Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

I had an opportunity to go to college, and decided to do my own thing. This cancelling of student loan debt plan, although I understand the plight of young people in debt, it is also infuriating.

Myself: Was in college, left, did my own thing, becoming successful, now am paying taxes for everyone else who is getting bailed out. I already have state income tax to pay as well, and with housing prices and inflation being insane, saving for a down payment is miserable enough!

Everyone else in college: Often didn't know what they were doing, get free money that myself and others are paying for. Most people in my college weren't there for STEM.

Anyone who paid off their debt within the last few years: Screw you. Didn't matter if you were eating ramen to pay off that $10K for a few years, we just took care of it!

Future generations: Where is my bailout? They were so lucky a few years ago!

Colleges: Let's raise prices to get another bailout! In fact, let's repeat the cycle, feed the fire, and hope the government just starts handing out free universal college money every year! Then, we'll just adjust prices higher to compensate, the real college price will be basically the same, but our margins will be bigger!

It's bonkers. I don't like the debt, but this is a terrible plan. Why not (for example), just declare no federal income tax on a single cent of earned income for people making under $100K a year who have student loans and pay promptly? Or, let's say the degree I took has not been working out and I'm not getting jobs, maybe after a certain point I can declare bankruptcy on that debt. There are plenty of other methods to help.

That's perhaps my biggest problem with the bailout proposal. It targets the symptoms, not the cause, which makes it a de-facto Band-Aid on cancer.

AOC put it well:

<quote>

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Not every program has to be for everybody. People with apartments pay for first time homeowner benefits. Young people pay for Medicare for our seniors. People who take public transit pay for car infrastructure.

Maybe student loan forgiveness doesn’t impact you. That doesn’t make it bad. I am sure there are certainly other things that student loan borrowers’ taxes pay for. We can do good things and reject the scarcity mindset that says doing something good for someone else comes at the cost of something for ourselves.

An example: If a person is blessed enough to be in a position to have paid off their loans, maybe they have a home now and benefitted from first time homeowners programs that people crushed by student loans help subsidize when they aren’t able to buy a home because of student debt. It all comes around. It’s okay. We can support things we won’t directly benefit from.

</quote>

https://news-papers.co.uk/news/38704/advocating-for-student-...

I disagree with her on many of those points.

- "Young people pay for Medicare for our seniors."

Medicare is literally going bankrupt within the next decade, as is Social Security. When it was founded, there were 30 young people for every old person. Now it is 3-1, and going down still from declining birthrates. There is no guarantee any young person paying in right now will ever see a penny when they are old, unless you expect the government to print money for the next half a century.

- "If a person is blessed enough to be in a position to have paid off their loans, maybe they have a home now"

Wishful thinking. I have paid off my loans, have no home, and getting home ownership right now is horrible even with first time homeowners programs. There are plenty of people trapped paying off their debt, but can't afford a home, especially with current prices.

It doesn't change the fact that Medicare and Social Security are being paid for by current contributions. That money coming out of your check isn't getting socked away for later, it's getting paid out now.

That's what she means and kind of what she literally said.

There are people who are paying into a system they will see no benefit from.

Her main point is that "what goes around comes around." You might receive a $10K bailout, but later your taxes will help someone else. That's her principle behind her thinking on why this is OK. If you hurt now, it will benefit someone else; and when you are hurt, you will benefit from someone else hurting.

I currently have very little confidence long-term that this will happen. Right now, I have 0% confidence in Social Security and Medicare existing when I am old. 0%. That money is, as far as I know, going away and I'm never seeing it again. The statistics back me up on this.

Furthermore, this bailout, it will absolutely be repeated. There is never a one-time bailout that doesn't address the underlying cause without happening again in politics.

Or to put it in other words: Let's stop with the 'F-you, I got mine' attitude that so many entitled Americans have. There's plenty of resources, capital, intelligence, technology to ensure everybody in the world has a roof, food, and clean water, but we don't do it because everybody with the power to help is selfish. They got their's so F everybody else.

