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Comment by kenneth | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard suggested yet. It goes against every value of fairness we hold.

Bernie essentially wants to forcibly take money from everyone who was financially responsible enough to save and pay off their loans early, or who like me worked their asses off through college to be able to graduate without debt, and use it to pay those who were irresponsible enough to dig themselves into a massive debt hole.

I have little empathy for people with student or credit card debt. You took a deal knowing the terms full well, you have no right to complain that you owe the money you already spent but never earned.

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> Bernie essentially wants to forcibly take money from everyone who was financially responsible enough to save and pay off their loans early

Bernie wants to take tax money and work out what the best thing to spend it on is. It's disingenuous to imply it's any more taken by force than taxes already are. Significant portions of your taxes already go towards people who have, by your definitions, behaved irresponsibly.

I don't know whether this is the best use of that money -- whether there's something else that would have much better effects on welfare and economics in general.

I also don't have any student loan debt from my university degree, though it's because I grew up in a country that doesn't charge money for education.

The system of being unable to discharge student loan debt via bankruptcy seems brazenly corrupt, though, such that demolishing the whole thing may be an appropriate response.

>I grew up in a country that doesn't charge money for education.

Your country almost certainly does charge for education, you're just shielded from the immediate cost.

>The system of being unable to discharge student loan debt via bankruptcy seems brazenly corrupt, though, such that demolishing the whole thing may be an appropriate response.

Alternatively, going forward we could allow the discharging of student debt in bankruptcy with the knowledge that this would prevent many useless degrees from being funded and correspondingly would result in a large decrease in higher education spending. I'm fully in favor. For far too many people college is merely an extended adolescence and creates perverse signaling issues when it comes to getting a good job. As a nation, we should be more mindful of the degrees we decide to fund and the amounts dedicated to such degrees. Your nation, which "doesn't charge money for education," is almost certainly doing this.

"many useless degrees" is very thin ice to walk on. If there are people wanting to learn something then it's not useless.

Looking at it from economical standpoint only is just very narrow view. Education is not training for a job. There is value in knowledge. Even if you think only about economy it's very hard to predict what will be profitable.

Dont forget that if someone is studying "useless degree" than it's enough burden to know you might not get job in that field.

I think it's wonderful if anyone has a chance to have a try at higher education.

Also as many countries show education doesn't have to be expensive and putting financial limits on them keeps them efficient.

> "many useless degrees" is very thin ice to walk on. If there are people wanting to learn something then it's not useless.

Maybe so, but it's also not something I'm willing to pay for or subsidize as a tax payer. Sitting around reading books all day would also be enriching but no one is claiming we should pay people to do that with tax dollars.

i can't think of a better way to spend tax tbh

Public transit? Functioning infrastructure? Lowering taxes and letting people keep their hard earned money? Paying for other people's entertainment is pretty much the lowest item on my list and I dare say it should be self funded 100% of the time.

Infrastructure spending is worthwhile, but it still has "bridges to nowhere". Similarly, education is worthwhile, but it also has "degrees to nowhere". Not all degrees for all people are worth their cost.

Even if I agreed that some degrees are worth less to humanity, I'd still want to fund all of them, because I don't know (and don't think you know) which ones are which.

there is no way of telling which degree would lead to progress. Steve Jobs famously studied calligraphy after dropping out but still "auditing" classes. if he didn't study "useless" courses effectively tuition free, apple would never have come to pass.

> Bernie wants to take tax money and work out what the best thing to spend it on is.

Bernie might leave me the money and let me work that out for myself.

I mean, look, I get that we actually need a government, and that we fund it by paying taxes. But every time someone like Bernie comes up with some grand new thing for the government to do, they take more money from me and from you to do it with. (Yeah, I know, "we're only going to take money from other people. That never actually works.)

Government programs aren't free. They cost you money. So the question I have for people, when I hear something like Bernie's grand ideas, is this: Given that you have to pay for it, how much more government do you really want?

Having the education and healthcare industries being in the middle of death spirals where costs increase every year and effectiveness decreases costs me money too. Fixing either sounds like a better use of taxes than whatever the $10Tn deficit increase under Trump is supposed to be achieving.

Do you think that Bernie's proposal is going to result in more money being thrown at education, or less? I presume more. (If it's free to them, more will decide to attend; the schools will charge the same as they do.)

Education is in a death spiral where costs increase and effectiveness decreases. Do you think throwing more money at the universities will make that better, or worse?

I'm not sure; it depends on the specifics of the proposal, and especially on what happens to student loan debt which does not exist yet, and like you say, how public universities charge the government once education is made free.

I agree that whether it's a good idea depends on that answer. I'm rejecting a stronger statement you made, about how any government program is suspect "given you have to pay for it".

In the cases of education and healthcare, it seems to me that there has been a decrease of governmental involvement (compared to other nations, if you like, or even internally to our own nation in the case where bankruptcy discharge became disallowed) that should not have happened, and that decrease is costing dramatic amounts of money. You can't tell whether a policy is a good idea just based on whether it expands or contracts the role of government. We can be suspicious of government under-involvement too.

Re your second and third paragraphs: Not all government programs are suspect because you have to pay for them. When the main selling point is that it's free, though... that may be time to look at it a bit more cynically, remembering that it's not free. Which doesn't make it a bad idea, necessarily. But it means that those selling it need a better reason for us to buy it than "it's free".

