Investing in Americans education is single handedly the best investment America can make as a country. I rather see bad business models fail and watch educated Americans fill in the gaps.
Well that's obviously false. I had a problem with it. And if you dared to say it during the pandemic, you were likely to get stoned by the wildly emotional pandemic mob.
The solution to the cost of education is the US, is to realize the cost somewhere, ie make someone actually responsible for the fact that very young adults with next to zero credit / income / responsibility are borrowing rather insane sums of money they can't actually afford to borrow. Society can debate who gets to be responsible (banks, universities, taxpayers, borrowers), someone has to be, otherwise the upward spiral (of debt) will just continue until it becomes an outsized economic threat (it's getting there). For decades the can has been kicked down the road intentionally, nobody wants to take responsibility. Biden and the Democrat approach is just more debt via loan forgiveness, which will result in an even bigger loan forgiveness after that.
It's identical to the healthcare cost problem in the US. The Democrats want to solve healthcare via universal healthcare, and they want to pretend it can be done without fixing the cost problem. They never talk about dramatically reducing the cost of healthcare, and how many millions of jobs need to be vaporized to do it, and how many medical professionals need to take a big pay cut to do it. The gravy train has to end, and that means millions of nurses, doctors, hospital workers get slashed pay; millions of related industry jobs vanish (in insurance, medtech, pharma, et al.), and the middle class and higher incomes that go with them.
Big education - the government borrowing pact with universities and their freewheeling ability to spend - is a gravy train for admin and universities generally, and has been for decades. It has to end just the same as big healthcare's gravy train has to end. Salaries have to be smashed, jobs have to be destroyed en masse, everything has to be squeezed, cut, slashed. Which is exactly how most of Europe manages their healthcare systems - tight rationing, tight controls.
Loan forgiveness is not an investment in education
If you are trying to argue that the increased tax levied on the particular indebted people with a better education adds up to the exact amount they owed, someone would have to prove that. Additionally, this additional tax from better education was never intended by Congress, when the tax rate was calculated, to go to paying anyone's previous education debt. So other services (arguably benefitting the entire population) would have to be preempted to pay for it. Either way, you'd have someone else paying for the debt.
A thought upon budget allotment and condition for loan forgiveness every year is significantly better than spending it in one go for publicity.
The one time forgiveness was adopted roughly simultaneously with reforms to lending and, particularly, repayment programs designed to ameliorate the creation of the same debt problem, it wasn’t a policy adopted by itself in a vacuum.
> Yes, yes it is
No. It most definitely is not.
It's paying off a bunch of loans that people freely agreed to accept in exchange for their chosen degree. It's the abdication of all responsibility. It's the creation of a society where commitments mean nothing. It is also rewarding behavior that isn't constructive and, devoid of consequences, is caustic.
Plenty of us have taken-on these commitments and worked hard for decades making good on our agreement and paying off the loans. What entitles this generation to behave as children when they should behave as adults?
How about we pay off half of everyone's mortgages then and call it an investment? I guarantee that would have far greater impact than the student loan bailout?
And, BTW, after you pay off my mortgage, I get to keep living in my house forever. Because, well, if we pay off someone's student loan/s, they get to keep the degree and use it to make money.
The whole thing is laughable.
Want to fix student loans? Get government out of that business ASAP. The minute loans don't have that guarantee, the cost of education will drop precipitously.
The other thing that is important is to remove non-degree coursework as graduation requirements. Someone going for an engineering degree has to spend about one full year on coursework having nothing to do with engineering. One way to look at this is that, in the US, 25% of your student loan is for shit that is not going to help get you hired. Or that 25% of your loan isn't for engineering coursework.
Being that this is a requirement for graduation, this means that this unnecessary 25% of the cost of the degree is being imposed on every single student. That's wrong.
What about accepting risks? Should those who used SVB have been bailed out?
No. Absolutely and most definitely not.
Then do it. And show us how you do it.
Nothing prevents you from setting the example, using some criteria to find a target for your charity and paying off some or all of their student loan. Maybe you can take over the payments?
In fact, you could start a foundation of like-minded people and help hundreds, or thousands, of people.
Here's the difference: You get to do whatever you want with your money. Including finding people who think like you and want to join you.
The other approach is forcing everyone to jump on your bandwagon. And that is wrong.
