An option not talked about much yet is cancelling debts. The Romans did it quite a few times. An effective redistribution of wealth from people who own things to people who do things.
For example, one of the variant of debt cancellation I hear about is the proposal by Sanders and Warren to cancel all student debt. Isn't that extremely unfair to people who chose to not go to college because tuition is costly? Isn't it unfair to people who put financial prudence in front of needless consumerism, by saving more to pay down their student debt?
All finance is done, of course, with pure equality!
The people who didn't take student loans haven't had to live with them. They had more years working, with better pay, and without loan interest - they got nothing for their decision! Certainly not a piece of paper that entitles the holder to work in a job unrelated to their studies and without any useful pay bump.
> They had more years working, with better pay, and without loan interest - they got nothing for their decision! Certainly not a piece of paper that entitles the holder to work in a job unrelated to their studies and without any useful pay bump.
Not sure what you're talking about here. People who gave up on college gave up on in demand skills, higher future income, and got more stressful and demanding jobs.
I heard a good saying awhile ago. You shouldn't look into your neighbor's bowl to see if they have more than you, only if they have enough.
Student debt is not a good thing for our society. It's not a good thing that people made decisions based on having or not having such debt. If we rip the bandaid off we'll help millions of people, at the same time creating massive stimulus at a time when it is most needed. It's no more "fair" to do that then it was fair to bail out the bankers in 2008, the difference is the people getting bailed out will be immensely more in number and productive in their usage of the money.
The state of student loans in the U.S. obviously isn't even remotely as despicable as chattel slavery, but it's still deeply immoral and not far removed from loan sharking + debt slavery. Ignoring the moral aspect, it's just wildly counterproductive and detrimental to society (particularly since the generation who allowed this to happen - the baby boomers - never had to deal with this themselves.
A better solution still would be a one time initial handout to all us citizens over 18 years of age of 100k$, and then every us citizen that turns 18 100k$ of free money they may use however they see fit.