Back to fixing the education more-cost-less-results spiral. I agree that what this proposal will do will depend on the specifics. But this proposal, if it helps, probably will do so only accidentally, because it doesn't seem to be attempting to do any such thing. It's trying to address the cost to students, and that's all.

To address the overall cost problem, it has to do something to incentivize universities to be more efficient at delivering education to students. If it was something like "If you've got an e-learning way to get to a full diploma, we'll pay you (the university) enough that you should be making decent money at it, and we'll give the student a computer and broadband if they don't have it", that would incentivize the university to have such a program, because money. And it could scale easier than in-person, if implemented well. Even better, you could now have competition between universities based on quality of instruction vs. odds of passing.

I'm sure there are holes in that approach, but I think it's at least somewhat in the right direction...

it's a faceted issue: the idea is to subside people to attend university so they can have a more productive and happy life from which everyone benefits (trough taxes, reduced welfare, reduced health costs etc).

the issue is that not every student makes the cut and not every university has the same ROI, whether because the degree itself holds little value on the job market or because the degree costs are too high to ever recoup.

another question is do we want to finance liberal arts degrees that traditionally have a bad ROI or do we want only the wealthy to engage in those sectors?

it's not a simple question, and the angle "who pays for it actually" seems reductive.

This is essentially my problem with it. I did very well in high school, and had many many offers to attend very expensive universities, many of which offered no academic scholarships. I made a conscious decision not to take on that much debt, and had a much longer road to where I am now, and probably a lessened overall outcome. But I'm debt free. I'm too old to care now, but it's not fair to kids out there with mindsets like mine, to just start erasing student debt wholesale. In that situation, community colleges cease to exist and universities have incentive to skyrocket prices even higher.

If we disregard "its not fair to me, when i paid mine off" and "this reduces my buying power because everyone is as well off as I am" as arguments, my problem with this is that it excuses the schools for jacking up rates as loan money became available.

This is a bailout, and the banks / schools are the beneficiary. No more loans that will never be paid back. Schools get every inflated dollar from the last two decades. Instead of taxing everyone, shouldnt the schools who took the money be paying in for everyone they trained who is underpaid?

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/442497-colleges-need-t...

We should just call this a bank bailout and that will shutdown this proposal. I prefer Andrew Yang's proposal to give every American a $1000/month divided funded by a value added tax. You could use that money to chip away at your student loans and it's fair because every citizen gets it.

And rent/mortgages would instantly go up $1000/m. And then we are back to a bank/realestate bailout.

The logic of this "not being fair" sounds more to me like "if I couldn't have it, no one else can!" I for one would be happy even if they just made college tuition free without canceling the debt. I'd be happy if younger people could get an education without having to worry about things I had to. I want to see others succeed, I don't want to hold them back because they have to suffer like I did.

I don’t think it’s quite as simple as you say. This isn’t something like “my childhood was tough, therefore I want everyone’s childhood to be tough.”

Just because someone has paid off their college debts does not mean that the effects of that debt have ended. Obviously the effects of that opportunity cost still exist. That money could have been spent on other things, like a mortgage. So the idea of forgiving all current student loan debt without any consideration of people who are still living with the effects of their previous student loan debt is pretty crude, and I think there’s a strong argument for calling it blatantly unfair.

This can go either way, though. It's just as easy to argue that cancelling student debt is a highly effective form of economic stimulation. There are droves of people who are actively putting off large purchases like houses and cars, and delaying having children, almost entirely because of student loan debt. Removing a huge ongoing monetary obligation from a massive section of people who want to spend is a lot more likely to help the economy than more tax cuts for the already wealthy who are probably going to hoard that wealth away.

Why not just give everyone 100k, people could buy houses cars, etc.. it'd really help those who couldn't even dream of going to college, even with loans. It'd drive up housing and everything else.

That is candidate Andrew Yang's proposal. 120K to every American over 10 years. You should checkout his proposals. There are long form interviews on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTsEzmFamZ8

As someone with $40k in student loans remaining from my econ degree(after paying off $10k+), I'm fully in support of this. I don't know what "we" you're appealing to, but I certainly consider this "fair" in the sense that I'm more than happy to give back to my community, fellow students, and younger generations so that they don't have to struggle through the same things I did. It sounds like this position is that others be punished for/with student loans because they decided to get an education.

1. According to the article Bernie is proposing a 0.5% tax on trades, and a 1% tax on bonds. Given that ~half of all Americans invest in the stock market[0] (and given how Wall Street has acted) this doesn't seem to be a big issue in my opinion (obviously others will disagree with me).

2. I do have empathy for those who have taken on such debt, because such debt should not in aggregate be so large as to impact the economy adversely (which it has, and will continue to do via consumer spending etc...). Additionally, I know very few, if any teens who are able to understand the intricacies of debts/loans, let alone adults(I'm sure this argument will be mis-characterized).

It may sound grandstanding, but I genuinely believe that we should care more about the medical, financial, and social/political well being of others in this country, and I think this is a good first step for that.

0: https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/20/investing/trump-stock-marke...

I mean, of course you support a proposal to wipe off 80% of your entire student debt. I don't think you get to call it "giving back to the community" when you're a net taker under the proposal.

I'm glad you seem so willing to engage in constructive/effective arguments regarding the proposal, rather than how the proposal should be framed/discussed in terms of individuals.