I paid every dime back. So did my wife. We did without lots of things for a very long time while meeting the obligations we entered into to go to school. We both worked full time jobs while we were in school. We didn't take vacations for a long time while we evolved financially and in our respective careers.
That's what commitment and honoring responsibilities looks like.
People with student loans whining about not being bailed out is the pinnacle of adults behaving as petulant children. Grow the fuck up! They bought something that will benefit them for the rest of their lives. The government facilitated that by guaranteeing that loan. No sane lender would have ever provided these loans without this guarantee. Time to behave as an adult and pay for it.
Bullshit degree?
Too bad. Not my problem. I am not responsible for someone paying $150K for a Masters in Underwater Basket Weaving. Tough shit. You fucked up.
Want to blame someone for that expensive Ms in Basket Weaving that can only make you $35K/year? Blame yourself. Stop voting for snake oil salesmen who promise the world and end-up damaging everyone who voted for them. If government was out of the student loan business that degree would not be worth more than $15K to $30K, if that. Your voting decisions have consequences. You have to pay for those just as well.
How about paying off everyone's cars? And then, we don't take them away. They keep using their car for free, just like a student loan bailout would allow someone to use their degree for profit forever.
Of course, some will have bought sensibly-priced cars, while others will have spent $150K for a car to drive the kids to school.
Lets force everyone in the nation who paid-off their vehicles through hard work and responsible behavior to pay for the cars bought by others who are now whining about their loans. Brilliant.
If you want to pay-off people's cars, be my guest. Again, private money and private decisions, you are free to do this...and more.
Let us know if you pay off someone's loan or start a private foundation to do just that. I'm sure many on HN who share your way of thinking will gladly donate tens of thousands of dollars (or more) to demonstrate these are not just empty words and the truly get behind what they say with non-trivial financial commitments for the benefit of others.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/rpr_2_6.pdf
Also, and I mean this sincerely… are you okay? You sound angry, resentful even. Please go talk to someone, this seems much bigger than student loan forgiveness.
Yeah, sure, people can write papers to justify anything.
Like I said, let's cancel everyone's auto loans and mortgages. I'll be we could write a compelling paper in support of that.
> are you okay?
Very funny. Insult shrouded behind fake sincerity.
I am fine, than you. Are you? You don't seem to understand reality at all. Please go talk to someone.
> You sound angry
Everyone who isn't a under heavy sedation should be angry at the stupid nonsense our society today seems to insist on passing for virtues. It is destroying our society to the bone. Splitting us up into more and more subsets brought into resonance by expert manipulators.
Don't believe me? Give it ten years, come back and compare notes. If we remain on this path nothing good will come from it. Sadly, we might have already passed a point of no return years ago.
The issue here is that it is far easier for political actors to work on the basis of creating resonance in subsets of the population than to actually do the difficult work of governing and solving real problems --which isn't easy at all.
Far easier to portray daily life as an ideological civil war with many "us vs. them" slices of society than to actually solve real problems over time.
One approach leads to easy votes and easy paths to stay in power. The other requires hard work and the risk of not delivering results, which could end political careers. The internet and social media gave politicians the tools necessary to focus on nothing except divide-resonate-and-conquer.
It's a game. The masses play. Politicians win. Society gets screwed.
For the unthinking among us, if they can reduce life to a set of mono-variable issues and clear good-vs-evil players, maybe feed them a few great looking graphs, PDF's and websites in the process, maybe even an idiot well-known actor who is stupid enough (most of them are) to get behind the cause, well, politicians and the money brokers that surround them do just fine.
Of course, the population doesn't do fine. They do worse and worse with the passage of time. Pick a time line, say, 50 years:
- The healthcare system is a horrible train-wreck
- Our system of education K-12 is worse than in some third world countries
- Our university system sells, for hundreds of thousands of dollars,
a product that, at most, should cost tens of thousands, or
be free (as it is in countless nations)
- Our systems of mass transportation are a mess
The California high speed train project is an example of just
how incompetent we have become
- Our actions on business, nationally and internationally, have
driven entire industries out of the country --forever
- Air travel lately? OMG!
