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Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Is it really a mistake to take your government at their word? When an authority figure lies, far more culpability lies on the authority figure than the subordinate. In this case, it wasn't even a lie, it was active obstruction by politically-motivated wall-people of the Supreme Court.

If my boss says "You can work from home today", and I let my wife borrow the car, then the CEO says "You actually have to come into the office today or you're fired", who made a mistake? Maybe I could have, potentially maybe, known that my boss could be overruled, but it's hardly my fault. My boss has more culpability, because as someone who's job it is to relay information to me and make appropriate decisions based on their directives, they have an obligation to not fuck me over. But mostly it's the CEO's fault for being a dick.

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Is it really a mistake to take your government at their word? Probably, yes. In this case, the actors likely knew they did not have the authority to unilaterally pursue this policy in a durable manner. It was misleading from the get.

But did the average person who was told their debt was going to be forgiven know that? I'm okay with arguing about the details of how much blame to place on the administration versus the regressives in the court, but dismissing out of hand the human suffering caused by the reversal by going "they should have known better" is patently evil.

> But did the average person who was told their debt was going to be forgiven know that?

How does that matter to the question if it was a mistake?

It's still a mistake to trust the wrong people, even if you didn't know better at the time. This seems like a good time to learn the lesson "don't count your chickens before they've hatched (even if someone tells you to)."

> ...how much blame to place on the administration versus the regressives in the court, but dismissing out of hand the human suffering caused by the reversal by going "they should have known better" is patently evil.

"Regressives"? "Human suffering"? "Patently evil"? That's, frankly, a completely immature and utterly ridiculous position to take on this. If someone robbed a bank and gifted you money from the robbery, would you call the cops "evil" for taking the money back, because of all the "suffering" it would cause you?

I get it, you really wanted student loans to be forgiven, but that doesn't make the people who oppose what you want "evil" or even bad.

While I'm totally for the debt forgiveness, anyone who saw that this was going to the Supreme Court should have planned for it to be overturned (i.e. plan for the worst, hope for the best), especially considering the judges known conservative leanings.

This has been known to be going to the Supreme Court since around January, I think, so people should have had about 8 months to prepare to start paying back their loans, and not just the two months since this judgement was passed.

Personally, while I did hold off on making payments for about eight months at the start of Covid, I resumed making payments during the pandemic and actually managed to pay off my student loans completely back in November of last year (although I was getting pretty close to paying them off anyway).

Other people could have started making small payments during this team, taken advantage of the zero interest to start making a larger dent in their payments, and increased slightly how much they were paying each month to ease the transition to full payments again when this kicks off again.

I'm aware that's easier said than done, though. My wife has student loans she hasn't made full payments on this entire time (I think she's been making half payments), so we're going to have a slightly rough transition also, but at least we no longer have the $400/month payments I was making on mine before the pandemic.

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