And I'm certainly glad you saw that my other points were reasonable and saw fit not to refute them at this point. :)

However, even under this proposal I would be a contributor as I invest in the stock market, which is the entire point of taxes/a community(it's literally giving back to the community/the cost of living in a society). So no, I would contribute my fair share, and arguably get less out(compared to others) since I've already paid $10k+, and I have no problem with that, at all.

Like I said, I'm happy to help others given the position that I'm in, which is better than some and worse than others.

What I, and others, find objectionable about your post is that you frame yourself as an altruistic contributor while downplaying the fact that you have orders of magnitude more to gain from this than you contribute. Implying that a 50bp tax on your personal stock trading comes even close to the $40k amnesty windfall you stand to gain is preposterous. Implying that you are giving back and helping others even more so. You are not helping, you are being helped. You are a net taker.

I frame myself as a contributor, because as I stated before, I would be contributing via the same proposed methodology as anyone else, via a tax on investments. Additionally, I haven't downplayed this, me downplaying it would be me either obfuscating my debt, or not discussing it at all, I haven't hidden the fact that I'd benefit from it, I'm arguing the merits of the proposed policy and why it would be good not just for me, but for society writ large(including you my friend)(benefits include increased consumer spending, increased GDP, etc...). Furthermore, given the potential timeframe on this, and any investments I would likely make in the future, it is well within the realm of possibility that I end up paying far more than the $40k that I might gain in the short term which would seem to reasonably answer "you're a net taker argument".

As I argued in my previous post, taxes are not altruism they are a cost of living in society, it's why we have a progressive tax system the more one benefits from society, the more they pay back. I do argue however that I'm more than happy to pay this tax so that current/future generations are better off, which doesn't seem to be a point that you've refuted at all. It seems that your argument is that because you struggled, everyone else should have to as well which seems fairly draconian to me(and ignores a basic sense of fairness, depending on how we want to define fair), and also seems to ignore the potential struggles of others and any questions of why they took on such debt (but that's another question for another time). I have no idea why you keep framing this as a means of "takers" vs everyone else, when I've kept bringing this back to the more nuanced point that yes I would benefit, and yes I would also contribute. It's also strange to me that you haven't seen fit to offer an alternative or any kind of compromise, but rather dismiss the whole proposal out of hand.

I suspect that you're going to come back to the point/continue belaboring the point that "you're a net taker"(while conveniently ignoring any other points) as if somehow: A. The only point of society is for no one to benefit from it. B. The only point of society is to make a profit. Neither of which is true, because frankly everyone "takes" from society in one form or another to varying degrees, we do this because everyone should have a reasonable shot in life. It seems unreasonable to ask people who are just starting out, to be potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt in the hopes of pursing them for the rest of their lives to make money. This is a question of lives/quality of life versus money, you seem to be fairly square on the side of money which is certainly a position one can take. Generally the point of society isn't profit, but to try and make the society a better place, and sometimes that comes at a cost, or with things we disagree with(I disagree with ag subsidies, but it likely helps rural farmers somewhere, so I'm OK with that in the end).

Look I understand where you're coming from but when you gain $40k now, it would be better to say 'thank you' than 'you're welcome'.

I can't decide if you're just trolling us or if you truly believe that your duplicitous position of both "helping society" and "pay off my student loans" is valid. What if we don't pay your student loan, but pay for those who are in default? You seem to be managing quite well, so let's help those who are less fortunate than you for the common good, but since you're doing fine, you can continue to pay your student loan, and maybe an additional 5% take to help those who are less fortunate.

I paid off roughly $70k in student loans. Can I have that back? Because if you're going to support the government paying off your student loans, surely you wouldn't deny me a check from the government to reimburse me for mine? Do you think it's better to not pay back the loans and just let it default with the hopes that someone with rescue me?

What about those middle class families who chose the financially prudent path of sending their kids to cheaper but low ranked state universities even though their kids had admission to expensive ivy league universities ? How would they feel about this proposal.

>Bernie essentially wants to forcibly take money from everyone who was financially responsible

"Financially responsible" has become a euphemism for "rich and assumed to be responsible".

I know a bunch of people who are not particularly responsible with their money (splurging) but they are beneficiaries of a lot of unearned income (interest, dividends, rent) and I have yet to hear a coherent argument for why this unearned income shouldn't be taken away and used to fund the kind of education that improves the overall wellbeing of society.

This is the point where somebody tells me that those people don't have enough money to fund this kind of thing (bullshit), or that Bernie won't target them he'll target you (bullshit) or that if you tax them they'll just run away to Panama (there was a study that demonstrated that when their taxes are jacked up they didn't even run away from New York to New Jersey).

This is extremely true. Financially responsible is also just "privileged."

They don't understand how different the state of primary education in the US is. Two school districts within 20 miles of each other are wildly different.

1. https://www.philasd.org/ 2. https://www.lmsd.org/

It's much easier to rob someone when you convince yourself that they didn't actually earn what they have.

This us vs them reductionism is seen in the early days of any communist system (the mass killings come a bit later)

Ah yes, communism.

This isn't us vs them - this is us vs... us. Everyone should want to allow people to access education.

>I know a bunch of people who are not particularly responsible with their money (splurging) but they are beneficiaries of a lot of unearned income (interest, dividends, rent) and I have yet to hear a coherent argument for why this unearned income shouldn't be taken away and used to fund the kind of education that improves the overall wellbeing of society. This is the point where somebody tells me that those people don't have enough money to fund this kind of thing (bullshit), or that Bernie won't target them he'll target you (bullshit) or that if you tax them they'll just run away to Panama (there was a study that demonstrated that when their taxes are jacked up they didn't even run away from New York to New Jersey).