- We can't build anything at scale any more
Remember "shovel ready projects"? Yeah, good luck
Just one drive up and down Interstate 5 in CA summarizes where
we are well: We can't build anything, and, when we do,
it's third world
- We have degrades so far that we can't even manufacture masks
and medical equipment during a pandemic
- And, yes, we have layers of society who would rather whine
and be taken care of by government than engage in the difficult
work that elevates societies and people at all levels
One way or another, we have managed to allow our politicians (note I have not pointed at a single unique party) to devolve our nation and society into something that is simply not headed in the right direction at all. The things these people have done and are doing continue to guarantee the irrelevance of the US (and Europe) on the world stage and 100 to 200 years (if not more) of Chinese domination at nearly all levels.
I guess the unthinking among us need to find themselves in that reality before they understand just how stupid they have been to not laugh these politicians off the stage and replace them with people who will deliver results and not focus on dividing the population into subsets that are easy to manipulate for votes.
I have worked in manufacturing, technology, electronics, software, commercial, industrial and aerospace domains for four decades. We have been moving backwards, for decades. We have eroded our ability to sustain and grow our economy to a point that likely has no return.
Just try to manufacture any non-trivial product in the US and Europe and the realization of how bad things are will feel like a bucket of ice water. In fact, try to manufacture most trivial products (masks, gowns, syringes, disinfectant wipes) in the US and Europe and the results will likely be the same.
This is the result of decades of incompetence and politicians focusing on their political objectives rather than going to work for us doing the difficult job of managing the affairs of a nation.
Yes, everyone should be angry, because, without a massive unifying force and a clear vision of common goals --without everyone pushing in the same direction-- this is going in a direction most are not going to like. It's like the proverbial crab being slow-boiled. Ignorance, as it turns out, isn't, in the end, bliss.
Look, I know bullshit when I see it. I've been around that long. Sorry, and I do not mean this as a personal attack, the study you posted is complete horseshit. And so is every single study that claims that forcing the entire population to pay for some X a subset of the population chose to buy on their own accord is not a way to build a society based on personal responsibility and the idea that your rights must end where mine begin.
I'll give you one example of this in healthcare. Our family was nicely covered and happy with an insurance plan that cost us $650 per month and had a low thousands deductible way back when. Then President Obama comes along and publicly promises everyone: "If you like your doctors, you'll keep them. If you like your healthcare plan, you'll keep it." He is on video multiple times making this assertion.
What happened? We were forced into Obamacare. Why? The terms of the bill forced companies to cancel all prior plans. And then, our plan went from $650 per month to over $1,800 per month. The deductible went from somewhere around $4,000 per year to over $9,000 per year. We could no longer go the the doctors we had been going to for years.
I did the math. My family would have to be run over by a truck before our insurance would pay real benefits. And yet we have been spending over $22K per year on premiums for over twelve years now. That's over TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS so far since being forced into this fucking abomination. Over $270K. For what?
And I voted for that fucker too. Biggest mistake of my life. Incompetent to the core. Well spoken like few before and after him. And, of course, he used that to divide this nation in ways most have yet to recognize. And costs will go up. At this rate I would not be surprised if it costs my family over a million dollars in my lifetime.
Perfect example of a politician promising to help people, yet causing great harm instead. One can find examples of this kind of thing across the isle as well. Not claiming Democrats are the only culpable here.
Politicians in this nation, by law, can lie to all of us and suffer no consequences for it. That's wrong and should change. They are causing way too much damage using that superpower.
The political "species" --because they are not human beings, they are parasites-- in the US has done more damage to this country in the last 50 years than any of our enemies could have hoped to inflict on us through any means available to them. They have destroyed this nation from the inside by only caring about themselves while pretending to care for those who's votes they want and need.
Why people do not wake up to this and revolt is something I might never understand. The fact that, in 2016, our only two choices for "leadership" were Trump and Clinton says a lot about just how stupid we all are and how putrid our political system has become. Out of all the brilliant and capable people in this nation, those two rose to the top? Amazing.
> let’s tackle this the best we can with the information we have
We have to be very careful. This "information we have" is deeply polluted by political forces and financial interests. I would advise anyone to almost, by default, discard anything that comes out of our universities one a range of topics. They have become paid political actors. The forces that be know how to manipulate this through grants and programs that only favor certain perspectives.
For example, go search for the body of articles challenging some of the narratives surrounding what we can and cannot do about atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate change. The number of studies --if you can find any-- is absolutely dwarfed by those showing we are Zeus and can lick this thing within a few years or even decades (which, of course, is complete and utter horseshit).
And so, if we were to tackle this with the information we have, the only conclusion they want us to reach is that we have to destroy entire economies to "save the planet" --which, again, is complete horseshit.
