like a lot of other high paying jobs would be like that also.
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.
That's such a cheap shot at my point.
My point is don't forgive loans if you haven't fixed the problem because all your doing then is perpetuating the broken system and burdening everyone with student debt.
So what? Would someone who chose to have unprotected sex not deserve to have their AIDS cured? It's completely messed up that it's even necessary to take on backbreaking debt to get higher education—to many people their only shot at social mobility. It's technically a choice, yes, but the fact that anyone even needs to make that choice is a travesty. Telling someone "take on tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands after interests) of dollars or lock yourself out of most social mobility" is messed up no matter what they choose, but partial justice is better than total injustice.
That's how society works. You want others to help you you have to help them. This is no difference than child tax credits, food stamps or the myriad of other programs the government runs with the taxes of people who won't necessarily benefit from them.
Forgiving current debt and preventing future debt are completely unrelated positions. Current debt needs to be forgiven and future debt needs to be prevented, but there's no reason to lock one of these behind the other. The problem is being perpetuated either way, just with more human suffering on one side.
Well
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".
What does "sound stave" mean?
I might be wrong here, but it looks like autocorrect got them and it’s supposed to be ‘should starve’.
"Should starve" I don't know what happened there
Should starve
"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?"
Plot twist, he actually beat up every single kid in the paediatric cancer ward at his local hospital.
Dude.
Fuck cancer, AND fuck people that have that logic about school loans or anything else.
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.
Don't take out a loan that you cannot afford, that is on you.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly, it's like when you look at US median wealth distribution, if you don't strip off the 0.1% at the top that have over a billion dollars in assets, then it makes everything massively lopsided and skews incredibly higher than reality.
Being told that at the age of 35, your average peers have a net worth of $175,000 is not anywhere near true for most people that's actually 35 and surrounded by peers.
You just have a couple of money bag multi-billionaires massively counterbalancing the far higher number of people with negative net worth.
Sure that's how it's supposed to work but I imagine we'll find the higher the income the less you pay as a percentage given the plethora of tax evasion schemes available.
It's highly dependent. Your doctor that makes $250,000 a year probably pays his fair share of $250,000 following the tax codes.
He doesn't really have the time or interest in finding loopholes in order to save the few thousands of dollars it might save him.
Most likely, he hires a qualified CPA and allows the CPA to manage his tax returns.
The people that are doing the tax dodging are the businesses that make millions a year, and they're using their business assets in order to decrease the amount of taxes they and their business pays.
They hire accountants and they do everything they can to not pay taxes, wherever the law allows for you to legally not pay them.
My opinion is that the actual solution is not to villainize the businesses for taking advantage of the tax loopholes but rather it is to villainize our politicians who created the tax loopholes as kickbacks for their friends that give them perks in real life.
There have been proposals to fix this, things like the VAT in England, and they are always loudly shouted down by the news corporations who are in the pocket and owned by the businesses that would be most negatively affected by them.
the pols own the businesses and/or get donations/kickbacks from them
If you think tax evasion is more common in business id say I'm fairly certain you are wrong and it's statistics will support that.
We simply don't know because the it's does not focus in higher earners because they can fight it, us poors can't.
I mean, I'm pretty sure that petty tax dodging happens even amongst the poorest of people, but if you look at what you would get out of going after the perpetrators, doing things like closing tax loopholes and instituting a VAT, things like that, would do more to solve the problem than auditing every single family that makes under $70,000 a year and finding out where they have made mistakes, accidental or otherwise, in their tax filings.
Instituting a corporate flat tax on any company that has revenues of over $500 million a year would put hundreds of billions of dollars into the federal economy.
With that money, corporations would actually save quite a bit of money because they wouldn't have to hire so many freaking accountants, and that much income could take care of the $1.6 trillion student loan debt crisis in half a decade.
After that was taken care of, it could all be thrown into Social Security and take care of that looming crisis. It would alleviate so many financial concerns from the country that it's actually concerning that we are not even beginning to consider doing such a thing.
Yep. Great comment.
