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What Warren and Bernie Sanders Supporters Are Worried About: Student Loan Repayment
Via Bored Panda:
Comments are worth reading as well. Here is one, regarding why a person can get $200K of student loans, but not even $20K in business loans:
Published in GeneralKevin Burgess
because the business loan could be forgiven, and written off as a loss. Student Loans cannot. Even though they actually come from the U.S. government, they’re handled by third parties, who count on it as a never ending income stream for the economic life of the student. Even in death it’s not cancelled.
It’s a great racket that has been created through Federal intervention. If the Federal Government would subsidize writing bad poetry, I might be a rich man.
What a dope I was to pay cash for my kids education. Should have let them pile on the loans then have Uncle Bernie or Fauxcahontas just cancel them out .
That is not going to happen.
One can’t help but wonder if this is a sign that Democrats have internal polling data that suggests that they are losing their support among people under 30.
I can’t imagine that. But perhaps, I suppose…
If a Democrat gets in office and pushes a student loan forgiveness program through the system, I want reparations for paying off my daughter’s student loans . . .
Two point that bother me about federalizing the debt of students:
Point number 2 is the one that frustrates me. Conservatives don’t know how to argue a point of view. Much like the “rich people pay a smaller percentage income tax than poor people do” argument, we are choosing to debate on hostile turf. In the tax argument we completely ignore the argument that the rich person pays 10, 20, 30 times the gross amount of taxes as other people. We instead equate all dollar amounts as equal and let ourselves get boxed into the percentage argument. In this case we argue on the size of debt problem and not the how-the-heck-did-this-get-so-broken arguement.
For all the whining about social justice, the Left really wants to have the less well off bailout the more well off.
It’s no more immoral than paying all your workers the same amount after they worked vastly different shifts (see Jesus’ parable of the master and day workers). Of course, it isn’t the “master’s” money. Its ALL taxpayer’s money… so wherever the political wind blows, that’s where it goes.
I’d support loan forgiveness IF it comes packaged with some wicked serious education reforms AND an end to whatever it is keeping employers from their own internal assessments for job readiness. (Which effectively means never)
Whether the loans are forgiven or not, people are going to feel this… unless, of course, they keep inflating and importing immigrants so the old people can sell off their assets for more than they are actually worth. Which leaves young people having to deal with the utter collapse of social cohesion – but who cares? The only people who matter will be dead already. Socialized health care does that to old people.
First, sell off a bunch of those ritzy excessive projects the campuses built like crazy for the inflated student populations (in some cases). They might be reused as housing to bring down rents Democrats also complain of, or mixed use developments with offices, eating joints etc. to realize their “walkable communities” or experiments in “sustainable development.”
If just one of these millenials would vilify higher education for its ridiculous prices, I would have a lot more sympathy that they were sold a bill of goods. If just one of them asked high schools to be more rigorous and return to offering classes that would prepare them for a career without having to go to college, I would be a lot more sympathetic that they were sold a bill of goods.
I feel for them being in the clutches of the moneylenders. I really do. But they are starting to attack the Baby Boomers and blame capitalism for their problems without confronting the fact that it is the left who has been pushing higher education for all, runs aforesaid institutions, and has controlled K-12 education for the past few decades rendering it all but useless.
In the Netherlands, in the late 1970’s, the government financed programs to assist artists and poets to live their dreams. I once watched a documentary about that program and painters, and must confess never have I seen such ugly uninspired art.
However, a huge problem is that currently some 42.5 million people from all political persuasions are involved in the 1.5 trillion dollar student loan fiasco. This is a huge voting block of people. The conservatives need to have some answers for the mess, as 42.5 million people is one heck of a voting block.
Recently Trump showed he is thinking about this mess. About two months ago, he wisely instituted a policy by which no Armed Services veteran, who has been honorably discharged and now has full disability due to injuries that came about during their service, needs to ever think about their debt to Student Loan sharks. That portion of student loan debt is now forgiven.
The student loan programs allow you to defer your debt, due to illness, but penalties and interest accrue. About the only way out of the debt for most people via complete forgiveness of the debt, is if they can clearly demonstrate a medical diagnosis of schizophrenia at the time the loan agreements were signed.
Being hooked up to life support after a car accident for six months will not allow an out. Not even if you have become permanently disabled and nowhere near able to garner the salary your college training once allowed you to have.