There are thing in life that don't require layers of research studies to understand or debunk. For example, any engineer with a reasonable amount of experience knows that building a submarine using a carbon fiber pressure hull is fucking stupid.
Bailing everyone out of X (which can be anything) isn't a way to build a strong, resilient, responsible society with self determination and ability to make good decisions and honor them despite outcomes. It's a way to build a loser society that will surely buckle at the first sign of trouble. Even worse, it's a way to build a society perennially dependent on government handouts, with all the downsides history has shown this brings.
I think there's reason to be angry. Some of us have been working hard for decades, only to see the people we hired to look after our nation destroy it from the inside and divide us to use us like pawns for their own benefit. That's not cool. That's something to be angry about. And rightly so.
I am flattered you see me as the son of God. I am not. If I were, I'd waste no time and fix the world with a single well-aimed divine fart.
Taxes and wealth transfers are something that a reasonable person can be angry or even resentful of.
If someone went into your house and robbed you, you might be angry. You have bills, dreams, and children to care for. A lot of people would even want to kill the thief.
These policies have the same effect, but you are powerless to defend yourself.
How do you feel about bankruptcy?
Which loan forgiveness program are you talking about? The PPP loans was explicitly designed from the outset to be forgiven, if they were used for payroll. In the end it was a roundabout way for the government to ensure people continued to get paid during lockdowns, not a way to "socialize their losses and privatize their profits".
We need to solve the bigger issue too, but that shouldn't preclude shorter term action to correct past mistakes.
Aka, politics as usual.
The interest/payments pause is not the same thing as the student loan forgiveness plan. They're entirely different things.
Now, if we’re going to argue about the very specific loan forgiveness being effective, then sure, it has been currently struck down. But I have trouble believing that nothing good has come from it, if only by forcing this convo, and convos like these taking place.
Sometimes you have to do something loud to get people’s attention; it certainly got yours.
If I know anything, it's that "people" are often simply wrong about stuff. If a bunch of people wrongly thing two different things are the same, that doesn't make it so.
> The general tone of this convo has been that nothing helpful has come from these actions, and that’s not true.
I don't care about the general tone, I was only responding to the statement that A "did" good because different-thing B "did good."
My understanding is this thread is specifically about the student loan forgiveness plan that was just ruled unconstitutional, not some amorphous larger thing (which may be how you personally think about it).
It doesn't say anything about the moral hazard of paying off student loans for those who haven't paid them, while ignoring those who have. Or about the likelihood that a student loan cancelation will need to happen again. Or that those two things together will encourage people not to pay their student loans in the future, hoping for another cancelation. Or that universities will be able to raise prices even more because they expect further cancellations.
Sure, the deficit may not go up as much as naively you'd expect it to. And we won't have to pay it off with taxes immediately. (we'll just have more debt instead). But you seem to not care about all of the reasons that people oppose this, and just throw a pdf in their face, hoping it'll shut them up even when it doesn't argue what you want it to argue. Please stop.
The interest rate pause was not declared unconstitutional today - and it will continue until the loans are scheduled to be started again in the next couple months.
The pause will continue until September (it was not effected at all by this ruling) so it once again exists without the forgiveness policy.
Why do you think one cannot exist without the other? The pause is fine with or without the forgiveness, and the pause existing didn’t save the forgiveness.
> Congress recently passed a law preventing further extensions of the payment pause. Student loan interest will resume starting on Sept. 1, 2023, and payments will be due starting in October. We will notify borrowers well before payments restart.
Source: https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/covid-19/payment...
This is not a problem that is going to be solved by injecting more unaccountable government cash into the system. Students would just take on more debt, expecting more forgiveness, and schools would thus simply continue raising prices. Why would anybody do anything differently?
Guys, seriously, we’re not talking about people taking loans out to do blow and hookers, they’re trying to get an education. You’re all acting like we’re just going to give out forgiveness and then throw our hands up and doing nothing after that.
Maybe you're responding to what I said about unaccountable government cash? But you seem to be thinking I'm saying it's the students who lack accountability and whose incentives are screwed up by the government cash?
That's not it at all, it's not the students' incentives that are a mess under the current system and an even worse mess under the perpetual forgiveness system. It is schools whose incentives are messed up. They have no reason to keep from raising tuition and fees indefinitely because they are guaranteed to be paid. It's that problem that setting a precedent for forgiveness makes worse.
