I agree completely with this assessment. I am also in a similar situation. Although I paid my loans off over a decade ago, my wife has more than 100k outstanding from her two advanced degrees. She knew the risk and longevity of taking out those loans.
It’s been touched upon in this thread, already, but forgiving loan debt is not the answer. (And, it sends the wrong message…) The answer is fixing higher education costs. Competition is already having an effect; the college where my wife was a professor prior to moving here closed two years after she left. It was overpriced for the value of the education. People are starting to become savvy to that.
The undergrad school where we both received our Bachelor’s degrees is a small liberal arts school with an insane tuition. The president announced at our last reunion that they were retrofitting the only decent, suite-layout dorm on campus to have gang showers. So, let me pay 30,000 bucks a year to shower with other people. That’ll have the kids breaking the foor down to get in… Oh, and they just closed the journalism department, among others. Did the prices drop? Whole lots of “nope.”
But think about the long term consequences of this approach–not only here but the dozens of other things which have suggested as something the President can do without Congress’ consent: in the long run this approach will result in Congress shutting down Presidential flexibility to deal with un-forseen problems.
The objection is that this is a $50k increase to net worth that is being selectively distributed only to people who made bad planning and financial decisions. People who didn’t take on unsustainable debt or have worked to pay it off aren’t just being resentful, they are being purposely excluded from a stimulus program for making better choices.
So: why not $50,000 to everybody, with the proviso that if you have student loan debt, you must pay it off first before using any of the rest of the money? Would the people now caterwauling about how “you shouldn’t care about other people getting a benefit” pivot to outrage over just getting exactly what they were previously asking for (50k in student debt relief) and not having the 50k in flexible spending?
Everyone with debt would get the same deal as in the debt-only proposal (up to $50k wiped out) and some would have money left over. But the stimulus would go to everyone
Because it has to be something that he can do without McConnell. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks this is optimal, but it is a case of don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
You don’t speak for me, thanks. I have paid tens of thousands of dollars while working public interest jobs, and, god willing and Joe Biden doesn’t fuck me somehow, which I assume he will, I should be having the remainder of my law school debt forgiven in the next year. I didn’t make any “unsustainable” choices or “bad plans.” I sacrificed financially so I could do work I care about in a world where nobody gives a fuck about anybody else, with the expectation that after ten years at least the remainder of the loans that are a necessary evil in this cartoonish economic hellscape of a country I was born in will be wiped away.
If the day after my loans are forgiven, everybody else gets their loans wiped out, I’ll do a fucking jig of delight at knowing that for once this country did something aggressive for working people. The problem with “standalone student debt forgiveness” isn’t the student loan forgiveness. It’s the fact that so many people just accept that it will be standalone, because there isn’t gonna be anything else.
“Caterwauling,” for Christ’s sake. An extremely simple moral observation is “caterwauling” in the current political climate of the United States. Mitch McConnell exists, so saying out loud “I think it’s good to help people out a little, when you can” is actually a degenerate statement.
[quote=“ZosterSandstorm, post:24, topic:925976, full:true”]
The objection is that this is a $50k increase to net worth that is being selectively distributed only to people who made bad planning and financial decisions. People who didn’t take on unsustainable debt or have worked to pay it off aren’t just being resentful, they are being purposely excluded from a stimulus program for making better choices.[/quote]
I don’t think it’s effective to put it in terms of bad or good choices. The reality is that even getting student loans in the first place is a privilege not available to many. So there’s an entire underclass of people without college degrees, who never had a realistic path to getting a degree in the first place, loan or not, who this stimulus ignores. As TriPolar says, it’s a stimulus to people who obtained the good paying jobs that these loans were intended to provide.
I’ll admit that this thread has been eye-opening, while I’d obviously heard of the economic stimulus angle I did not realize the extent to which proponents consider this nothing more than an back door coronavirus stimulus bill. I’ll admit I do not find these sorts of shenanigans appealing, especially given the long term expense and the lack of targeting for those who might actually need a stimulus right now. It really feels like trickle-down economics repackaged for the times.
