sj_zero on Nostr: I think I've figured out why I feel so much differently than a lot of people who are ...
I think I've figured out why I feel so much differently than a lot of people who are calling for student loan forgiveness. I saw one post the other day saying that student loan forgiveness would just be an advance on social security which future generations are unlikely to receive but pay into their entire lives.
One of the greatest tricks that the government has played on people is pretending that it has money. The only money it has is either money that it took from people, or money that it stole from future generations.
So where would billions of dollars for so-called student loan debt forgiveness come from? The majority of government income comes from the income tax, and much of the income tax is paid by the middle class. On the other hand, new spending is not paid for with taxes, it's paid for with debt.
We've already established that the governments today have no intention of ever paying down the debts they run up today, so what we're doing is the equivalent of running up all our credit cards and leaving them for our kids to pay off, which most people would consider evil.
The moral reasoning fails miserably. "The boomers stole from us by setting up social security which we pay into but are unlikely to get, so we should steal from future generations by getting our outstanding student loans paid for" -- it's sort of works as an appeal to inertia, but somebody doing you wrong really doesn't justify you doing wrong to somebody else. Moreover, some people point out that student debt is an investment in the future. The problem is, there's always going to be that particular investment in the future. Once this generation's education is complete, the next generation will also need to have their education paid for, and the next generation after that. Intending to run perpetual debts to pay for recurring payments just isn't fiscally prudent. We are in the verge of several sovereign financial crises exactly because people don't care about where the money is coming from. Part of the reason they don't care about where the money is coming from is that Congress is 11 billion years old and they're all going to be dead within 10 years.
It also fails miserably as a class argument because the only people who end up getting this supposed "advance" are people who made a number of very specific decisions. Rather than it being sort of reparations for a class containing generations that have been screwed over by poor decisions, it ends up becoming reparations for a very narrow class of people who have large amounts of unpaid student debt.
Among the supposed beneficiary class of millennials and gen z, you have:
-A large number of people who didn't go to college at all.
-a number of people who went to college without ever accruing student debts for example by working to pay for a state school tuition and living frugally at home.
-a number of people who went to college, I crude small debts, and didn't pay them off but the debts aren't meaningfully enough to really be relevant if they are paid off.
-a number of people who went to college, accrued small debts, and paid them off.
-a number of people who went to college, accrued larger debts, and paid them off.
So the major beneficiary of a student loan forgiveness program would be people who did go to college, likely went to an expensive enough College to justify large student loans, took out those student loans, and then didn't pay them back. What exactly privileges this particular group of people?
Now some people might think "well it's just the schools anyway", that's not really true. Student loans often pay for people's cars, they pay for people's rent, they pay for those big kegger parties you see, and there's even people who use some of their student loans to pay for fancy vacations to exotic locations.
Some people think that the problem is that tuitions are too high. There are options for college with relatively low tuition costs. In the us, you can attend a state school very little money. Up in canada, I attended a community college which I was able to pay my entire tuition using a less than minimum wage job I worked in a dying rust belt town. The thing is, the people who end up racking up giant debts often don't want to go to a state school, they want to go to a fancy School. In other words, these people who are trying to enter the upper classes by and taking courses above their station in life want regular working Joes and future generations to pay for their entry into the upper class. It's kind of messed up when you think about it.
If you have two students, going to the same school, and one of them used their student loans to help buy a car, and to go to parties, and buy nice food, and to go on fancy vacations, and the second student took the bus, studied instead of going to parties, ate inexpensive meals, and didn't go on any vacations, why should the first student ultimately have all those frivolous costs paid for, while the second student who sacrificed to make it through college sustainably does not?
So I have only one way I think would be acceptable to everyone in order to deal with the excess loans: every year private schools get billions of dollars of taxpayer funds, so just take that money and put it towards paying down a certain number of student loans, and stop giving any public money to private schools. Then, once all the student loans are paid back (of course this would imply there would be no further government subsidized student loans given because if they need to be forgiven then obviously people can't be trusted with them) we can take back that several billion dollars every year and reduce the total budget.
A lot of the private schools receiving public money are sitting on massive endowments, so for some reason for example Harvard gets something like 800 million dollars a year from the federal government. With their billions of dollars of endowments, they can run their own institution.
It's also key, my argument that if we do forgive student loans and we should end government funded student loans. At that point student loans can either be doled out by the Banks based on the likelihood of people working in certain majors successfully getting jobs and paying off the loans, or by having a parent co-sign for the loan and if the student fails to pay back their student loans then it will be the responsibility of their parent. Unlike the massive risk of putting all of society on the line for a few people's student debts, then it would leave the responsibility on the banks or the parents to ensure that loans are paid back.