It has nothing to do with what people with student debt spend their money on.
But it is not the only potential solution.
But the availability of other actual potential solutions does not make the non-solution of one-time blanket forgiveness that we're discussing here any more appealing to me.
Don't worry, sugar daddy government's got your back Jack.
Also points scored in the last election. IIRC, this plan was announced a single month before the 2022 election. They got to benefit from the votes of people who thought they were getting their loans forgiven, without ever actually doing that.
If it was so certain that they had no intention of going through with it, why not call their bluff and turn the responsibility for killing it back on them?
That's the wrong question. It was never if they had "intention of going through with it," it was about if they would be able to actually pull it off. The GGP stated "This was doomed to fail from the beginning and I bet they knew it," and I have to agree. Their plan to push this through purely via executive action was very likely to fail (and did), and the lawyers and politicians who formulated almost certainly knew the odds.
The legal analysis at the time of its passage certainly thought there was a strong legal argument for it to be allowed.
Forgiving either person's debt will improve each one's finances, but won't affect whether they've gone to college in the past.
Edit: in case it wasn't obvious, the question is rhetorical. I'm not advocating for forgiving any kind of debt.
It'd be fair to ask why student debt vs other kinds of federally held debt, but why notmall debt is pretty clear.
But this is going into the weeds and not really addressing the point of the argument.
You can already do that with bankruptcy, but it specifically does not apply for student loans
Bankruptcy is very different than student loan forgiveness. For example, 91% of people hire an attorney to do the bankruptcy, there are court fees, you take a huge hit on your credit score, you can't get credit, you either get put on a payment plan or you have to liquidate your assets, etc. Compared to that, student loan forgiveness is basically a freebie. When I asked, "why not forgive any type of debt," I meant it in the same kind of way that student loan forgiveness works.
You are the one telling me bankruptcy has consequences
The point is school debt is specifically excluded from bankruptcy by law so people have no recourse
You ask why not forgive all debts, and my response is we don’t need to do that, if debt is enough of a burden people can file bankruptcy
Yes, there are consequences and people have to make that choice
There is no choice for student loan debt, hence forgiveness
You can’t have it both ways - there has to be an out
> We need to solve the bigger issue too, but that shouldn't preclude shorter term action to correct past mistakes.
But this plan stretched the law past its breaking point, which why it was struck down. IIRC, the plan would have been OK if Congress had only passed a law explicitly granting the authority to forgive the loans, which it didn't even when Democrats controlled Congress.
IMHO, They'd fix the student loan issue immediately if Congress passed a law to allow the debt be discharged in bankruptcy (but maybe with some kind of delay or different fix to prevent the previous abuses of bankruptcy that led to the current regime), and perhaps added a claw-back from the schools for future government loans.
Come on. It's not no "unintelligible, extremely disorganized speech or writing manifested as a symptom of a mental disorder" to disagree with you.
Furthermore, framing this as just about "not helping people" is simple-minded. There are almost always trade-offs between different goods, and maintaining separation of powers is an important good as well. There are serious, serious problems with allowing small provisions of law meant to solve small problems to be re-interpreted to allow the executive to unilaterally make massive policy changes.
Same for the discrimination case where the plaintiffs had neither suffered damage, nor prior restraint, nor were actually engaged in the line of business in which they claimed to be.
The court is now accepting purely hypothetical cases when it’s convenient for them - this was someone who might start a web business and might suffer adverse action. The action that might be punished hasn’t even occurred yet, let alone any governmental response, nor is their even any bona fide movement towards the action that might be restrained, let alone any indication the government might restrain it.
It’s extremely damaging to our legal fabric to have this double-standard applied across the system. This is calvinball territory, the court is changing the rules of the game for different participants. Different people get an entirely different process based on which group you fall into, and the process difference is so drastic it effectively determines the outcome of the case.
The law already allows the debt to be discharged in bankruptcy, though it sets more difficult terms than for debt generally.
It's easy to be unsympathetic when something doesn't impact you personally. I'm not impacted by student loans, but I've heard enough stories from close friends to give me pause.
I am very empathetic to their plight and worry we have knee capped a sizeable portion of a generation, which will impact the economy and society as well.
The two paths were hard forks. It was a big decision.
I'm still "paying" the price in the form of reduced wages, surely.
