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Comment by floor2 | Hacker News Reader

Reminder- there is no such thing as "cancelling student debt". The money was borrowed and spent, we're just moving the debt from the people who took it out and benefited from it, to other unrelated taxpayers who get stuck with the bill.

The student who made all the prudent decisions- lived on cheap groceries, while attending a low-cost state school to major in something employable like nursing or accounting now gets saddled with the debt from the student who got a basketweaving degree from a private liberal arts school while ordering UberEats every day.

The government should claw back the money from the universities that overcharged and failed to provide value (as they have done in a few extreme cases against for-profit scam colleges) but it's frustratingly unjust to see people who made frugal decisions be forced to pay for others who didn't.

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That's a naive view of how taxes work. It's a big pool that they divide up to fund a zillion different things. Deciding to fund college educations via student loan forgiveness doesn't necessarily mean a raise in tax rates, they can also accomplish it by shifting funding around. Taxes have been either stable or decreasing for decades[1].

It's also worth recognizing that education benefits _everyone_ in society, not only the person being educated.

[1] "Taxes" are hard to quantify, but here's a look at federal income taxes specifically through 2018. Notice that most columns trend to a decrease. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-averag...

> we're just moving the debt from the people who took it out and benefited from it, to other unrelated taxpayers who get stuck with the bill.

That's always the case, regardless of whether the debt is paid back later.

With government-sponsored loans, which are most student loans nowadays, the money is disbursed from the tax revenue and goes immediately to the universities and students to pay for tuition and other expenses. After the student leaves college, the loan is paid back slowly over many years. But note, crucially, that the identity of the taxpayers also changes over time. Taxpayers retire and/or die, new taxpayers enter the system, worker incomes change over time, indeed tax rates themselves change over time. It's never the case that individual taxpayer X is directly paid back for their tax money that went towards the disbursement in year YYYY.

Insomuch as all money is debt, you are right, but thinking of government debt as such is deeply misleading - without it, there would be no money in circulation.

That's not too say that the universities aren't a big part of the problem.

Do we all pay for usury laws, too? Or do we all, net of costs, benefit from those laws?

It's wild watching the Democratic party engage in brazen class warfare. "Did you go to work in a factory instead of going to college? Good news, you're paying for college anyway!"

Obviously, a levy on college endowments would be a better path, though still bad.

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