Emphasis mine

Calling the income "unearned" doesn't make it unearned. It doesn't make people any less deserving of keeping what rightfully belongs to them.

At some point in the past, a person (possibly an ancestor) took risks to create wealth. Part of the motivation is to later have an easy retirement or to support one's children. You'd kill that motivation, causing people to avoid the risks which would no longer create wealth, and thus prevent things like start-ups.

>Everyone should want to allow people to access education.

Why?

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're highly repetitive, therefore predictable, therefore off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Coherent argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km9OCw3f5w4

So the existence of financially irresponsible rich kids somehow disproves the idea that it's possible to pay back debt if you act financially responsible by running a sensible budget and cutting expenses?

It's possible for some; not for others. This isn't about what's possible, though, it's about what's fair.

It's treating the "right to untaxed unearned income entitlements" like interest, dividends and rent as intrinsically more fair ("financially responsible") than free education that bothers me.

Interest, dividends, and rent are all taxed in the U.S.

While we're on the topic of fairness...what about those people who will not go to college or send their kids there? Is it fair that they're forced to pay for other people's education?

Of course some people fail to consider the privilege of family wealth, but wouldn’t student debt forgiveness also hugely benefit (perhaps unfairly) people with that privilege? I suspect that students with family wealth have considerably more student loan debt on average, because (among other reasons) they correctly judged that their family wealth would be a safety net for their future student loan debt.

I suspect that many students with less family wealth tend to take on less student loan debt, even if they would be accepted to the same college education opportunities. I would call this “financial responsibility,” and I would consider a blanket student debt forgiveness to be quite unfair to them.

>wouldn’t student debt forgiveness also hugely benefit (perhaps unfairly) people with that privilege?

The last thing these people want is meritocracy, because it forces them into competition with poorer people for the most prestigious and high status jobs.

If not having to worry about graduating with a crippling debt load is a privilege everybody has rather than a privileged elite, then the competition that privileged elite faces is greater.

>I suspect that many students with less family wealth tend to take on less student loan debt, even if they would be accepted to the same college education opportunities. I would call this “financial responsibility,”

Then you are also using "financial responsibility" as a euphemism for rich.

> Then you are also using "financial responsibility" as a euphemism for rich.

I am saying the opposite. The financially responsible ones I was talking about are the less wealthy people who choose to take on less debt because it would be a huge risk.

You are lauding the "financial responsibility" of 18 year olds taking what it usually the losing side of an enormous lifetime financial gamble that they are forced into? You're arguing that choosing tails on a bent coin is the "right" choice?

Just to be clear: 1) college debt is enormous 2) on balance it is worth the risk given future earning potential 3) it's not clear to the average person let alone the average 18 year old whether the gamble is correct.

I'm sorry, I don't think I'm arguing the things you suggest I'm arguing. I also don't know whether taking on college debt is usually worth it. If it is, then why do we need to forgive all the debt? If it's usually a wise choice to take on the college debt, then shouldn't we just have some programs for the minority of people whose post-college earnings were insufficient (something more like Warren's plan to means-test the aid)?

You post on a forum of rich techbros and you don't have any stocks that pay dividends? I make 20k a year, and I have dividend income, oh, and I paid off my student loans. Why bother being responsible if the government is just going to take away my savings/investments and give it to people who went to colleges they couldn't afford?

I agree with one small point: Rent? Do you mean rental income? Because I feel like if a person can buy a place and then rent it out, that is an opportunity earned and converted into income. My husband and I own two rental properties, which took us about 11 years to acquire. We get decent rental income out of it but it took a lot of time and work to get to that point. I think we earned that income.

I think there are a couple of things that as a society we’ve failed to do to different extents;

1. Promote vocations and vocational schools (some people are better off here). It could be the traditional HVAC, welder, nurse or new types like front end development, aspects of IT.

2. Price loans according to prospects. Getting a loan for literature or writing should cost more than a loan for biology, informatics or medicine. Obviously predicting future demand is imperfect, but we also know what majors will likely have low demand into the future.

Especially since our federal loan programs have very generous repayment plans. 20 years paying no more than 10% of your disposable income and it gets wiped out.

I paid 264k plus interest. It’s bullshit to tax me further to pay off loans for people who can afford to pay it.

This "tax" would not affect you in the slightest, unless you own an HFT firm.

But someday they might be a millionaire!!

He is proposing taxing all stock transactions .5%. I’d pay that and .5% I move my nest egg around adds up.

And his projections are pants-on-Fire stupid because he doesn’t account for the fact all high freq trading would move offshore if they taxed trades .5%.

Sanders is either an idiot or a bullshitter.

You may be a market timing genius and/or unicorn day trader but generally speaking nobody beats the market and nobody should be moving their own nest egg around, which usually only makes the brokerages money.

So the transaction fees get passed on to the people who buy into the funds (except, buying into a fund is also a "financial transaction" so may also end up being taxed).

Moreover this logic seems to assume HFT is useless. It's a source of liquidity. Everyone who directly or indirectly invests in the stock market ends up paying for higher liquidity - it's just a case of how easily you can see it.

LOL I wish you had to meet every single person who gets a break, and tell them with a straight face how some minuscule portion of your taxes "paid off" their debt.

You paid 260k for uni degree? Thats insane. You could live with that comfortably in many countries (even developed ones) for 20 years!