Tax enforcement has costs. Some taxes cost more than others to institution, and tax enforcement makes zero sense for poor people where the cost of enforcement exceeds the revenue.
Which is precisely why the IRS has been so gutted, because a broke IRS has no money to audit rich people who are doing massive, illegal, and blatant tax evasion systematically.
And the media focuses on what people buy with food stamps as if they should only be able to buy beans with them.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Also agreed.
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.
100k + is not middle class.
Do you have anything to back that up?
Here's my link: The salary you need to be considered middle class in every U.S. state—it’s close to $200,000 in 2 of them. In every single state 100k is middle class.
I don't need my own you just proved my point, 100k is not middle class.
i believe your source even makes note that the American "middle class" is considered working class just about everywhere else.
And in which state is 100k more than double the median income? Did you actually look at the article, or did you hit the second paragraph and assume?
That's not how most of the world defines middle class because it's a useless stat that does not reflect societal issues via economics.
I looked at the article.
Did you?
Do we all think loan forgiveness is the cure for student loans?
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.
I am once again reminded: Humanity is fucking ugly. I'm starting to get nihilists.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!)
Are you talking of a specific instance? Because, we do have anti-usery laws.
We also have anti trust laws, but yet we have tech monopoliies and an FCC thats done nothing for a decade
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.
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)
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.
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.
This is a great point. And yes, the system typically always rewards the rich far more than the poor.
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.🥁
Are you sure that's the right link? The Wikipedia page talks about a law that mandates a permit for carrying firearms.
changed the link so if folks want to verify sources they can.
Are you sure you linked the right bill? The bill in uour second link is about public carrying of firearms in California.
Refresh🧵(🔄). Even explained why.
Capitalism is cancer, prove me wrong.
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.
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.
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.
I admit I kinda feel this way about Ozempic after having to fight for years to finally get into better shape.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And next he will be paying for physiotherapy to treat the msd from twisting his wrists like that.
Did you voluntarily give yourself cancer for odds at a better and less laborous job?
Like with student loans, we shouldn't have to.
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.
That's why there was a large push for student debt forgiveness literally a year ago. But the right still flipped their shit. It's not about fairness to the people in the past, it's about fairness for those in the future. Children should not be in massive debt at 16 or 17. Hell, I feel like nobody should be taking on debt until they can fully understand what it takes to pay a debt off. So, not a student.
The right just love to pull up the ladder.
"Debt forgiveness" is why it failed. That's bullshit. Free pass to everyone who already went to college and still had debt, doesn't help anyone else, doesn't make college more affordable, just bails out former college grads.
You didn't have to. There's been several other options besides going to a 4 year college for decades now.
If you follow the analogy, then you want everyone else to go through chemo to beat your cancer... Kinda weird.
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:
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.
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?
By this logic all public services are regressive, since everyone pays into them and there will always be someone poorer who pays in and someone wealthier who benefits. That's why progressive tax rates exist, so that the amount of tax people pay is proportional to how much they are able to contribute. Our progressive tax system only breaks down at the upper levels with the obscenely wealthy. Despite this - on average - the poor benefit the most from student loan forgiveness and the (relatively) rich contribute the most. This is because even though the rich and poor alike would have their student debt forgiven, the rich would be paying more tax to make up for it. It's really a very simple concept, and should not be so difficult for you to understand.
Now, as an extra note, if we corrected our progressive tax system to tax the obscenely wealthy at the highest possible rate (as a progressive tax system is supposed to - and used to - do), there would be absolutely no question as to where the wealth is being distributed, because the wealthiest people who currently pay little to no tax hold more wealth than the rest of us combined.
This is not a valid analogy, unless those public services went only to the wealthiest people. Student loan forgiveness goes only to college students (obviously), who are statistically the wealthiest among us, over their lifetimes.
It's like if there was a financial government benefit/incentive to buying a second house. Only the wealthiest among us are buying more than one house, so that would be an obviously-regressive policy.
The same money that would forgive the loans of college students, instead being used as grants for people who, for financial reasons, never went to college, would be put to much better use.
No. It is if you tax everyone the same. You don't have to, and you shouldn't.