Student loans weren't a great option, so I didn't take them. Why does everyone else take them, and then pass the blame and responsibility to the government?
I haven't had student loans since the early 2000s and I'm fine with forgiving them or at least reducing interest rates to something very low.
I lived in an active hurricane zone for most of my life, fwiw, and half my family just got screwed in 2022.
They've all variously moved away and come back. Hurricanes are a price you pay for coastal views. If I could put a beach in the landlocked state I live in now, it would probably generate incredible value.
I haven't taken a position on loan forgiveness, I've only taken a position on people blaming others for their own choices.
But I do live in a wild place, and a fire is a possibility. I pay for insurance to cover that, so I believe I'm footing my own bill as far as my own personal involvement. I wouldn't expect to receive a dime from anyone else; I never did during a hurricane.
You did, though, indirectly. Federal funds were used in lieu of state funds (your taxes). In essence, I paid for some of your cleanup. I agree that you didn't receive a personal check from the federal government, but you did benefit from their action.
Even your insurance is done with this method -- you pay an insurance premium which is far less than what would be paid out in the event that your house burned to the ground. If we're using the same insurance company, my premiums go toward that as well.
I walked into your trap, you got me--my region received hurricane funds. So now we should pay Chad's student loan back even though Chad said he'd do that himself? Huh?
On the other hand, we have a lot of people, about 20% of borrowers, who are in default and in dire financial situations. They will likely end up homeless or destitute, which has obvious negative impact to the community. For these people, forgiveness would be life changing. If you look into the program, it wasn't going to forgive 100% of the loans, but rather a smaller amount and it was income limited.
Does it really hurt you because someone else is helped? I certainly didn't feel hurt when my tax dollars went toward your hurricane damage.
I'm saying this as someone who saved for my children's education, and started doing so years before they were born.
I still don't think that absolves people of the responsibility they put upon themselves. You're totally ignoring that part of the argument, and it's really my only argument.
And clearly we need to pick and choose where to spend our money; we can't aid every cause. That doesn't make everyone a hypocrite. I don't think you've even made a case that I am one; your alternative idea of "federal assistance to the state of Florida" doesn't really compare well to "helping individuals repay loans they directly benefit from"; it's not at all the same class of spending.
Anyway no, people who are against this very specific form of federal aid are not hypocrites if they support some other very specific form of federal aid. That is not a logical conclusion.
I find it funny that we tolerate fabricating billions of dollars to bail out banks with TARP, wipe out billions (trillions?) of dollars in tax revenue with the TCJA, but draw the line when it comes to actually helping the little guy.
I'm even okay with being more strict with the income requirements so that those who are truly struggling can contribute more to society. Would you accept debt forgiveness for those currently in default? Keep in mind that declaring bankruptcy is not a viable option for these people as student loans are not discharged in that case.
I would consistently vote against giving tax money to private entities, given the chance (but look at our options here--we're just voting which private entities to give it to). I'm sure I'm in favor of giving private entities money in some cases, but my core belief is in personal responsibility (to a point you might find extreme), and so most of my positions can be deduced from that.
That being said, I would totally be all about a program to loan students the money with no interest. I think that solves really all the problems. It's not hard to get out from under it. It's very clear what you're signing up for, even as a young adult. It's not victimizing young people and their poor decision-making.
I'd even be totally okay forgiving the previous terms of the existing loans, and eliminating the interest. But to have other people pay for your expensive, optional education that will (hopefully) greatly benefit your life? At everyone else's expense? No, I'm never going to vote for that, no. We already give most people a very expensive primary school education, and just looking around, I would say most of that education is squandered & forgotten.
I don't vote with my heart. People struggling is not a big motivator for me in the voting box (but it certainly is in my personal life). I want them to do better, but I think the struggling is an important part of that process. It certainly was for me. I would encourage people to really dwell in that struggle; I consider it a fundamental, pivotal part of my human experience.
> I'd even be totally okay forgiving the previous terms of the existing loans, and eliminating the interest.
Hey, we agree on something!
While you were in a position to make a certain career decision due to the field you wanted to go into (tech), other field require schooling. For example medicine doesn't have on the job training that allows one to be a nurse, radiology tech, respiratory tech, dr, surgeon and so forth. Do you want there to be even less of those people?
What about accountants? What about engineers? Should they just "teach themselves". The idea was that all these roles are publicly beneficial and we used to recognize that.
