There are a lot of “educated elites” who are broke as fuck, if that’s how you’re defining it.
I get screwed on it pretty badly, my student debt was paid off about 10 years ago. I hope they do it and really screw me good, my generation deserves the help.
I mean, I can only speak for myself but I had a massive amount of student loans that could have really fucked up my life. Have been super fortunate, paid off all but a few thousand that probably won’t get forgiven under this plan and wouldn’t be very meaningful to me even if it somehow was (only not paying them off now because the interest rate is 2%).
Lecturing 18 year old versions of myself that turned out less fortunate instead of helping them is not what we need right now… at all… end of story.
Let’s cancel student debt.
But what about people without student debt who have medical debt?
Let’s cancel student debt and medical debt.
But what about people without student or medical debt, who have other debt?
Let’s cancel all the debt.
But how would the bankers(who have been bailed out multiple times for trillions of dollars) survive without the usury they’ve become dependent upon?
They can learn to code.
I mean it’s an imperfect thing that will help some people in need that we can do without the Senate. Period, the end.
It really doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.
Like I’m literally texting with a friend tonight who is 30, has a graduate degree, makes about $40-45K a year, lives in a 3br house with two roommates, has $12K in credit card debt she can’t get out from under, and owes God knows how much in student loans.
She’s paycheck to paycheck and she maxed her credit card out due to horrible spending habits. But now she’s just stuck and doesn’t make enough to get out from under it. I’ve been trying to coach her on budgeting and debt consolidation to lower the interest rate on her debt.
Just cancel the student loan debt. We’ll give free money to some people who don’t need it, oh well. My taxes bail out billionaires once every 10 years, might as well bail out some people worth low six figures and also some who actually need it. Sounds great to me.
Most of the people I know who have student loans aren’t elites by any means. It’s entirely underclass people who wanted a way out of the underclass… and only some of them found one. A lot of these people got degrees and still work at Starbucks etc.
Yeah it doesn’t help the absolute poorest very much, but it does help a specific group that is getting the ever loving shit kicked out of it.
Some of you are way way way too about ‘fairness’ instead of just doing what we can to help people. The opportunities to buy huge swathes of votes do not come often. This is one of those.
I think you’ve got a wildly inaccurate idea of who gets student loans. It’s people, who were never rich, who went to college. My student loan payment for my wife and I is more than half the size of my rent on a suburban 3br in a nice place… and you can’t get rid of it through bankruptcy.
The reason I’ve been avoiding paying it is because I’ve been watching it drown my peers for years and I know that a lot of them are never going to buy a house or have kids without real relief. It’s a situation where people went to college for the promises of 75k a year and instead got 40k a year… and a student loan debt that makes that roughly equivalent to where they started or worse.
Now have I personally been fortunate? Yes. I could pay off my student loan. At the same time do you really think 4 semesters of community college + 3.5 semesters of state college should have run me 75k? For a degree that I didn’t finish or even end up using in the end?
Student loans are capped at something that at least sounds kinda reasonable now.
https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans
If you are an undergraduate student, the maximum amount you can borrow each year in Direct Subsidized Loans and Direct Unsubsidized Loans ranges from $5,500 to $12,500 per year, depending on what year you are in school and your dependency status.
It’s the graduate students that get into the horror stories then need to work for the govt for a decade or whatever to get them forgiven.
That and other collateralized loans people take out.
Medical debt is scary because most of that is worth pennies on the dollar and you know the govt will just turn into a giant piggy bank to make asshole creditors whole. Student debt works because the creditor is the govt.
Govt should go around like John Oliver and secretly buy up everyone’s medical debt pretending to be another debt collector.
Great point about the debt collection industry. If they can buy the debt for pennies on the dollar than the debt can be cancelled for that price or less(preferably zero).
It’s why when I accidentally answer a phone call from whoever happens to be trying to collect my student debt, I make them offers of 2-5 cents on the dollar of the original principal. I keep reminding them that something is better than nothing. I only need them to answer yes one time.
Just declare national emergency over covid, executive order 1200 to every adult per month until covid infections under a certain number or x percentage of the population is vaccinated?
How will you pay for it actually applies here.
Respond fuck you? Start taking it from the military budget baby, I dunno, let’s sign the shit, take the first few payments from military budget and other horseshit and then start hammering that the checks you love so much will be stopping unless the republicans do something
Edit: oops yea one payment would be a ton of money but I stand by my plan, although I’m realizing this sounds like what trump tried to do a few months ago lol
matt yglesias? The guy who just defended the genocide of native Americans to promote his book? More reputable sources please
This is by far the best argument for a bad use of resources compared with alternatives, but idk, man.
(A) You have the cheat code. “Fuck you, stop me.” Billions in military money went to border bullshit under Trump. Just redirect whatever money is allocated to executive branch stuff to fight the war on poverty or whatever. See also wireless’s post.
(B) Those treating it like self-evidently good politics and progressive policy, I’d like to see some work. Somebody in the comments of that tweet says that 2/3 of the money will go to people in the top 40% of income. No idea whether that’s true (seems plausible), but if it is, doesn’t seem too progressive. Where does that money go now and could it be redirected by Biden to something better? Like, if you just kept taking student loan repayments and redistributed the money into monthly $100 checks to everybody, that would probably be politically better and certainly more progressive than cancelling the debts.
Forgiving student debt is a good thing to do but a horrible starting point. I support the former but not the latter.
Biden can’t cancel student debt because he has a pile of money he gets to disburse as he sees fit, he can do it for boring technical legal reasons. The choice is do something inefficient and unfair but good or do nothing.
This is what Trump tried to do, except like $400/WK to like 10% of the population and he failed hard.
It can be a messaging gimmick but it won’t actually work, the goal is to make the GOP sue. In this case they might just say “Please proceed, Mr. President.”
If it were me I’d abolish ICE by EO and liquidate the budget as one month of the CARES Act unemployment boost of $600/wk. I’d also do it so fast the checks were already in the mail before the lawsuit hit.
Then when my administration lost in court I’d say “Welp, too late, I’ll know next year I cant liquidate ICE. But right now I think I can liquidate CBP, so I actually already did that this morning. You guys wanna do a stimulus deal yet? Fuck around and find out motherfuckers.”