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.
So to get this straight:
You are against making studying more accessable for less wealthy people because that would mean taxing the general public and that is a wealth transfer from poor to rich?
You understand that it would allow poor people to study and consequently make it less relevant how wealthy you are to be able to study. Resulting in much more a merit based system than wealth based system.
You understand that by giving more people access to completing a university degree, you get more people with university degree. So e.g. more doctors, more doctors cheaper prices.
And of course, you can make the tax based on whether or not you have an university degree. Now you could call it a wash but obvious it would a display of great ignorance about the practical options that exists. In such a system, you don't need a loan, so you don't need to pay interest, you don't need someone who is willing to grant you the loan, temporary unemployment would be less of an issue...
And these are the reasons why poor people don't study.
For the wealthiest people*
The point is that if you're a college student, you're already in the richest category statistically; you literally are less in need than everyone else, on average. The same money would be much better suited to give grants to people who have, for financial reasons, never set foot in college to begin with.
Having student loans is no obstacle to completing a degree, this is non-sequitur. No one is expected to pay student loans off pre-graduation.
You've done quite a poor job of 'getting this straight', I have to say—quite a crop of straw men you've assembled.
If you don't have to pay for university as there is no loan to be paid back, the people who can't go for financial reasons can step their foot into university.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, and I haven't heard anyone put forth any kind of solution for that.
That's... not how that works. When people (who aren't already filthy rich, anyway) get money, they spend it, strengthening the economy as a whole and benefiting everyone but the filthy rich. Your logic would apply equally well to wage increases or anything else that benefits people other than you, but in reality a rising tide lifts all boats. Also, rich pricks already have all the money in the world to buy up housing, so it's not like there's any shortage for demand for the stuff.
The whole point of social welfare is to help people, but different people can get help in different ways. There's no reason for one policy to help everyone, for the same reason one doesn't expect food stamps to necessarily benefit prospective homeowners. Also student loans are exploitative and fucked up and shouldn't exist period.
Because it'd break the government's budget and/or inflate everything to hell and back. If we assume it's realistic then sure, do that and also forgive student loans. If you want the government to help you, sure that's perfectly fine and frankly your right, but there's no reason for that to have anything to do with them helping other people too.
You haven't seen corporate media or the corporate-captured political establishment put forth any kind of solution for that. There, off the top of my head. You'll likely see something similar in your own local progressive politics scene. There are plenty of policies both proposed and implemented that attempt to help prospective homeowners. Rather than push against student loan forgiveness (which wouldn't help anyway), you can push for affordable housing policies. In the end people eho want student loan forgiveness aren't your enemies; they're your allies against the ultra-rich. There's enough wealth in the world's wealthiest nation to pay for your home and their student loans, but it's being hoarded by rich pricks who want you both to suffer.
No... when people spend it that money just goes right back to the top. None of it passes through our hands. I don't get paid more when the company I work for does better. Products don't get cheaper when costs go down. They continue to squeeze us for everything they can. So when only one group can afford these now increased prices everyone else gets fucked. Yeah, rich people are the problem but picking and choosing who gets handouts is not the solution.
Nailed it
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.
What about miracle cures?
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.
What a horrible, uninformed and ignorant hot take.
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?
I honestly have no problem with that. I think housing is actually more critical than student loan forgiveness. A debt driven payment to every American under a certain income threshold would go a long way towards repairing the dwindling middle class, and 99% of that money would go towards big businesses anyway.
That said, your individual experience is based on your socioeconomic upbringing and yours alone. You had opportunities others did not, even if they don't feel like opportunities to you. Student loans were sold on a lie to every American high school age child, that the money would work itself out after college. Something no reasonable adult could actually believe to be true but no high school age child had the worldly awareness to doubt.
You buy a house knowing what your monthly payments are going to be. You buy a house on credit you spent a decade or more building. Multiple people have to sign off on you being able to repay that debt and even those are thrown around like candy. Giving 100,000 dollars to a teenager with no credit history who's probably never had a job is irresponsible and crazy. It should fall on the debtors to write that money off because they were crazy ignorant or stupid to expect it to be repaid in the first place.
