"Independent estimates suggest the plan will cost more than $300 billion over 10 years."
To me, that $300 billion could have made more impact elsewhere, for more important and time-sensitive issues.
Why people are so merciful to big rich companies but so ruthless to other people?
> Why people are so merciful to big rich companies but so ruthless to other people?
Because that's a straw man? A lot of people aren't OK with the government "give[ing] large subsidies to big corps full of money."
You should try asking "people" what they think of bank bailouts sometime.
The relative standing matters so much because it affects your social capital (and since your genes are always trying to find/mate with the best possible partner, relative social standing feels a lot more important than absolute one)
That is the reason behind a lot of the backlash to programs like this. It changes (in a small way) the relative standing of ordinary people. Same underlying reason as the NIMBY movement.
Also, those companies failing would have lead to not only their employees getting hurt, but possibly plunge us into a depression - hurting everyone.
What this loan forgiveness does is help a select few by hurting literally everyone else.
The covid bailouts were interest-free loans, which are actual free money.
It's a bit of a different situation.
Edit: that's also ignoring the position of "don't bail out corps and don't bail out individuals alike"
It’s a VC site…
> It's very rare for a large company to take a subsidy and hoard it, or not use it for public goodwill.
Citation needed.
Citation needed. Regardless, it's not up to companies to be charities - everyone is acting in their own best interest, of course.
But if you give the $10k to the lender instead, the person now has $500 more to spend every year in addition to having increased their net worth by $10k.
False. The government isn't holding the note for student loans: banks are. Paying off these student loans goes to a bank's balance sheet whereas checks sent to people get spent on any number of consumer goods (or invested into Wall Street Bets stonks if that's your thing).
If the interest amount is more than 0%, it may give more income over the course of the loan term for the person with debt than it wipes out at the bank.
The money someone was spending on the loan and interest may very well go to any number of consumer goods, investments, or other items, though.
If you take issue with that, then by the same logic you could also argue that any attempt to help a person pay off debt is encouraging frivolous spending - after all, once the debt is repaid, the person has additional income available which they can spend on things.
> The money someone was spending on the loan and interest may ...
Not in this case. Federal student loan payments have been paused for over 2 years now, people have not been making monthly payments for these loans.
Huh? I thought private student loads were pretty rare nowadays, and most loans are now through the federal government.
Also, according to https://finance.yahoo.com/news/student-loans-not-eligible-fo..., this loan forgiveness doesn't apply to private student loans:
> Private student loans, by definition, are private and are not eligible to be forgiven. These are loans the borrower owes to student loan providers and not the federal government. Mr. Biden's announcement won't change how these are repaid and borrowers should expect to continue to repay them as they have to date.
A student loan was approved on a gamble.
Now the lenders are trying to find a way to guarantee their returns by making everyone else pay.
None of those things are true for student loans.
https://www.investopedia.com/how-to-file-student-loan-bankru...
Mostly false. I prepped and processed bankruptcies for two years and I only came across one instance where a student load was dischargable under chapter 7. IIRC, under a Chapter 13, they can be consolidated as an unsecured debt. I only did a few Chapter 13s so I'd have to go back and reread that part.
Possibly some would do with income they had already set aside for repayment - if the person in question had enough regular income to have had no problems repaying before, and if they nevertheless fall under the required criteria:
> Following more than a year of internal debate, the president said Wednesday that he will cancel $10,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers making under $125,000 a year or couples making less than $250,000 a year. In addition, those who receive federal Pell Grants and make less than $125,000 a year would be eligible for total forgiveness of $20,000, Mr. Biden said.
The amount of people falling into that particular bucket seems rather small to me, compared to the amount of people who this will be a genuine help.
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Oppressive tuition costs shouldn't have happened in the first place. Nor should university cliques and gatekeeping to education and opportunity happen. I'd like that corrected.
On the other hand, I know people who've suffered a lot because they couldn't afford to take on student loans, or because they paid off every predatory dollar. One of them even died at ~30 from the stress pretty directly attributable to that. Others I know continue to suffer. Tuition forgiveness won't help them, and it decreases their relative wealth. Can we also support these other people?
So you understand the pain
Would they have accepted loan forgiveness for them ?
What do you think of tax cuts for business or home owners ?
> Can we also support these other people?
Go ahead and improve this one situation, but don't forget to also help the other people (who might otherwise suffer even more).
As for it being used elsewhere, sure, it could be used elsewhere... but it's not. It's currently money that's just sitting around being debt accumulating interest for banks and the DoE. So it may as well be used to help people out.
Don't buy into the contrapositive of the American Dream; the Dream isn't true, and so neither is its contrapositive.
I disagree with this, and in fact, it's my point.
I did study philosophy -- at uni. But I didn't learn about contrapositives in that class, I learned about it in a dedicated Critical Thinking course -- also at uni. I also took a couple of formal logic courses and a few psychology courses there, all electives, and none related to my career (except maybe tangentially in the formal logic of computation). I learned so much in these courses about not only how to think, but common ways people incorrectly think and how to notice and avoid that. I even learned theories of the neurology behind why some of those common mistakes happen, and the importance of each step in the scientific method regarding which of these fallacies each attempts to counteract.
