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Comment by grapescheesee | Hacker News Reader

Rant warning.

As someone who made great sacrifices, to pay off my loans immediately after graduation. I could not be more vexxed at the current administrations policy on this, over any policy executed with executive authority in my life time. I fully paid off my loans just before covid started.

I received pell grants, I worked full time while in school. I drove, maintained a 15 year old car, and live with roomates.

Additionally the amount of sound clips and articles, I hear because of this policy in America calling for more relieve. Makes me far more conservative than I would have ever been.

I also left out a rant on the deficit the US has.

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I understand where that's coming from but student loan debt is not a major contributor to the national debt. If we wanted to fix that, we need to roll back the Republican tax cuts which nuked the balanced budget we had around the turn of the century (this is especially important to the solvency of Social Security).

I would also say that while I sympathize with your position kids today are looking at even larger debts and wider housing deficits. Debt forgiveness won't solve everything there but I'd put the blame on the Congress rather than the people trying to do something to help.

$400 billion would not contribute to the national debt?

The word was major: that’s around 1% of the $31T total.

"I suffered and so should my children! Why should anything get better"

Coincidentally, policies that make things "get better" just happen to be promoted and supported by the political party that I support.

> Coincidentally, policies that make things “get better” just happen to be promoted and supported by the political party that I support.

I don’t think that is coincidental. Why would someone support a political party besides thinking that its policies generally were the ones that make things “get better” of the available alternatives?

Why should poor fast food workers pay student loans for privileged liberal arts majors?

> Why should poor fast food workers pay student loans for privileged liberal arts majors?

Weird anti liberal-arts slander aside, the vast majority of people unable to pay off their student loans - most of whom have been trying to do so - are far closer to the former implied end of the socioeconomic spectrum than the latter.

Not that it actually matters - your question is disingenuous to begin with.

The average salary of a liberal arts major is over $50,000. That's $20,000 higher than a high school graduate. Why should the latter pay for the former?

All of this nonsense is a distraction to prevent people from noticing that the capital holding class is exploiting all workers for their labor whether they have degrees or not. College could be provided for citizens for free but we don't have that because the capital owning class has workers all pointing fingers at each other squabbling over pennies

> Why should poor fast food workers pay student loans for privileged liberal arts majors?

Poor fast food workers almost certainly pay zero-to-negative net income tax (negative potential becaue of EITC), so…they wouldn’t pay forgiveness for anyone.

Fast food workers aren't affected by inflation?

> Fast food workers aren’t affected by inflation?

In a world where the Fed both had the capacity and the desire to selectively exclude the effects of particular fiscal actions from its monetary policy calculations and, specifically, to do so for student loan forgiveness, this might actually be a sensible question.

How much of a poor fast food worker's pay do you imagine is being withheld in taxes to pay off student loans?

What do you imagine happens when money is printed?

In my experience approaching 4 decades, the answer is that the rich get more of it. The particular question about money doesn't seem to matter much, the answer is the same.

> I also left out a rant on the deficit the US has.

The deficit, at this level, is unimportant. The US will not retire, therefore there is no end date for the payment of its debts. The inflation it is experiencing at the moment is eating away at the base of the debt level while the interest rate is still far below the amount of inflation.

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