To be clear, I don't just want debt forgiveness. I want the college lending system rewritten entirely. I want debt forgiveness to those that need it even if that means my debts aren't wiped out.
To be extra clear, I should not have been given that loan, 90% of the literal children signing for those loans should not be able to access them. But there is no other path to college for almost all of those kids, because college has become so unreasonably expensive.
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.
Why do you dislike living in an educated society?
You are the guy in the OP.
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.
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.
That's an argument for the government to help college students less, not to help them more.
So because you know a couple people who maybe didnt make the best decisions, forget everybody else. How many students who take out those high loans go on to become something useful and needed by society. Cause the people I know that took out that much mostly went on the become doctor's.
Yes cause the students have the power to set the prices. It's the loan givers dealing with the universities that keep driving up prices. If the government was to step in and say we're only paying this much the prices wouldn't be so exorbitant. You know, like the other developed countries do.
Doctors borrow that much for medical school. Their undergrad degree doesn't cost more than anyone else's.
The government does step in and run state schools where it sets the prices, and its prices are reasonable. In this context, private universities are a luxury.
So the $98,000 it costs for an in-state student to go to my nearest local state college for 4 years is fairly set by the state? What about the $101,000 for the next closest.
That seems totally fair, right?
In the state I am most familiar with, a four-year degree costs about that much only if you live on-campus. The degree itself (without room and board) is $56,160, and that's if you get no financial aid whatsoever (and need all four years to finish - I finished mine in three by taking no classes except the ones mandatory for my diploma, but that's not possible in some universities). Most people are eligible for a lot of financial aid.
So as long as you live close enough to commute from your parents house, get to live there for free or real cheap, and jump through the hoops and hurdles without any issues, you too can get by relatively cheap!
Everybody else can get fucked cause this person was one of the lucky ones!
Also, make sure you go to what is considered one of the more affordable universities while living in that state for over a year before hand!
Its super easy and affordable
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...
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.
The actual college debt per person is much closer to $40,000 right now ($1.6 trillion split between 43 million borrowers), and the income difference between a high school diploma and an associate's degree is like $150 a week lifetime income on average.
Also remember that that is a lifetime income difference, so that $150 a week average may not actually be realized until the borrower is in their late 50s or early 60s.
Once again, applying the median, bachelors degrees can add another $500 to that, but once again, that is lifetime income that may not be realized until towards the end of their working career and we're applying the median, and the thing about the median is, is the median lies to you.
The median makes things look like they're better than the whole. The median allows one billionaire to counterbalance the poverty income of 10,000 poor and homeless people. The median allows the six-figure job you got in your sixties managing other people to counterbalance the four-figure jobs you worked from the ages of 16-30.
The median paints a rosy picture because it throws everything into one giant blender.
Also, this does not include the number of people that attended college, accrued student loans, and then did not complete college, and so they have no advanced degree to get them a higher income job, but they have bills associated with such a degree, and yeah, those people tend to only make like an extra fifty or sixty dollars a week over their high school graduate-only counterparts lifetime income.
I said all of that to say, using the median to justify your emotional condoning of bad practices is in and of itself a bad practice.
If instead you were to say, "Yes, I want good things to happen to other people, America make it happen," and another million or two people joined in with you, then collectively, we can do something about it that works for both the people who worked hard and paid things off for themselves, like myself, and for the people in the future to prevent them from ending up in such a terrible situation.
Many raindrops make a storm.
Do you have a problem with local school taxes too? 🤡
Lots do. When I lived in Florida I would hear all the time from the snow birds there that they didn't want to pay taxes for the local kids' education, they already paid for theirs up North. A real twisted version of "I got mine".
If it's income tax, then only the place that the money is earned gets that. If it's property taxes, again it's location dependent. So, it really depends on which pot they are complaining about.
Property taxes. Florida does not have income tax, plus snow birds is a name for retirees that have both a home up north and in Florida.
I'm aware of what a snowbird is.
Not local to Florida so their income tax law isn't really a concern for me.
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.
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.
Tax the rich