Public K-12 education may fail to teach people how to think, but high-quality universities do not. Which is my point: higher education is so important and should be as accessible to as many people as possible if we're to create the best society we can for ourselves and others.
The world is a very hard place to live in and we do very little to prepare 18 year olds for adulthood. Can't get a job or afford a place to live on their own. God forbid they make a mistake. It's cruel and predatory to give them loans they'll be stuck with for the rest of their lives unlike any other type of loan.
Financially coddling those 22+ is doubling down on failing to prepare them for the future.
If cancer were cured, has everyone who had cancer prior been "penalized"?
People taking out a student loan voluntarily took on that debt. Pretty much nobody is voluntarily choosing to get cancer. (Yes, some people perform behavior that increases their chances, but rarely is it a 100% chance)
So if someone chose to do something knowing the negative consequences that would happen (repayment + interest), and then the rules change on them and everyone else in the middle of the contract, can you imagine someone being at least a little unhappy about that?
An analogy that I think fits better:
A teacher says there's an exam next Friday on chapters 1 - 5 from a textbook. You study, do your work, skip spending time with friends and family on the weekend in order to study for the exam.
But then the exam rolls around the teacher says, "Nah, you know what? We're only going to test chapters 4 - 5."
You might think, "But I could have seen my friends instead! I could have spent my limited amount of time in different ways over the past week. The guy who went out and partied all weekend got lucky and will get the same grade as me, ugh." I can certainly understand why someone who studied may feel unhappy about that, or think it's unfair.
When people say this, they are implying that choosing to get a higher education that creates student loan debt is equal to some other choice that wouldn't incur that debt. But of course, this is untrue; the benefits of a quality education are not equivalent to other options. It's not just "student loans or no student loans" in isolation.
To make your analogy somewhat more accurate (though probably still imperfect): it's like the teacher says "study chapters 1-5 and I'll give you a 90% guarantee in the class, and those chapters will be on the test", then the test ends up being only chapter 3. Yes, you spent the extra time studying you didn't need, but you still got the 90% guarantee in the class, so the time debt paid off even if the people who didn't study as much got to hang out with friends more, since they didn't get that 90% guarantee.
Smallpox was basically eradicated, but vaccines didn't "punish" people who died from it before they were invented.
In fact, in a case like that, you should be pissed off at Jeff, not at the people helping everyone which happens to include Jeff.
Why should someone with a B.A. be fed and not someone with only a high school diploma?
Care to take a guess at how much money -- sorry, "blood and sweat" -- this will cost a taxpayer?
$200/year.
How much is annual tuition in the US?
$8,000 on average, $2,000 at my local public college.
If this paves the way for future policies to forgive new loans similarly, that $200/year will decrease as the backlog of existing loans are out of the pool. At which point, every single taxpayer could get the same education for less than $200/year as opposed to $2,000 - $15,000+. ($2,000 being the cost of my local public college, $15,000 being the annual tuition at the school I attended; the + meaning I understand there are more expensive places.)
This is not "the blood and sweat of taxpayers". This is 2 weeks' food bills spread over 52 weeks with the potential to give those taxpayers an education along with everyone else who they're paying taxes for.
> And goes to clearly morally bankrupt portion of population. Those who over spend with debt money.
So you can't think of any reasons someone might have student loan debt other than "they made bad choices and are immorally expecting other people to pay for it"?
Nice try, but not true - you get the loan, you can do what you want with it as long as you stay in school...rent, spring break vacations, food, entertainment etc. none of that has anything to do specifically with education.
Some loans go directly to the schools. Others do get disbursed to the student. But you said a key phrase in your own comment: "as long as you stay in school". Money is fungible. If I get paid $5,000 in student loans and use that to buy a computer, but then I have to pay $5,000 out of pocket for tuition, that is identical to me paying for tuition with the student loans. The second I decide to stop paying tuition, the loans stop as well. So it doesn't matter what a student spends the check on directly, as long as they're using that money and paying tuition, the student loan is being used for education.
So someone makes a bad decision with money as a teenager, probably pressured like a mf by HS counselors and others saying that they must go to college and that makes them “morally bankrupt”. Shit, some other idiot in this thread called the people who thought differently than him “evil”, we’re going hard on the propaganda train today!
How can you even attempt to speculate on the moral character of the student loan debtors ?
I'm not sorry to say that if people think it's valid to argue "I shouldn't have to pay $12/month to help other people live a healthy life", then our society is broken because the people in it are broken.
This will not turn into consumer spending if the debt is just "erased". People who can't pay their loans don't have money to spend elsewhere.
I don't think either would just hide it under a mattress. Lenders would invest it in capital projects and the Government would use it to pay off political supporters.
Heh.
Perhaps it could be spent making education free.
The current admin chose loan forgiveness- What do you propose ?