The "Policy" of student loans was a government decision and directly created this problem and it is what needs to change to solve it.
The people struggling to repay their loans are those that have degrees with little or no economic value.
The main criticism from blue-collared voters on student loan forgiveness is the moral hazard of allowing students to take out loans for degrees with virtually no economic value. Of course, this criticism was completely ignored by the college educated elite whom refuse to entertain the idea a degree needs to have a measurable ROI. There are many other factors that play into this, but this is the crux of the matter.
Also the moral hazard argument is a red herring to rage bait the blue collar segment of the population and disregards the breadth of actual majors of student loan holders. And secondly it still does nothing to address the actual government policy decision that gave rise to this problem. The policy of student loan (public and individual student risk) vs direct public funding (public and institutional risk).
The number of students enrolling in a program and the amount of debt taken out by those students doesn't matter if there is a positive return on investment and the debt is repaid.
The blue-collared voter views the moral hazard as the end of the conversation. Attempting to diminish or dismiss this as a red herring is counterproductive and doesn't accomplish what you want.
It's akin to trying to convince a friend to rob a bank with you. The friend doesn't need to hear the hifalutin plan to know it's stupid and wrong, but you're getting upset that your friend doesn't want to sit down and hear it for three hours.
I think it's silly to view this in a way that generates ill feelings for folks who pursued education. The blame falls on the government, lenders and schools. They should bear the cost of any forgiveness.
For my entire twenties, I could have been one of your friends complaining about the burden of my student loans. Nowadays I complain about the burden of my mortgage. But in both cases I got loans for valuable things on very reasonable terms. Just because I feel personally burdened does not mean it's a crisis for society.
It also doesn't mean nothing should ever be done. Personally I think income based repayment is a great policy. Maybe we should make that more generous for its current beneficiaries can't afford housing or families at its current level (anecdotally that wasn't the case for my friends who took advantage of the program, but it's a statistical question and I don't know the answer).
But many people seem to act like blanket forgiveness is the only workable or fair policy, and I'm just not convinced.
But my criticism is not based on whether or not it would be a boon or a hindrance to the economy...
If you could come back from the future and say "that didn't happen, instead it gave college graduates the breathing room they needed to become politically engaged and they successfully pushed for permanent solutions to the problem of increasing costs and debt", then I'd be happy to take the L!
Or perhaps if you could find an analogous country where a one-time blanket forgiveness led to more foundational improvements to the financing of higher education in that country, that would help alleviate my concerns.
But barring that analogous country that already did this (which I don't think exists because, as you've noted, our current system is weird and different than how it works elsewhere), I don't think there's a quantitative answer to this question, because that's just not where my concern lies.
> I believe it creates perverse incentives that encourage a continuing spiral of more costly higher education, resulting in more debt, and unpredictable periodic political battles over "one-time" forgiveness.
So you believe that forgiving loans will instead create good incentives that lead to lower costs for higher education. Can you explain the mechanism by which you think that would happen? I've described how I predict people would behave, but I'm curious how you think it would shake out.
If I steal 100K from you and turn it into 110K for me, that is a net gain. However, you might not find it very favorable.
It's robbing Peter to pay Paul. Someone with student debt gets relief and greater spending capacity and everyone else just get some more national debt and higher interest rates.
It is all upside for one party and all downside for the other. As the paper states, GDP goes up, but less than the total cost over a 10 year horizon.
Forgiving 1.4 Trillion debt is predicted "Over the 10-year forecast, the policy generates between $861 billion and $1,083 billion in real GDP.
Now GDP doesn't equal federal revenue so you are really looking at adding $1.4T debt for a fraction of $1T in returns.
There are multiple ways to attack and ease the problem, its not an either/or approach. We could help people now, while tackling the long term issues.
I definitely support the development of a policy designed to attack the short term problem of untenable student debt (to the extent there is a problem... I think income based repayment is already a good policy targeting this), while also targeting the underlying causes of the student debt situation.
But this forgiveness policy was not that. It was a half-assed political gesture toward a campaign promise that the administration never seriously thought was going to solve any problems.
They picked their legislative priorities intentionally (pandemic recovery, infrastructure, and climate), and explicitly chose not to include this one.
I think there are a number of policies to consider, all the way from beefing up the current programs - like income based repayment, public service forgiveness, and grants - to regulatory price controls, to your idea of nationalizing essentially the current system, to rethinking the whole concept of what college is for and who should go.
