Like everything from guns, to healthcare, to elections, to supreme courts, this is a problem that’s already been cracked in other countries.
Some combination of
So what? Universal health care is unfair to some percentage of people who will end up with somewhat worse coverage than they have under the status quo. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.
If loan forgiveness increases overall fairness and doesn’t have egregious collateral damage to some people who are among the worse off, then we should consider doing it.
We need to stop catering to the mentality that if there’s nothing in it for me, then you shouldn’t get something either. Parable of the workers in the vineyard, bitches. Life is unfair, but we don’t have to maximize unfairness to soothe the butthurt.
Programs to help children shouldn’t be seen as unfair to the childless. Spending on public transportation shouldn’t be seen as unfair to car drivers. Programs to help farmers shouldn’t be seen as unfair to city dwellers.
It’s not unfair to people who paid their debt, it’s just variance that we didn’t get around to doing it before they did.
Some of those people even had to move back home with their parents, or God forbid, their parents had to give them the money to pay off their student loans.
Some of them even had to start their own businesses and get work their ass off to get their first client, which luckily happened to be their fathers company!
Horror!
i’m not saying don’t help, in fact I do think it’s a great thing, but instead of a flat amount I think it should be a percentage or a flat amount and a percentage. Say $5k and 50% instead of just 10k off for everyone
I agree with all of the rest of what you wrote, but I don’t think this measure is being framed as fiixing education in any way. And if it is, that’s dumb.
IMO it’s some combination of:
something that can be done quickly and without Congressional approval
plays particularly well with alot of Bernie/Warren (esp Warren) folks so Biden sees this as a good move to counteract alot of the other stuff that he will be doing that will upset those folks.
I don’t think they’re looking at it as some sort of comprehensive systemic solution to anything, frankly. It’s a “quick win” when they know they probably aren’t going to get many.
(And if you want to get 4D chess with it, MAYBE a credible threat to just unilaterally wipe out debt could be bargained away as part of more comprehensive education legislation, but I’ll believe that was the strat if/when I see it).
Preach
Sanders called for erasing all student debt. Warren has had a long-standing passion for student debt relief, but wanted to cap it at $50K and limit who could get it, and how much, based on income level. Both had their plans within the context of a much wider re-imagining of what secondary education should look like as part of an even bigger plan of re-making society along more egalitarian lines with lower discrepancies in wealth. There’s also some aspect of preventing a student loan bubble from having a deleterious effect on the economy similar to the housing bubble.
The Biden camp is throwing a bone to the Sanders-Warren wing of the party by picking one of their ideas that they find the least offensive and which polls better, but they are probably stripping it of any of the surrounding ideas in higher education that give it more weight.
I would make this argument but it sounds REALLY wrong coming from me. My goal wrt student loans is to pay as little as possible and see the max amount forgiven. I treat my student loan payment as a tax that is levied on me rather than a loan I’m trying to pay down. I’m not trying to pay it down, I’m trying to wait it out.
It comes across as ‘fuck you pay me’ when I say tough luck to the people who paid their shit back lol.
Because in 2010 or so, the US government decided instead of having private companies make student loans that the US government guarantees/stands behind, it would make the loans to students itself. No need to have a middle man lender profiting from it.
That means the President can now probably just issue an executive order saying students never have to pay that money back.
If the US government wants to payoff non-student loan private debts, it has to go get that money from Congress and pay off the lender with cash.
Eh. POC’s and people who grew up poor typically take out and carry way more student loans than richer people. Some deserving people will get it.
Where I think you’re getting hung up is that you think this takes away from or damages those other goals. It doesn’t. We should do every positive thing for people we can do in 2021. Mitch isn’t going to let us do much, so saying you don’t want to do the biggest positive thing you can do for the citizens of the country (and the only real economic stimulus you have available that doesn’t involve giving Mitch something probably terrible in return) because it’s happening in the wrong order… yeah that doesn’t really work.
I’m not the best place you could put that money, but I’m not the worst either. Most of the people who would get money out of this would be more deserving than myself. The people I’m most excited to see helped are the people I grew up around who went to for profit schools for certifications and now have 300-400 a month student loan payments that can’t be discharged through bankruptcy so that they can work IT in a call center for 22 an hour.
Plus you know who else has a LOT of student loan debt typically? Teachers.
If we lived in a vacuum, could do anything, and chose this that would be pretty fucked up. That’s not what’s happening though. The choices aren’t this or the right thing… the choice is this or nothing. That changes the entire argument.
I don’t disagree with any of this, and getting this thing I bet on happening in this particular way is actually a pretty effective damper on the good feelings I should get from winning a bet. This is not how I wanted this to happen. This was supposed to be the already college educated people’s cut of an education reform deal.
One thing to remember is that a LOT of the people who will be whining about how they paid off their student loans and didn’t get a bail out is that they will have paid those off while getting significant financial support from mommy and daddy.
How about we cancel the loans of those that have massive debt and didn’t get a degree or how about you fucking rich assholes give me money
I gotta be real with you man… I don’t think we’re ever getting off capitalism to the degree where we could ever stop encouraging people to go to college. My fondest dream for the lower classes is that they automatically get enough money every month to live… which will give them the most valuable freedom the upper class has. The freedom to fuck up and fail without ending up homeless.
The reality is that automation is coming for every single repetitive task humans do over the next 50 years. We already have a huge glut of low skilled general laborers. We need to start giving people as much time as it takes to learn a useful skill that they can use to help us fix a problem.
Even the solutions to the environment and climate change are going to have to be forced through a capitalist framework at this point. We can’t stop here and retool it’s way too goddamn dangerous. We just went backwards for four very important years. We do not have time, and we aren’t going to catch up in my lifetime. It’s about whatever can make stuff happen the fastest on the ground.
That’s a $200+ a ton carbon tax, strict quotas for fishing with fish farming to make up the difference, UBI, universal healthcare, and an economy with a floor. It’s paying people to plant acre after acre of trees to extract carbon from the air. It’s decoupling farmers from commodity crops and paying them to fix the land with better practices. All of that stuff is the same capitalism + government system we’ve been running all along.
Yeah it’s super fucked up, and it’s still causing massive externalities by the second… but we’re talking about dodging mad max. If you think the average person on earth has it worse in 2020 than they did in 1880 I’m not sure what to tell you but that you’re wrong. There’s some bad shit happening, but it’s quite a bit less frequent than it used to be and things are improving. So we need to dodge the climate change bullet because it can unwind the whole thing and quite possibly put our species on the road to extinction.
“This good policy should not happen because a better policy exists” is not a good argument.
It absolutely is the best we can do right now. I don’t think a single person on this board is arguing this is well-designed policy, or that it deals with the myriad systemic issues around higher education and debt. But given the current choice of “do the horribly inefficient but ultimately good thing” or “do nothing and complain that Republicans are mean,” the path is clear.
Cancel medical debt
Cancel student debt
Make college free
Kill the landlords and provide government housing
Free all the people in prison
Just fucking help people for once
That’s just not true. It is palatable because it is immediately achievable and its better than doing nothing. Almost everyone here supports a transformational policy agenda - your argument is pure strawmanning.
Also it will absolutely benefit tons of people who didn’t graduate college. And actual rich (and upper middle class) people never have student loans in the first place.