Law degree but yea it was insanely stupid. But I didn’t have 264k dollar. The government loaned it to me.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/09/24/public-...

Except that 99% of the people that attempt to do this via public service are rejected. Effectively, this program does not realistically exist for 99 of 100 people that try to do it.

> 20 years paying no more than 10% of your disposable income and it gets wiped out.

That's not quite true. The part that gets wiped out counts as taxable income for that year. In other words, if 100k of loans go away you now have a 10-30k tax bill depending on your income and state. I support closing that loophole, but otherwise I agree that it's a pretty fair system.

To do this fairly it would have to be a kind of retroactive scholarship for all students, where you would be refunded your tuition as well.

Of course, then there are the people who chose not to study at university in the first place for financial reasons. I don't think there's a completely fair answer.

I agree this is straight up pork barrel politics, not good policy, and rewards poor behavior without anything preventing the problem from happening again.

A simpler, fairer proposal: give _everyone_ who attended college in the last X years $Y per year attended. At least that way the good actors aren't punished to subsidize the bad ones, and everyone is still drawn towards lower cost programs and valuable degrees.

It should be more of a sliding scale. Each year further from today gets less.

Sure, make it a chart. If you paid tuition during X year, you get $Y per month attended.

Thats about as close to fair as you can get. Maybe with some kind of interest reimbursement, for people who paid loans not cash. Also minus any tax credits youve gotten, for paying interest or principal.

This is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard suggested yet. It goes against every value of fairness we hold.

... I have little empathy for people with student or credit card debt. You took a deal knowing the terms full well, you have no right to complain that you owe the money you already spent but never earned.

What a load of horse shit. Once student loan debt couldn't be discharged through bankruptcy it fell to the perils of moral hazard. You want to pursue an English Literature degree at Harvard, by all means proceed, if that person footing the bill[2] then has skin in the game as to whether that debt can be repaid.

My solution to the student loan crisis, federalize all Sallie Mae [1] loans, let the lenders take a bath like when Washington Mutual was federalized during the Recession and then let a real market start underwriting student loans.

[1] https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/ [2] Edit: original was person/lender

I dunno what sort of message this is supposed to send to people. "Fuck you if you were a big enough sucker to pay back your debts"?

I keep seeing this sentiment in this thread, but I'm not seeing the logic behind it explained. Normally the fact that other people have already committed their own time and money to deal with some issue doesn't mean we shouldn't address that issue going into the future. What's different in this case?

I think its interesting to apply the sentiment to other things.

Would a state funded levee system be a "fuck you" to people who lost homes in the flood that prompted them? It's being paid from their taxes, after all.

Is the chicken pox vaccine a "fuck you" to people who had it when they were young before it was available?

Are surgery advances a "fuck you" to people who previously got an amputation?

Was the introduction of the GI Bill a "fuck you" to everyone who served in the armed forces being it? After all, veterans pay taxes.

No, it's all just zero-empathy privileged people who don't want to share.

Yeah, I'm so privileged that I took on debt to go to university for a difficult subject and had to work and make lifestyle sacrifices to pay it back rather than voting for someone to give me a free ride.

Regardless of whether it would work well, the proposal is to help people who are suffering inside a horrifically broken system, not to give indiscrminate free rides to people who haven't even made the decision yet. The notion that massive tragedy is OK if the fault can be placed with the victims under the argument that they demonstrated financial incompetence is simply antithetical to civilization. Otherwise, why not ignore anything that can be placed under the umbrella of personal responsibility? High suicide rates? Who cares, it was ultimately the dead's decision. Don't look into it.

The idea that people deserve this and it's not fair to those who already made it through seems like a purely emotional reaction, and an extremely reductionist one, considering the dramatic complexity of higher education's actual value and how much risk is "worth it".

How is overspending on college any different than overspending on anything else? Is the guy who drives around in the BMW he can't afford "tragic"?

It's absolutely possible to pick an economically viable major, go to community college, go to a trade school... It's also absolutely viable to take on loans and pay them off through hard work. How important is that degree to you? If it's very important then expect to sacrifice, almost everyone else is.

I know so many peers with degrees of varying quality that spend their money on international travel, eating out almost every night, living in the most expensive cities in the world yet they complain about their student debt constantly. Now they're presenting themselves as true victims and acting like anyone who doesn't support this bail out is a hateful wretch.

I'm sorry but I worked hard and made good decisions and I absolutely expect the same level of competence from my fellow citizens. People make dumb decisions all of the time and you have to learn the hard way that your life is your's and there's no fairy godmother that will come waive your poor choices away.

Well, perhaps there could be. You just sound determined to never even countenance the possibility that things could be different.

MAGA, amirite?

Well, I don't think there can be a fairy godmother. Someone has to pay for all of this.

I do want things to be different though, and it starts with people taking on a lot more personal responsibility. Our whole society needs to reintegrate that concept into who we are and how we're raised. A lot of people are very quick to blame others for their mistakes and look to them to fix their problems.

> The notion that massive tragedy is OK if the fault can be placed with the victims under the argument that they demonstrated financial incompetence is simply antithetical to civilization.

It is, however that may be, fundamental to the modern conservative position on a wide range of issues.

> Otherwise, why not ignore anything that can be placed under the umbrella of personal responsibility?

That is, indeed, the point of the argument. (It is, of course, less consistently applied to corporations and the investor class because “job creators”, but still...)