There are a bunch of different things I might support depending on the details, but just "I dunno, do a one time blanket forgiveness and nothing else I guess?" really ain't it.
People don't need "breathing room" to care about a political issue. People care about issues that are affecting them. You clearly care about this issue because (from your comments today) it is clearly affecting you. You aren't going to suddenly care more about whether college administrators are or aren't incentivized to raise the costs of college after you've been freed from the clutches of your student debt and have more room to breathe. You'll move on to caring about the next thing that is affecting your life directly. That's not a criticism of you or anybody, it's just the natural reaction.
By my first paragraph, I assume you mean the parenthetical at the beginning? If so, that isn't what "gaslighting" means, and while I can see how you read it as talking down to you, it can't be talking down to anyone else, because it is solely responding to a particular style in a few comments you specifically have written.
Have you seen any efforts for tackling the rising cost? I haven't. They have spent a ton of energy on a one-off stunt and have done absolutely nothing to tackle real issue.
I agree. The universities can charge whatever they want, they get paid upfront, and when the student defaults on the loan they bear no consequence. The current system is deeply broken and in much need of reform. The scale of the problem is immense with tens of millions of American adults in student debt. You want to forgive student loans? Great. But at least fix the root problem.
All the leeches involved in higher education and lending will never put up with that though. So the rent-seeking and indentured servitude will continue.
I don't think there has been any support from Democrats.
1: https://www.nola.com/news/politics/gop-senators-introduce-bi...
- you gotta get it rocking first
- it might kill you if you do it wrong
I view this as a preliminary wobble.
I've also seen some people advocating for a general student loan payment strike, but that feels dicey. Everyone would need to do it, basically, and there's no way to prove solidarity, it'd be a legal mess IMO.
The 3rd, although more out there idea, has to do with setting up specialty bankruptcy support for student loans, allow them to be dismissed via proceedings, without it being reported negatively on a credit report.
I don't think there's any good alternatives to legislating it, if one wants to pursue relief here, except removing interest rates or something of that nature.
I myself am withholding my own opinions, other than to say I support student loan relief efforts. I'm just cataloging what I'm seeing in (anecdotally of course) large numbers online people talking about.
This was something with no political downside.
if they were interested in actually helping the disadvantaged, then there are plenty of workarounds, like forgiving the interest and fees on student loans rather than forgiving principal. this would be more impervious to the idea that the executive branch was trying to wholesale rewrite legislation, rather than tweaking it on the margin, which was part of the court's rationale in this case.
What a great victory!
That's how modern US politics works. They have given up on actually solving problems a long time ago. And people are stupid enough to buy into this nonsense.
That doesn't seem to be accurate: a new debt relief regulatory effort was initiated today, plus a repayment “on ramp” that limits the impact of ending the pause, plus a new income-based time-limited repayment program that will have low income borrowers paying $0. (The last of which was, IIRC, announced in principal around the same time as the forgiveness program, but not finalized in detail.)
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/secretary-cardona-sta...
Regulatory notice on the first part is here:
https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2023/n...
I will agree if we define the audience as “the masses”. If, on the other hand, we consider the subset of people who actually engage in critical thinking, things should be different.
This was a political stunt to gain votes. And, as you seem to suggest, it will still be used as yet another us-vs-them wedge tool used to divide and polarize the population.
What’s outrageous is that the cost of university education has been inflated precisely due to government involvement through guarantees.
Everyone should be horrified that 17 year olds are agreeing to loans in the $150K to $300K range (and more). And sometimes this is for degrees that will never lead to high income jobs. I saw this piece a while back on this 32 year old with some kind of a sociology degree that cost her $250K. She was making $60K a year, with no real prospects to do significantly better.
My guess is that a reasonable cost for a degree is in a range similar to the cost of cars. The idea being to be able to pay it off in 5 to 7 years at the average earning potential for the corresponding degree. That might mean $20K to $150K max. For example, a CS undergrad degree should probably be in the $20K to $50K range.
The only way that happens is in a market where government isn’t in the student loan business.
To be clear, that's a tiny minority which rarely impacts the outcomes of elections, and elections are what matter to politicians.
Personally, I think the cost of college should be capped, and in addition all forms of student loans should be outright banned, which should force the education industry to cut itself back to a reasonable amount of spending.