This attitude is the product of an insanely competitive and violent environment. People have learned that this is how you have to be to make it to the top. Also, what's the fun of being rich if nobody else is poor? The lower the low, the higher the high. People enjoy feeling the power of crushing others. Putting your boot on the throat of the weak makes you feel intoxicatingly strong. I'm convinced this is why the rich turn to philanthropy. Instead of helping make a system where the poor and needy don't exist, they rather make charities that transmute their greed into benevolence. There's some truly sick psychological stuff going on in this country.

I disagree that this was "put well".

> An example: If a person is blessed enough to be in a position to have paid off their loans, ...

This is the perfect kind of framing for her argument. Someone who paid off their loans didn't work hard, they didn't make a coherent plan and execute it, they didn't sacrifice, they were just "blessed". A benevolent god smiled upon them and their debt disappeared!

Great quote. Well put.

You left out when exactly you went to college.

Tuition increases have been ticking at around 2x-3x inflation for the past 25 years. It's not like the 70s or 80s when you could work during the summer and cover most of your expenses and then possibly take out a modest loan to cover the shortfall.

There ultimately needs to be some form of price control on tuition. Otherwise it just turns into, "well elite schools charge X so if we don't charge X*.95 people will think this is a school for rejects" since the only real signals in the market place are the price, average standardized test scores, and "prestige." Maybe in exchange for getting government grants and loans, they have to negotiate tuition rates with the federal government. They would be in a much better position to collectively bargain on behalf of the students, since the only option now is to either withdraw or grin and take it when they decide to hike the tuition.

Employment outcomes and default rates could be used in these negotiations. Lower than average employment prospects should be tied to lower than average tuition. Also, the overhead rates could be considered. This would put pressure on universities to curtail the sprawling administrative industrial complex.

I left at the end of 2020.

Your solution is actually worse.

You've introduced several hoops to jump through. And in order to make sure no one is cheating, you're going to need people to investigate. You've basically created a shadow welfare system. Because that's going to require people and training. The government will have to pay people to make sure the "wrong" people don't get money. You think a one-time payment of $10k to $20k is bad but want to replace it with yearly $50k payments. Every employee will have to find 3 to 5 fraudulent claims per year to just break even.

And why should you only get to discharge the debt if you don't get a job? What if you can't get jobs in the field your degree is mostly related to? If you get a job in an unrelated field, we could argue that your degree was also "meaningless" in that fashion. Although whether or not we should be treating college as "white collar vocational training" is another story.

You are paying taxes because that's your dues for living in the USA. You get things you want, I get things I want, they get things they want, and they're not all the same things. But through pooling our money and leveraging collective bargaining, we can make all of these things not only cheaper, but possible.

I was suggesting ideas. I don't think they are the best ideas, rather that the main idea being presented of a one-time bailout is the worst of all worlds.

This is not built to be a one-time bailout. This is going to need to be, to be "fair," a bailout of past people who paid in; and a bailout of future generations who will look back to it and complain about it.

Taking a page from the Stoics and deciding to not be infuriated might just be the best move here. You can't control what other people do, but you can control how you react. Simply accepting that your reactions are under your control can lead to a lot of inner peace.

The game was rigged to begin with. Individuals can't make sound choices within this insanely dysfunctional system. You can work hard, be the greatest model citizen, and still end up in a horrible place due to circumstances beyond your control.

We've seen whole cities become apocalyptic wastelands due to unfathomable economic crises.

I firmly believe no one can make sense of this unprincipled chaos. We call ourselves a capitalist country, but goods produced by a communist country dominate our market. Wtf? Just one of the many naked paradoxes that people seem to ignore and continue on like everything is normal. We're beyond the point of making sense of this mess. None of it makes sense, none of it fair. It's organized anarchy.

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