As a taxpayer who has never taken on loans of any kind, I find this all quite irritating. You take on debt, you pay the debt, don't turn my tax dollars into your negligence subsidy.
As a taxpayer who paid off all the debts they’ve incurred, I have no ill feelings towards those who can’t.
As a taxpayer who has always been able to pay for food, I have no ill feelings towards those on food stamps.
As a taxpayer who has been able to pay rent/mortgage, I have no ill feelings towards those in shelters.
Some people need help, it’s the responsibility of everyone else in society to aid those in need.
And it does create a massive moral hazard. I still have my student loans, because why would I pay them off? I'd rather wait for someone to get elected and decide to pay them off for me. (And you can bet that everyone considering taking loans is thinking the same thing, and factoring the chance of forgiveness into the expected cost of the loans.)
The US makes more money on the additional income tax of college educated people than it costs to educate them, many times over. It’s in our collective interest to put you (and anyone who wants to go) through college. I totally get the personal responsibility angle here, but the actual moral hazard here is that our country chooses not to cover education in the first place, when it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything else, and not educating people is worse for everyone (except perhaps a few CEO billionaires).
As a total side note, it’s also really interesting to me how strong our ingrained no-free-lunch and teach-someone-to-fish mores are, even when there’s lots of strong counter evidence. Poverty is extremely damaging and getting people out of poverty by giving them what they need is more important than forcing people to struggle through it and learn something. The (often) unspoken assumption that rides under that stuff is that people are poor because of bad choices and low work ethic, which is frequently completely and utterly wrong, and anyway extremely complicated because being poor forces people to make bad choices. Breaking the cycle allows people in need to live and breathe and make good choices.
I'd rather have a person following Christ with godly character. That plus not taking a bribe and having skill at leading are the Bible's standard for picking rulers. Americans filter them for these rich, elitist egomaniacs. Then, we have to pick the lesser evil on policy grounds until that stops. God works even through the wicked to bless us in some ways, though. That's the bright side.
We wanted God, ability to share Christ, the Word, and less sins that get nations destroyed. We got that. We saw both politicians and people on the news praise Jesus for the first time in a long tine. We also saw companies, like Meta, reversing censorship policies they used against Christians and conservarives. That affects me since I lost accounts in big communities just for mentioning Jesus or God's Word.
Progressives have been, at an institutional level, censoring the Gospel as hate speech or harassment, mocking God in media, promoting idolatry/universalism, pushing fornication, promoting child murder (abortion) even financially, pushing LGBT even in elementary school, and recently systematic discrimination against entire groups. They also defend Palestine over Israel when they have to pick a side. They also export sexual immorality to other countries via media and political deals which is exactly what Revelation warns about in Rev. 17:2.
The Old Testament shows these same traits... especially idolatry, child murder, and ditching Biblical marriage for perversion... being common threads for the destruction of nations. That Progressives promote these on a policy level, but mock and fight God's design and the Gospel, means we have a clear choice. One party, who is merely pandering, will at least let us share Christ, protect babies from murder, and reverse other damaging trends. Those trends are happening now but didn't under Biden/Harris or Obama.
Personally I worry about the fact that Republican fiscal policy is actively harmful to supporting the lives of the children who are being saved by the abortion ban. Why are we cherry picking only the pre-birth side of a pro life agenda? Why aren’t they pro- the already born living? Their fiscal policies are actively and intentionally harmful to the poor and actively against sharing costs and establishing social safety nets. To me it feels extremely un-Christ-like to spread so much hate and division and pretend to care about Christians.
I’m not sure we’re going to reach one another constructively, but I remain intensely curious how and why Republicans are so successful at this when they are certainly working against the interests of pious people like you. It’s very interesting that democrats are being successfully vilified and painted as pure evil when their fiscal policy is traditionally firmly on the side of loving thy neighbor in the way God meant it when speaking to Moses, while conservative policy is firmly on the side of stripping the vineyard bare and leaving nothing for the sojourner, of keeping the hired workers wages all night, of not caring for one another. Their policies are designed to benefit the ultra rich at the expense of the poor, and this is a damaging trend that is accelerating.
Most people taking out student loans are still teenagers. Does anyone really expect a teenager to make good financial decisions? Also, most people can't get a solid job without going to college, so they're forced to take out loans.
That "negligence subsidy" is really helping people who were put in an unfair situation by colleges and banks.
No mortgage? Bravo
Try again. I've inherited relatively little.
Most people inherit nothing. Actually, most people end up spending money taking care of their parents.
though it appears most people will get something
For public schools, you have school districts. For infrastructure you have utility districts. For libraries and parks and amenities, you have municipal government.
For student loans, though, the individual students are the ones making the decisions. The taxpayer is subsidizing students pursuing highly employable careers like engineering or medical science, but is equally subsidizing students pursuing unemployable degrees like cultural studies or literature.
And to be clear, these areas do have value, but it also seems reasonable for taxpayers to call out the fact that these are terrible ROI investments, money-wise.
Young people make mistakes. It does not benefit society to make those mistakes ruin their lives.
The people requiring us to go to college usually wouodn't pay for it. The colleges got more expensive. So, if it's required or really helps, it was rational to take on college loans to get a Bachelor's in good specializations. Many of us did IT or Business. (I did both.)
Once out of college, people looking for jobs found that most companies woukdnt hire them for lack of experience. If they did, they would pay them a little above minimum wage. That would either not cover the bills or barely cover them. The minimums on the loans were high, too.
At this point, people with Business degrees are working in grocery stores making nothing but loaded with debt. They realize they were screwed by the whole system in what amounted to a long-term con about the ROI of a college degree. They feel that, if they got nothing for it, they shouldn't have to repay it at all or at least get a break on payments. They're paying less on the debts to experience some of the quality of life they were promised if they spent 4 years on a degree.
That's what happened to a large number of hard-working people whose expensive degrees got them nothing but poverty and debt. They're barely scraping by now. They wish they ignored all the advice in school and never got one. Or maybe got the cheapest one they could find instead of really investing into a worthless asset.
And the best part is we all get to read descriptions of us online that we were just irresponsible, lazy idiots. No mention of years of being forced by schools and businesses to get this debt to have a decent job. No mention that they often don't pay people with degrees anything. Something seems wrong about that.
And now, 2/3 of them are not even bothering to pay the loans. Good luck getting an apartment, house, car, or a top job with bad credit.