this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
1208 points (96.8% liked)
Important Images
1656 readers
1 users here now
Look at these
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They aren’t doing anything to fix the underlying issues with the loans. So they forgive stuff, cool, how about all the loans they are continuing to issues? Are we going to have a big forgiveness event every few years when it’s politically convenient to win some votes?
If they want to actually fix the problems, I’m all for it, but they aren’t doing that. Their trying to bail out a boat that’s still leaking, when they cause the leak and have the power to patch it. It makes no logical sense.
The underlying issue is that education is expensive and it should be free. I don't understand American's obsession with keeping the public stupid but I'm sure you'll defend it.
Education doesn’t have to be as expensive as it is, even if it isn’t free. These people give college students blank checks, because the loans are backed by the government. Knowing that the kids have an unlimited supply of debt, the universities have become bloated and wasteful, letting administrators get rich on the backs of these kids.
Even if it’s made free, the out of control spending of these universities has to be reined in, as it will lead to taxpayers paying the inflated costs, but just not being able to see it so clearly.
Right and that's a great thought, we should do that; just like we should nationalize healthcare and immediately eliminate private health insurers and PBMs and all the other dozen middle men that make health care more than 10 times as expensive in the US than abroad. But massive sweeping reforms are massively unpopular amongst the wealthy, and the wealthy through use of undemocratic systems of control like the Senate and Electoral college can wield supermajority control of the government despite only having support of 20% of the people -- so it's not happening until wider reform happens, and during that time tens of millions of people are being crushed by a trolly.
To really push this metaphor it's 'do we invent planes so people can stop being tied to train tracks, or do we stop the trolley.'
It's not an either or situation, it's not a zero sum game, we can do both, but we absolutely should do one regardless of our choice to do the other.
My issues with it is we're going to have to keep doing it every other year as new debt gets created. Does it happen on a schedule or do we do a little forgiveness here, then wait until people are in crushing pain again in 5-10 years and try to do it again... how many massive student loan forgiveness programs can we do before we fix the actual problem.
Was this even a problem created by the wealthy? This seems like a monkey paw situation, where the government was like, "we want everyone to be able to get a degree. We'll back the loan so no one gets rejected... tell us how great we are." Then time passes and people get $80k loans to get degrees in shit that will never get them a job which will allow them to pay it back. Now the government is like, "we'll forgive the loans... maybe.... someday.... if we can... just vote for us again... we promise we'll totally do it next year...." They tried something, it didn't work, undo it. This shouldn't be hard. Like applying the scientific method to government.
Why would people continue to get student loans if school was free?
What? That's not what's happening. They are doing student loan forgiveness, for only some of the current loans. Nothing is become free under the current plan. People are still going to take out massive loans, they are still going to go into massive debt, and they will still be crippled. Which is why this is a stupid plan.
If school is free, they wouldn't need to take out loans, correct. However, we'd still want to get the costs under control so it's not the government writing a blank check to the colleges, funded by tax dollars, instead of students writing blank checks with debt dollars. The current government can't afford to make this free, the budget is upside down as it is... there is a $1.5T deficit for 2023. Somehow we're going to pay for college too? The deficit is out of control; we can't just say the government is going to pay for all this new stuff when they can't even afford the current stuff. I'm all for providing stuff like healthcare and college, but we have to get the house in order first. Doing it when things are in their current state would be a disaster.