One of the greatest tricks that the government has played on people is pretending that it has money. The only money it has is either money that it took from people, or money that it stole from future generations.
So where would billions of dollars for so-called student loan debt forgiveness come from? The majority of government income comes from the income tax, and much of the income tax is paid by the middle class. On the other hand, new spending is not paid for with taxes, it's paid for with debt.
We've already established that the governments today have no intention of ever paying down the debts they run up today, so what we're doing is the equivalent of running up all our credit cards and leaving them for our kids to pay off, which most people would consider evil.
The moral reasoning fails miserably. "The boomers stole from us by setting up social security which we pay into but are unlikely to get, so we should steal from future generations by getting our outstanding student loans paid for" -- it's sort of works as an appeal to inertia, but somebody doing you wrong really doesn't justify you doing wrong to somebody else. Moreover, some people point out that student debt is an investment in the future. The problem is, there's always going to be that particular investment in the future. Once this generation's education is complete, the next generation will also need to have their education paid for, and the next generation after that. Intending to run perpetual debts to pay for recurring payments just isn't fiscally prudent. We are in the verge of several sovereign financial crises exactly because people don't care about where the money is coming from. Part of the reason they don't care about where the money is coming from is that Congress is 11 billion years old and they're all going to be dead within 10 years.
It also fails miserably as a class argument because the only people who end up getting this supposed "advance" are people who made a number of very specific decisions. Rather than it being sort of reparations for a class containing generations that have been screwed over by poor decisions, it ends up becoming reparations for a very narrow class of people who have large amounts of unpaid student debt.
Among the supposed beneficiary class of millennials and gen z, you have:
-A large number of people who didn't go to college at all.
-a number of people who went to college without ever accruing student debts for example by working to pay for a state school tuition and living frugally at home.
-a number of people who went to college, I crude small debts, and didn't pay them off but the debts aren't meaningfully enough to really be relevant if they are paid off.
-a number of people who went to college, accrued small debts, and paid them off.
-a number of people who went to college, accrued larger debts, and paid them off.
So the major beneficiary of a student loan forgiveness program would be people who did go to college, likely went to an expensive enough College to justify large student loans, took out those student loans, and then didn't pay them back. What exactly privileges this particular group of people?
Now some people might think "well it's just the schools anyway", that's not really true. Student loans often pay for people's cars, they pay for people's rent, they pay for those big kegger parties you see, and there's even people who use some of their student loans to pay for fancy vacations to exotic locations.
Some people think that the problem is that tuitions are too high. There are options for college with relatively low tuition costs. In the us, you can attend a state school very little money. Up in canada, I attended a community college which I was able to pay my entire tuition using a less than minimum wage job I worked in a dying rust belt town. The thing is, the people who end up racking up giant debts often don't want to go to a state school, they want to go to a fancy School. In other words, these people who are trying to enter the upper classes by and taking courses above their station in life want regular working Joes and future generations to pay for their entry into the upper class. It's kind of messed up when you think about it.
If you have two students, going to the same school, and one of them used their student loans to help buy a car, and to go to parties, and buy nice food, and to go on fancy vacations, and the second student took the bus, studied instead of going to parties, ate inexpensive meals, and didn't go on any vacations, why should the first student ultimately have all those frivolous costs paid for, while the second student who sacrificed to make it through college sustainably does not?
So I have only one way I think would be acceptable to everyone in order to deal with the excess loans: every year private schools get billions of dollars of taxpayer funds, so just take that money and put it towards paying down a certain number of student loans, and stop giving any public money to private schools. Then, once all the student loans are paid back (of course this would imply there would be no further government subsidized student loans given because if they need to be forgiven then obviously people can't be trusted with them) we can take back that several billion dollars every year and reduce the total budget.
A lot of the private schools receiving public money are sitting on massive endowments, so for some reason for example Harvard gets something like 800 million dollars a year from the federal government. With their billions of dollars of endowments, they can run their own institution.
It's also key, my argument that if we do forgive student loans and we should end government funded student loans. At that point student loans can either be doled out by the Banks based on the likelihood of people working in certain majors successfully getting jobs and paying off the loans, or by having a parent co-sign for the loan and if the student fails to pay back their student loans then it will be the responsibility of their parent. Unlike the massive risk of putting all of society on the line for a few people's student debts, then it would leave the responsibility on the banks or the parents to ensure that loans are paid back.