I believe I’ve said middle class people, not rich people, although I’m sure posters will quibble with that. And I’m not really looking to argue there, obviously people with student loans are going to run the spectrum, and many are struggling. But cashiers at Dollar General are also struggling and I’m fairly certain most of them don’t have student loans.
It’s a pretty simple question – Are the people struggling the most from COVID related hardships the same people as the ones this debt relief will affect? And if not, then how do you propose the money get from one population to the other. Will it trickle?
Where did you get the idea that I proposed that student loan forgiveness is the only progressive action that should be taken to assist American workers, or that I think this would be uniquely targeted at those struggling the most? If you read my post to be suggesting that other relief shouldn’t be available to other people, then I apologize for misstating my position. I think other things should also be done. I thought this thread was about whether it’s good to forgive student loan debt.
To put how meaningless 12 percent is into perspective - the chance that eliminating a randomly chosen dollar of student debt will help an actually poor person is exactly the same as the chance that a randomly chosen black voter in 2020 voted for Donald Trump.
This is a giveaway to the well-off suburban voters that zeroes in on exactly the kind of “affluent culture warrior with a podcast” issue that everyone with a lick of sense told the Biden campaign to stop worrying about. People want to pretend that student debt relief is about impoverished ghetto residents who got scammed into going to ITT Tech. The numbers show that it really is about rewarding people who are already doing fine for wasting time at Sarah Lawrence and voting the right way, just as we always knew it was.
Due to coding errors, a previous blog post on this topic, published January 22, 2018, was retracted on May 1, 2019. We corrected those errors, ran the numbers again, and wrote the following new analysis. To read an explanation of how the errors occurred—and to see a detailed explanation of which numbers have changed—click here.
This post was corrected on May 20, 2019, to fix an error that was held over from the retracted post. The share of households with education debt who are in the lowest income quartile is 17 percent, not 14 percent, as originally reported.
Mhm. Mhm. Let’s give them a couple more cracks at it and maybe their charts will match their “analysis.”
Would you like to see some more studies, or do you feel overwhelmingly satisfied at the rigor with which this one was conducted?
Several people in this thread are arguing that nothing else CAN be done because of McConnell, so Biden should do this instead.
eta: This is why I put the word STANDALONE in the thread title. As part of a comprehensive education bill that addresses the root causes of high college costs, maybe. As part of a comprehensive COVID relief bill, I dunno, I guess it could be a part. Without either of those options being realistically achievable, this idea has little merit.
Since you’ve chosen to make this personal, I’d like to ask: did you plan all along to have a significant portion of your student loans forgiven? The tone of your statement is that you deserve to have your student loans forgiven because you became a “public interest” lawyer. That sounds a lot like asking someone else to pay for your personal decision.
I would like you to show any meaningful numbers that dispute the notion that student debt is overwhelmingly something that comfortable people who did something supremely idiotic (went to grad school) have to worry about. I’m not interested in playing “find some reason to dismiss each of hundreds of possible sources in turn” if you have no sources at all.
“Everyone should appreciate my sacrifice, but also the government should step in and make sure I don’t actually have to sacrifice anything.”
I hope he went to law school sometime more than 13 years ago when the market crashed and literally anyone you asked other than the people signing you up for student loans started screaming “DO NOT GO TO LAW SCHOOL” at you.
Is that what the tone of my statement was? I screwed it up then, sorry; I’m kind of distracted. It wasn’t supposed to be about me deserving to have my loans forgiven.
The tone was supposed to be that I deserve to take all the money of the rich by main force and distribute it to everyone else via a number of mechanisms, including, but not limited to, free education for everybody at Sarah Lawrence, where they will take mandatory courses in doing better at trying to insult people online.
OK I laughed, but in all seriousness, Biden doing whatever executive order to wipe out student loan debt doesn’t actually “take money from the rich.” There’s no attached mechanism to increase tax revenues from anyone, so this will be borne on the backs of future taxpayers of all stripes.