> You're not being punished. Your debt would be the same with or without this policy. The cost to the average taxpayer is less than the cost of tuition at a public college. So guess what? If this policy paves the way for future similar policies that apply to new loans, you too can get free college education and make that tax money work for you, if you can't bear to let it work only for others. It's not about "looking stylish". It's about the importance of education and acting as a proof of concept that it's feasible to make said education accessible to everyone.
The vast majority of Americans have a small window, typically age 18-25, to finish secondary and post-secondary education before the specter of adulthood causes you to lose almost all your time to do it.
If it was the case that I could simply quit my job tomorrow, get a totally free ride through school, and return to work 3-4 years later that'd be different. For myself, and most likely a majority of Americans, we paid our dues by sacrificing useful years of our life in school, then more of our lives paying off our debt (in the case of military debt payment contracts sometimes the price WAS your life), for what? Absolutely nothing. No tax break, no thank you letter from the schools and students, no anything. Just more taxes.
This is punishment. It's an unfair tax levied on responsible Americans.
> You're describing this "choice" in a way that seems to imply all choices are equal. That anyone can choose to go to college or not and have the same outcomes in life, that there's no benefit in choosing one path over another, that there aren't other factors influencing such a decision or the availability of these decisions in the first place, etc. "Don't even have to live with it" -- do you realize that sounds like you're implying lifelong debt is a punishment for education? Something that must be "lived with" if you get said education?
This is precisely why we should not pay students for making poor choices. The underwriters should be responsible for two things given students generally are not creditworthy:
1. What is the net present value of the degree
2. Will the student be able to pay the degree off under the assumption of (1).
3. [Optional] What is the correct course of action in the event of default.
Loans should only be given to degrees that have a positive NPV. Since the government guaranteed loans through making sure bankruptcy discharge could not happen this calculation was thrown out and money was given to everyone. Ostensibly this was to encourage people to get degrees other than STEM, but it turns out very few degrees outside STEM have an NPV on the right side of 0. As an aside this is probably a good thing. STEM has become a jobs program, and university education shouldn't necessarily be tied to profit. However, when loaning people money only the jobs programs will get it - naturally.
This solution Biden has proposed fixes nothing. We gave the corporate student loan banks the biggest bailout we've seen since the great financial collapse. We should be up in arms about this. Students should be protesting. The debt was not removed, we simply gave tax payer dollars to the least deserving, and by extension encouraged them to continue to loan to negative NPV degrees because the government will always save them.
Lifelong "punishment" for a personal choice is not a punishment. You chose your degree. If it wasn't profitable, you can probably blame yourself or your counselor or the smooth talking college recruiter. You got duped. It was still your choice. Paying off my loans was not my choice. The alternative was much worse. If was told in 15 years a president would rob the tax payer to pay off my debt I would've just let it sit and ignore the collections calls. But the alternative was a lifetime of debt servitude and so I scrounged, worked overtime, ate nearly nothing, barely slept, and finally paid off my debt shoving every penny I earned into it. I understood it was my responsibility and the debt wasn't anyone's fault but my own.