I survived making minimum wage.* Now that I make more money, why should I support giving a handout to minimum wage earners today? Nobody was giving me $15 an hour to work at McDonalds, why should anyone else get it?
*Total lie for rhetorical purposes. I’ve never worked a minimum wage job in my life.
How about "I made the necessary sacrifices – attending a cheaper college, stretching college to 6/8 years, holding down job(s) while attending school, etc – to finish college with minimal debt, why should I now have to pay for those unwilling to make those sacrifices.
Thanks a lot.
Yup. Better “dull and uninspiring” than “interesting” (in the Chinese curse sense) and inspiring terror.
I got by on $7 on hour by buying cheaper coffee, cooking at home, and not spending on non-essentials like cable TV and going out to movies. Why should I now have to pay for those unwilling to make do with the same wage I lived on?
I maintained a lifestyle I could afford on the $6 an hour I made at McDonalds. Why do I now have to pay the debts of those who worked with me at McDonalds and spent like they were earning $15 an hour.
I’ve worked for less than minimum wage and I was grateful for the opportunity.
The funny thing is, when I said it, I was being ironic.
Are you really arguing that we should cancel all the debts for those unwilling to live within their means?
Do you really think that only lazy deadbeats are getting crushed by student loans?
I think this is a whole nother thread and we’ve hijacked this one long enough. Back to my original point, which is simply that imo canceling student debt is not the best move if Democrats want to win in 2022.
Fools are as well. Look, we as a society have allowed high school diploma to no longer signal sufficient economic value for an economy that is globalized and has access to billions of cheap laborers yet maintains a foolish wage floor. Then, by guaranteeing student loans we have predictably increased the overall cost of college. Additionally, parents and educators have failed to provide proper guidance to adolescents in how to transition into responsible adulthood which included being able to analyze the ROI of things such as tertiary education.
There is no reason why a sufficiently rigorous high school education with objective standards for achievement and behavior can’t provide one with enough education to be economically viable in the US economy. The fact that it doesn’t is in large part due to the desire to not hurt feelings and that is going to be huge negative in the global competition. You think China is going to care about hurting sub group A’s or sub group B’s feelings as they ascend to the #1 power on the globe? No.
We can no longer coast on our post WWII overwhelming dominance of the globe and that means we need to work on changing the structure of incentives in our society to get the outcome we want. Appealing to so-called wouldn’t it be oh-so compassionatism isn’t going to work the way you think it will and it never has. Never. Never. People respond to incentives and that’s just the way it is.
It’s also horribly lacking in nuance. Ideally, anyone considering taking out any kind of loan at all will factor in the likelihood of their ability to repay it. That goes for people with outstanding student loans as well as for people who have already paid theirs off, and it necessarily involves making some assumptions about the future. Well, to a significant degree, those assumptions have been proving themselves invalid lately, and the conditions that led to their invalidation have not been the fault of the borrowers.
But yeah, the shitty attitude thing is arguably more immediate.
Yeah. There are two drastically different responses to hardship:
It’s pretty telling which response a person has.
Do most people who have repaid their student loans feel that they have “suffered”?
That seems to be the argument that those who have repaid them and don’t want others to get them repaid.
I’m still paying mine, was quite the ordeal when I was barely making MW, paying them made it hard to afford to eat. Now that I’m doing much better, I wouldn’t say that paying them makes me suffer, but I do miss that few hundred every month.
OTOH, from a macroeconomic perspective, an argument for paying off student loans is that it should stimulate the economy, as suddenly all these young people have more discretionary money to purchase with. Right now, consumer demand is not really the problem, so it may actually not be a good thing for the economy at the moment.
But, as @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness says, and I’ve said on these boards as well, there are two ways to deal with overcoming a hardship. The first is to remove the barriers, so that others do not have to overcome that hardship. The second is to reinforce them, so that all others will. I think that our civilization progresses better as hardships are removed, as there will always be hardships left over for anyone who wants one.
Getting a degree in a useful field is hard enough already just from a purely academic standpoint. Putting up fiscal barriers and disincentives does no one any good.
Is it “fair” to people who paid their way through college to now make options available that are free? If not, then we can never progress, as it’s not fair to those who will not benefit from the progress. If so, then why it would it be fair to give something to one person for free while someone else is still paying off their loans for it?
Personally, I’m not for just straight up cancelling debt, even though I would personally benefit. I think that in the first place, there should be a path for anyone to get a 4 year degree or more with no out of pocket cost, and one that does not involve having to work while doing so. Maybe it’s not the flashiest campus and the most famous lecturers, but it is sufficient to get that piece of paper that says that you learned some stuff that is relevant to your potential employer. You want to go to a fancier school, then pay or get scholarships.
Now, as to what I would do about student loans:
As it is, student debt is relatively easy to defer. If don’t make much, then you don’t pay much either. I would simply add in a time limit to the loans as well. So, if you pay your deferred payments for say 10 years, the debt gets wiped. I would also give another option that allows one to immediately wipe the debt, but, that debt is then considered to be taxable income over the next 10 years.
And then to pay for it, you have a degree tax. If a business requires a particular degree in order to get in the door, then they should pay a surcharge for expecting society to produce that educated worker for their use. Make them pay for the provided resource that allows them to profit.
Anyway anyway, back to the original point that started this whole tangent…
As @Miller already said, this is something that can be done with executive order. Raising MW and lowering drug prices is something that congress would have to do. And have you noticed anything about our congress lately? It’s not really getting much done that boost everyday people’s lives and show positive improvement. If congress can’t show that the Democrats will do anything to help people out, then at least the president can.
I think we have very different definitions of hardship. To me, hardship is struggling for basics such as food & shelter. I fail to see how paying off loans that enabled me to get a great education, do interesting work, and make more money down the road can be classified as ‘suffering’.
Excellent post; thank you for it.
I think this bit is a key to the discussion, tho, because the first question does not, IMO, frame things properly.
A proposal to erase all current student loan debt, to allow people to be free from their obligations, is what we’re talking about.
A proposal to henceforth offer different terms for student loans, or even changing them from a loan to a grant, etc. would be a much different thing and IMO would engender much less resistance.
I am not sure that anyone ( regardless of party ) whom I have ever interacted with via the school where my sons were educated, would ever see you as “reasonable”. Everyone ( myself included ) might see you as insufferable, but maybe that is only because we had children… and because you had “issues”.
That whole post was well said.
The above reminds me of one of my well-worn refrains: look at the metrics of the advanced nations – our ‘competition’ – and see what those who are doing quantitatively better than the US are doing.
On this issue, among so many others, it’s instructive.
And remember: it’s the sum total (I don’t have the multiple regression handy to determine the respective contribution of each element) of many things that these countries do that make so many of their ‘scores’ better.
It’s a different way of doing business, writ large.
The point is: it works for them (better than our way works for us).
[But a segment of our society would have to shove that “exceptionalism” nonsense, and their leaders would probably have to stop dry humping the flag on camera]
I’m often reminded of the saying, “If you suffered in life and want other people to suffer as you did because “you turned out fine,” you did not, in fact, turn out fine.”
I think it’s relevant here.
And to intentionally be hyperbolic: any of the civil rights strides that have been made since the founding of this (US) nation could have been strongly resisted by people who took a similarly morally questionable position.
Think about it: abolition/emancipation, women’s suffrage, Civil Rights Act, marriage equality, etc., etc.
I’m with @Miller on this one: it’s a weak argument that only seems to weaken further with time.
But there are ways to soften the blow on the student loan issue, including income-adjusted tax deductibility (as part or all of the solution) for existing student loan debt.