> The idea that people deserve this and it's not fair to those who already made it through seems like a purely emotional reaction,

It's not, it's cynically manipulating emotional reactions. The motivation is more coldly considered defense of the privileged position of the already successful than any kind of emotional reaction.

Apples and oranges. Most of those things aren't fungible like money is. There's no moral hazard involved with someone receiving a new elective surgery. There's no opportunity cost to someone not receiving a non-existent vaccine.

GI bill is a disingenuous comparison because those people made pretty tremendous personal sacrifices in service of the country.

The hypothetical levee system and the GI bill are both very much the same situation, involving taxes assisting someone else. Why should citizens who lost property in a flood be responsible for ensuring that others in the future don't?

Why is the GI bill comparison disingenuous? The veterans who served before the introduction of the GI bill made exactly the same sacrifices as those who were eligible for it, and yet their taxes sponsored it. The fact that one group was put in personal danger doesn't make the comparison invalid.

Some would argue that the levee system creates moral hazard by incentivizing development in dangerous areas.

And the GI bill comparison is disingenuous because it's disgusting to compare the millennial English literature major whining about being unemployable to men who fought and died in Europe and the Pacific. It's not a comparison of pre-GI bill veterans to post-GI bill veterans that you are actually making.

>And the GI bill comparison is disingenuous because it's disgusting to compare the millennial English literature major whining about being unemployable to men who fought and died in Europe and the Pacific. It's not a comparison of pre-GI bill veterans to post-GI bill veterans that you are actually making.

Sorry, is it still "disgusting" to compare those English majors "whining" to American war criminals that murdered 2 dozen Iraqi civilians [1] and then faced no real punishment? Why do they get to reap the benefits of the G.I. bill? That isn't even getting into the dozens, maybe hundreds of war crimes committed by American soldiers that then get to go home and go to college for free. Why do my tax dollars have to pay for some overgrown manchild with the emotional intelligence of an alligator snapping turtle to go to college because he couldn't make it in any other field than killing people? Explain to me why I should support and reward murderers.

By your logic, the GI Bill incentivizes young people going to fight in jingoistic US wars (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, and hey look, maybe Iran) and somehow you think that people studying English literature is more morally hazardous?

See how easy it is to derail the discussion when you aren't interested in actually talking about the topic at hand?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre

>It's not a comparison of pre-GI bill veterans to post-GI bill veterans that you are actually making.

That's precisely the comparison. You can't remove something from the argument space simply because it was a worse situation, that's a textbook logical fallacy. The thing being compared here has nothing to do with the sacrifices of soldiers, and everything to do with a specific proposal: a group of people being asked to contribute to the greater good via a benefit they were not able to have.

By the way, reducing this to "millenial english literature majors whining about being unemployable" simply makes people stop listening to you, because you clearly haven't been listening to them. Insulting, belittling, and making assumptions will always harm your point.

No. I have student loans, if next year all college students get free* tuition I'm not going to be upset that I had to pay. I'm going to be happy that they don't have my burden.

We as a society need to push the next generation up, not bitch that they don't have it as hard as we do.

I disagree so very much!

Default rates on student loans are about %40. Home mortgages are about 4% and auto loans are about 6%, for comparison.

I've lived this too. My family was able to send me and my siblings to college on our own dimes. We worked our butts off to help the family pay for our schooling. I spent many hours after school in the family business, and many summers too. I had less of a teenage/childhood due to this. I contributed my income after graduation so my siblings could get through without debt too. I sacrificed my time and money for the betterment of my family. My family did the same for me.

Hopefully, I have proven that I have sacrificed enough to be considered a real voice in this conversation.

I would LOVE to cancel all these debts.

I've seen my friends and other family members struggle with these $800/mo debts for nearly a decade now. It does nothing for nobody but some rich jerk. I'm tired of seeing the people that I love struggle and be punished for trying to help the world. Yes, fine, I'm better off because of my sacrifice and my family's. And yes, fine, wiping out that debt would 'invalidate' that sacrifice, whatever that means. But I'd much rather sit on my porch my friends and drink a beer, rather than sit alone on my porch and drink 2 beers while my friends drive for Uber on the weekends.

Enough is enough. This pain is unnecessary and thus is cruel.

Let's unpack a few statements here:

> financially responsible enough to save and pay off their loans early

What if you are financially responsible and you don't have enough to save and pay off early?

> like me worked their asses off through college to be able to graduate without debt

I did too. How much debt did you have? As a college student, I could pay off $30k in debt with a few CS internships. No number of Google summer internships could pay off $200k in debt, though. Especially if you tack on more debt for medical school. Do you think it's feasible that there are people who bust their ass and still can't graduate without debt?

> irresponsible enough to dig themselves into a massive debt hole.

This is the real part I question. Who dug themselves into the hole? The parents? The kids? What did you know at 18? If you can barely drive, vote, or drink, how could you possibly predict the future that your financial choices might cause ruin to you and millions of others of your generation?

Can you, at the age of 18, as the world is telling you to go to the best college you possibly can, truly grasp the gravity of the decision you're about to make?

> I have little empathy for people with student or credit card debt.

Then you have little empathy. At 18, you didn't know the terms "full well." Most kids were duped. Most parents were fooled. The news said "if you get a college education, you're going to make more money." It still says that. So they make a connection and they don't question it. Even if you have to go into debt, you still make more money. The problem is, does making more money actually net you more money. Not a lot of people really thought that through.

So that said: is that worth punishing them? Is punishment the right thing? Why can't we look at this from compassion and caring, rather than punishment and justice?

