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Comment by tomohawk | Hacker News Reader

Why reduce a complex issue to such hostile, binary, us-vs-them terms? There's no advantage except to spread negativity and hatred.

Oh wow. This sums up what’s wrong with our growing individualism where it’s only me me me.

The goal should be to strive as a society not everyone can be a doctor, lawyer or investment banker.

And education and healthcare are prime examples where we have to pay the tab together.

People who want their loan forgiven are the me me me. They don't want to fix the system for the next generation, they just want a check to their name.

You can want loans forgiven and want the system fixed. Where are you getting an observation that, in general, people who want loans forgiven also do not want the system fixed?

Biden didn't campaign on changing the system, he campaigned on loan forgiveness. His strategists obviously picked the preferred platform.

Education is not a prime example. Many degrees ARE useless. Paying your own way is a massive incentive to pick a valuable and reasonably priced degree. Many people consider healthcare a human right. Getting to spend 4 years half assedly drawing supply and demand graphs or writing essays about proust is most definitely not!

This is genuinely one of the funniest comments I’ve read on HN.

So much judgement against kids who sought an education.

I'm curious, how do you feel about politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene getting her $183,504 USD PPP loan forgiven? She also happens to be vehemently and vocally opposed to student loan debt forgiveness. Another one mentioned in the link below, Vern Buchanan, took $2.3 million in PPP covid loan forgiveness. He's also opposed to student loan forgiveness.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-shi...

How does any of this make sense? Are we, in the USA, collectively just a bunch of selfish jerks who can't see past our own noses? The lack of empathy may not be surprising at this point, but it is embarrassing and arguably immoral and inexcusable.

So much judgement against kids who sought an education they could afford and opted for a state university at home instead of taking a loan to go somewhere else.

Where is the empathy for the ones who worked hard and made sacrifices to pay off their loan? Where is the empathy for the ones who passed on a college education because they didn't think they would be able to pay off the loan?

As for the politicians you bring up, ok it's infuriating now what? 2 wrongs don't make a right.

I have immense empathy for those that work hard and have the fruits of that taken away, but there is a sickness in the US where all inevitable indirect motion caused by the simple reality of living in a zero-sum system (called civilization) is framed as something being "taken away", which implies much more injustice than the actual consequences in question. It's an adjacent mindset to the one that can not have a rational discussion about anything related to taxation because they think that the phrase "taxation is theft", aside from being true or not, is a perfectly complete opinion on all taxation-related topics. It's also adjacent to the mindset that obsesses over "personal responsibility", which is certainly a noble ideal, but from the mouths of these people is instead used as a rejection of reason and empathy. These hyper-reductions might have a seed of a legitimate idea in them, but they are ultimately destructive.

Based on this philosophy, there is no way to both realistically and "fairly" make things better for future generations.

Y'know, the idea of "I study war, so my sons can study business, so their sons can study philosophy", or whatever the John Adams quote was.

I think that most people, in general, agree on the idea that we want to make the future better than the present. If making sure that someone 20 years from now can go through life with fewer hardships is "unfair" to people now who have to endure them, and thus we must not make the improvements that lead to that future, then how can we ever, ever make things better?

This has been answered a dozen times. You're talking about changing things for future generations which everybody agrees on.

This loan forgiveness does not do that. It retroactively changes the rules that were in place when some people decided to go to college and others didn't. This move changes nothing for future students.

Because "the rules that were in place" then were unfair, and were not, in fact, decided on in any organized manner: they were simply the confluence of a number of factors.

This change does not take anything away from anyone. It does not hurt any of the people who (like me) are lucky enough to have paid off all their student debt.

How people react to it just shows who is a bitter, jealous person by nature, and who has actual compassion for other people.

> Where is the empathy for the ones who passed on a college education because they didn't think they would be able to pay off the loan?

I don't understand. No matter what kind of reform is done (making college cheaper, or forgiving loans, or any other solution) it will still be the case that some people in the past couldn't go to college because it was too expensive back then. So we can never change anything?

We can - and must - change the rules/system moving forward for sure, but I don't think it's fair when 2 individuals, who were faced with the decision to go or not to college at the same time, with the same rules, see the rules retroactively changed for one of them.

And not just that. The people who decided not to go to college are paying for the "forgiven" loans of the ones who went.

Why change what was, and not what will be? I'd rather they give free college to the future kids than repay the ones who already got one.

No one's changing what was. That's impossible, unless our physicists have come up with something really cool recently.

Canceling student debt is, in fact, changing what will be: many people now do not have to worry that, in the future, they will have to pay that extra money, or that their loans will continue to balloon in size due to the interest changes. That is all the future.

And why do you think that canceling some debt now for people actively struggling under its burden is more unfair to people who paid off their debts than letting future people go to college without ever having to take on that burden?

We can change things the question is can we allow people who are motivated by profit to dictate the change.

College is way more expensive than it was before the government started distorting the prices. The inflation rate for college education is similar to that of disease care and is unconscionable and driven by the free money hand out that Biden helped create.

It doesn’t make it right, but it does make them hypocrites.

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