How about those of us who've never had student loans? Credit for future "educational services"? Straight cash payment?
So if you want to help poor people, help all poor people. Not just the ones with student loans.
If it is a net positive to help a specific group for society, why not?
Why should only people of <characteristic X> get $y of help from the taxpayer funds that come from everyone?
The goal is not let the income/wealth gap get too wide, or to provide more opportunities for all people at the bottom. Giving cash to everyone involves zero politics, wastes zero time in arguing politics, and does the job.
For the record, I am against tax breaks period. If the government wants to incentivize something, it should pony up the cash to do it. This would reduce corruption, make it impossible to fudge the numbers, and increase transparency to prevent corruption.
Why should FEMA only help hurricane victims in a city just hit by a hurricane? "Help everyone and give some money to Boston where the weather is perfect."
Sorry, I don't see how that makes any sense.
Please state the goal of helping people with student loans. Is it because the student loans are causing them to be poorer? If yes, then you have your answer. Help all poor people, regardless if they decided to invest in a overpriced education.
By the way, the national flood insurance program is a political tool to buy votes from the (previously) swing state of Florida. Taxpayers all around the US subsidize Florida homeowners who want to live in the beach and in areas prone to disaster. This is not a good thing. Continuing to invest in flood prone areas over and over again is a waste of the US’s resources.
This is the type of corruption and misallocation of resources that happens when leaders tilt the scales. Subsidizing people spending their 18 to 30 years learning things or partying or whatever that people in the US and around the world are not interested in buying is also a misallocation of resources.
I have no problem with government providing people a floor for standard of living and opportunity to move up. I do have a problem with government rewarding bad choices, intentional or not.
> Please state the goal of helping people with student loans. Is it because the student loans are causing them to be poorer? If yes, then you have your answer. Help all poor people, regardless if they decided to invest in a overpriced education.
Some would argue this. This isn't what I would argue. I would say most that would benefit are certainly not poor.
> Subsidizing people spending their 18 to 30 years learning things or partying or whatever that people in the US and around the world are not interested in buying is also a misallocation of resources.
You can argue that you think the benefits of loan forgiveness are not there and we shouldn't do it for x, y, and z reasons. That's valid. Your argument that loan forgiveness is invalid because everyone should get the same instead, is what I don't necessarily agree with.
Are you stating that the government should help wealthier people, even though there are poorer people?
If so, we will simply have to disagree. The goal of wealth redistribution should be to close the income/wealth gap, and that means helping poor people more and rich people less.
I oppose bailing out only people who borrowed for higher “education” for the same reason I oppose bailing out only people who have equity in a failed business. Some investments succeed, and some do not. Bailing them out disrupts the feedback loop for properly allocating resources in society.
>Your argument that loan forgiveness is invalid because everyone should get the same instead, is what I don't necessarily agree with.
Two scenarios. A person decides to enter the trades because they evaluate the cost of higher education and probabilities of future cash flow, and determine tradespeople are more needed and will earn a more appropriate ROI.
Another person does not do any research and signs up for tens of thousands of loans and uses them to obtain skills society does not want to pay for.
Why would society reward the second person specifically for making a bad investment and not doing their due diligence?
And I am not indifferent to the fact that 18 year olds do not know the future, and anyone can make a mistake in projecting movement of supply and demand curves. Which is why I want to help all poor people, not just the ones that took out student loans that did not result in decent income paying work.
That does not change the fact that the impetus to give people student loan debt relief is that the student loans are making them too poor.
Your logic is flawed.
The logic of helping with student loans is the student loans are making them too poor. Hence the reason to help them is because they are too poor, and government wants them to not be so poor.
Logically, the government should be helping all who are deemed too poor, regardless of why they are poor.
Child tax credits are neither here nor there in this discussion, because their purpose is to be an incentive to raise children for society. Although I would prefer it to be done via straight cash also, as opposed to meddling with taxes.
There may be debt servicing firms making an income from student loan payments, or student loan refinancing companies, but we could ignore those and say they are ineligible.,
I say this as a person who 100% supports student loan forgiveness and will experience no direct benefits (as I re-financed all of me and my wive's (much larger) student debts while interest rates were low).
I don’t know why people feel in opposition to helping people who have gone to school.
Help everyone that needs help, equally. And it is easy, give them cash.
I feel that only helping the subset of students who - with seeing eye - moved into an expensive course and then could not pay back later, while not somehow giving support to more responsible people (who did choose not to go into an overpriced education OR who paid of their debts) is giving the wrong incentives - go yonder and consume, throw out money with both hands, and then wait for the next politician to pay your debt (with money paid for by the more reasonable folks, which we indirectly punish that way).
A marginal income tax takes care of making sure it does not help non poor people.