A generation was tricked into a bad ride. My generation. I graduated (with debt paid off in a year) when the economy tanked, in 2009. It couldn't have gotten worse for me. And even though I'm part of the cohort that should most want to have everyone suffer the way I did and pay off debt, I don't.

Cause I don't want suffering. For anyone. Even if they get a better deal than me.

That's how progress goes: we give the younger ones a better chance than we did.

Education shouldn't be slavery. You shouldn't want this for others. This is a way out, and it likely won't come to fruition this way, but it is a way towards compassion.

Plenty of people at 18 have the personal responsibility and financial awareness to not get a useless degree in exchange for a massive amount of debt.

> That's how progress goes: we give the younger ones a better chance than we did.

Culture matters. Instilling a sense of personal and financial responsibility in the next generation is the best thing we can do to help them. Giving the most irresponsible people of our generation a massive handout is the opposite of that. Think about it, if an entire generation of people who came before you were absolved of tens (or hundreds!) of thousands of dollars of bad debt, why on earth would you think it was a good idea to pay off your debt and instead not just wait around for the same handout?

This is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard suggested yet. It goes against every value of fairness we hold.

Is there any chance this will really happen?

If the answer is no, don't waste your precious keystrokes.

If the answer is yes, ask for more: not only they cancel the existing debt, but they also give you your payments back.

Problem solved!! :)

Not to mention that the beneficiaries are by definition college educated, meaning they are currently or will in the future be among the highest income groups in the country!

This would be paid for by taxes on investments, and the result of this would be increased consumer spending. Which leads to good results for investors

I have some empathy for them because having a college degree is becoming less optional if you want to partake in today's economy, especially if you want to move up relative to your poorer parents who probably don't have the support and/or network for you to find your way to a good career. Sure, it's not required to have a financially stable background and college degree to make it but saying that forgoing them is a reliable path is not honest.

So, in that light, I would say that I don't think all debts should be cancelled but I do think we should remind ourselves that during the New Deal there were plenty of people who said that it would be unfair for the government to fix jobs and social security for lazy bums. We don't have to go to either extreme, cancelling all debts or showing no sympathy what so ever.

Like you, I have hard time empathizing with people that put themselves in debt "knowingly". It is hard to not think they are just stupid. The issue is, I was lucky to have the opportunity to be educated about these risks early enough. I have hard time blaming people of not knowing something that was never alluded to when they were growing up (e.g. credit is not free money). Otherwise I agree with you, this is a ridiculous solution to an otherwise real problem.

Maybe Bernie should fix the fact that our education system does not even include financial literacy courses instead of just mass forgiving debt.

EDIT: Apparently down voters on HN are against financial education in our public schools.

The etiquette is to not discuss votes on your comments. For what is worth, I suspect people dislike the snideness and lack of effort in the comment, not the notion of financial education.

It's important to understand that the government can't make loans disappear, all it can do is transfer the burden of the loans from one group to another. In this case, we have transfers from those who did not go to college or went to college and did not take out loans to those who did. A regressive transfer.

Then there is the issue of creating more imbalances. We send far too many people to college. Germany, for instance, sends 1/3 of its population to college (which lasts only 3 years and is quite strict) and 50% to trade schools. We have no trade school program and tell everyone to go to college, yet we struggle teaching useful skills to people. Something is broken in our college system, costing twice as much as the OECD and yet not doing a good job of producing skilled workers. This is not a system that should be further subsidized, rather we should spend much less on our universities and divert resources to trade schools. A bloated, dysfunctional system is not deserving of a bailout.

Then there is the basic issue of fairness. Colleges have huge endowments, employ excessive number of administrators in make work jobs and hold substantial real estate holdings -- these should be depleted first in any bailout of the system before we start tapping taxpayers. If a college is graduating large numbers of students who can't repay their college loans, that college should be liquidated as it is socially harmful. Liquidate the endowment, sell off the real estate and convert it to trade schools.

Finally, college educated kids are pretty privileged. We should focus on those who did not go to college.

On a personal note, my family did not have a lot of money. I was a decent student and had good SAT scores -- I got lots of brochures for Tulane, Brown, and other universities that I knew I couldn't afford. Instead, I lived at home and worked, and went to a community college on full scholarship. I got good grades and then lived at home and went to the local state school, also on a transfer scholarship. I worked. Then I went to an "elite" grad school, also on scholarship. I graduated with no debt. I could easily have gone to a private uni and been saddled with lots of debt, and then maybe clamoring for a bailout. But that would be irresponsible. There are plenty of low cost community colleges and state schools that offer scholarships to even half decent students. I am not looking to bailout anyone who made worse choices. I understand that people can suffer misfortune, in which case the school they went to should bail them out.

>By the numbers: Sanders plans to pay for the action by hitting Wall Street with a tax his campaign says will raise $2.2 trillion over 10 years, according Vox.

As we learned in 2008, taking $2.2 trillion from "Wall Street" will have major effects on "Main Street" (we nearly had a total economic meltdown over Wall Street holding a "mere" $0.5T in toxic assets). Wall Street is not some wholly separate entity from the rest of the economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_...

This is some relevant background reading for anyone who thinks Bernie's tax revenue numbers are realistic.

>The volume of futures trading fell by 98% and the options trading market disappeared

You have to wonder what the second-order effects of the options trading market disappearing (or being severely reduced in volume) would be.

I know there are some pretty important businesses that depend on options to hedge against commodity prices. Airliners and oil come to mind.

i would say getting rid of this market makes the financial system healthier. 2008 crash could have been avoided with something like this

Would it? It wasn't options trading that caused 2008; it was bad home loans.

yes. the derivatives built on top of bad home loans caused the contagion. it would have been close to a non-event if there were no derivatives based on the bad homeloans.

https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0210/did-derivat...

https://www.thebalance.com/role-of-derivatives-in-creating-m...

The derivatives were traded in massive blocks, not in high-frequency transactions where fees adding up matters.

Some argue that this debt that has to be repaid 'no matter what' is part of what is wrong in today's societies and economies. Here read this book Debt: The First 5,000 Years https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt

You're right but you're wrong. You're blaming students for an outrageous situation and saying they should have chosen simply to be poor.

But isn't this the definition of socialism: Taking from one and giving to another?

"...forcibly take money from everyone who was financially responsible..."

I am no fan of Bernie's but this description is completely wrong. A transaction tax would have little to no impact on ordinary savers/investors. It would have zero to do with credit card debt. It would at most represent a slight redistribution from assets generally controlled by the 0.1% to the top 50%.

The place where that tax would pull from in the financial system is currently mined by HFT bots. To the extent that this impacts you, you are already being skimmed by them, you just don't know it.

The financial system is REALLY REALLY big. Hundreds of $T change hands DAILY.

Money is fungible. Saying that the expenditure is funded by a tax on Wall Street is just clever bullshit to make it look like the taxpayers aren't on the hook for this absurdly expensive amnesty. The truth is those are two entirely orthogonal issues that affect the federal budget. If not this amnesty, the tax could fund something else. If this tax isn't enough, the money for this bill will come from somewhere else.

If it's clever messaging and it works, it works. Some cohort in the country is going to be on the hook; it's up to democracy to pick which cohort that is (congressional representation, all that jazz).

Right now, Millennials are on the hook (carrying the debt). They're also now the largest voting cohort [1], having edged out Boomers this year [1]. Do you think they're going to stay on the hook? It's unlikely (~1.6 million Boomers die each year, about 1.3 percent of the Boomer cohort); Millennials will continue to reshape state and federal government each election cycle.

I imagine the cohort of voters who took on large amounts of student loan debt and successfully paid it off in a short duration of time is exceedingly small (but vocal!). Life isn't fair.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/01/millennials...

Money is a lot of things. It is fungible. It is also an asset.

The amount of wealth- assets- outside of their houses that taxpayers who are not in the .1% hold has become an increasingly tiny fraction of the overall total asset base- which VASTLY exceeds the tax base that people are accustomed to thinking about (taxes on their income).

Taxing the trading of these assets between one huge asset holder and another involves flows of money that generally speaking have nothing to do with most people. An analogy is- you're here in a nearly empty swimming pool a block from the beach and Bernie is talking about bringing in a pipe and a desalination plant to refill it, because there's a lot of water in the ocean.

Regarding the budget, to a first approximation, these loans do not have an impact at all. Where the Govt actually holds the asset, it is merely a fiction on the balance sheet. There is no "student loan interest payments" line item on the Treasury's income statement (https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/files/reports-statements/mts...). Where the govt is a guarantor, then there are private entities that do expect to be paid, and it would be good for the govt to not be put in the position to have to pay them without another source of revenue.

And it is absolutely true that from a particular perspective a transaction tax can provide an extremely useful source of revenue in the future, perhaps even offsetting personal income taxes.

It's your description that is completely wrong.

A transaction tax has been tried before in Sweden[1], had disastrous effects on their stock markets, and had to eventually be repealed.

I don't think most people appreciate how efficient the US markets are today, relative to what they were like 20 years ago. HFTs do make a lot of money, but its a extremely small amount compared to the total size of the financial system [2], and it is decreasing rapidly each year as the competition increases.

If we impose a transaction tax, market makers who are already on razor thing margins will increase bid-offer spreads, volatility will increase, and it will become way more expensive on average to trade. There's a reason why you can trade virtually for free on your personal account today, vanguard is able to offer you 0.1% in management fees, etc. These things did not exist 20 years ago.

Its a common myth that HFT's are "stealing" money from investors, but if these firms were not in the markets, it would almost certainly be detrimental to the ordinary saver/investor.

Bernie definitely wouldn't be able to raise nearly as much money as he would need from this tax, and it would hurt the economy. Him and his advisors know it, but he just wants to pander to the anti-wall street sentiment while also making it seem like his proposal isn't completely fiscally irresponsible, which it is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/d81f96ea-d43c-11e7-a303-9060cb1e5...

Frankly I don't disagree, in the sense that this is largely a BS (pun intended) proposal from someone who does not understand how finance works. I am not a fan of Bernie.

But these particular counter arguments, such as they are, miss the forest altogether.

Sweden is...not the US. It's basically Ohio. Trying something in an Ohio that is not on the dollar does not tell you anything.

Some kinds of efficiencies in the US system are laudable, others are deeply problematic. Solving for e.g., humans trading on their personal accounts is a demonstrably terrible idea from a retirement savings perspective at scale.

The fundamental point is that in the US and in most of the world there is a deepening imbalance between capital and labor. And labor is going to have its say unless capital figures out how to share.

There are lots of ways this can go horribly wrong. Lots of current events rhyming with bad moments in history. Trump is this gone wrong. Bernie would be too.

A redistribution of wealth is coming, one way or another.

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