I get where you are coming from, I really do.
When I was in my mid-forties and realized that my chemical sensitivities did not allow me to work in offices, I still had the ability to work as a home health aide. Many people told me: “Borrow the money and go back to school and get your nursing degree.” But the idea of going into debt to pay for college hampered me from doing that. If I had been in my thirties, that might have been the route to go. But I wanted to be able to retire debt free. Health issues also existed that made me wonder if I;d be working when in my 50’s.
I knew others in their forties who went back to school. Some made it and had the ability to work at a job they loved, making a nice amount of money and then paying off the loans. Others got totally screwed over by the Economic Collapse of 2008, with their state or county agency jobs disappearing when the economy no longer existed.
Here in Calif that collapse was brutal. Some people had their student debt amounts increase by 300% due to not paying during 2009 to 2011, and dealing with penalties and interest.
@mountie
Great graph by the way.
Anyway, I relate to those who say “If we could bail out the banking crowd in 2008 to 2011, why can’t we bail out the people suffering from the student loan crisis?” It was very telling to read the comments on the site at the bored panda site and realize how people have faithfully paid off their loan for years, only to have as a result of all those payments a total balance equivalent to the amount they owed the day they graduated from school.
I agree, however reluctantly. I’m afraid, however, that it will only lead to more people over stretching themselves like they did with the sub prime lending for homes and thinking that if enough people do it, then they will have to have their debt forgiven. People who grew up during the depression were scared senseless out of taking on debt. It was a hard lesson, but one that carried through for several generations.
On the other hand, I think intervening with the money lenders to ensure more transparency, negotiate reasonable compromises for those who are struggling but want to do the right thing, and encouraging creative solutions that hold the colleges and universities accountable for their part in this mess, would go a long way.
BTW, my electricity will be turned off here in Calif in just a few hours. (3Pm Pac Time, Oct 26th.) I am not at all deliberately ignoring this topic and the fine comments of my fellow members. However I may not return until Tuesday.
Please continue to bring your wisdom, and insights aboard the topic. My household and community are at this time quite safe from the Kincaide fire raging north of Santa Rosa. But I do ask fellow members to remember in their prayers everyone now struggling to load up their cars for evacuations, or existing on their last thin slice of hope that their homes and communities may be spared any devastation in these catastrophic fires. As well as of course, for those hundreds or thousands who have already lost everything.
Last but not least, please pray for the unrelenting, untiring, devoted and brave firefighters, police and other first responders.
Yes, right after I get my money back for paying off my student loan.
Now, there are two lines of attack that may flip the issue to our favor:
You are all in my prayers. Stay safe.
Let’s confiscate 50% of the endowments of all public and private universities in the country and use the proceeds for debt forgiveness.
As a conservative who was born at the very beginning of the millennial or at the very end of gen x depending on what chart you use I guess I should chime in here with that age group’s perspective. I should start out with the caveat that I don’t advocate for, nor think it’s a good idea to, forgive student loans. I say this even when it would benefit me a great deal. What I hope to inject here is perspective from someone in that age group, period.
In the mid-2000’s (and now, frankly), no large company with a good salary and benefits is going to consider you for employment without a degree. That’s just a fact. Yes, there were/are exceptions to the rule. No, they were/are not plentiful. For the type of job I wanted I needed a four year degree in a bachelor of science in some kind of computer field. What that meant, ultimately, was nearly seventy grand in tuition and fees, in private loans, and govt loans subsidized and unsubsidized.
I want to state here that I did, in fact, try to do both full time work and full time school. It failed. I ruined my GPA in a year. Instead I took a longer path that included moving for jobs and losing credits, community colleges, and ultimately did online school for a four year degree at one of the few university’s that offered a four year degree in network security at the time. My parents were in no position to help financially. My wife (we married young) also had student loans for engineering. Combined we owed more than $100,000 in no nonsense degrees that should have yielded large salaries (we were told) starting out. They didn’t. While we were paid decently, you had to move to areas where the cost of living was so high that it negated the increase in pay. We did not live extravagantly. We do well now, but still have a significant amount every month going towards tuition that is about the same amount that we paid in rent while in college.
I don’t say this to look for sympathy. However, my wife and I are both conservative. We knew the costs, we took them anyway because at the time it really was the only way to get to higher paying jobs. Consider what non-conservatives are thinking. cont…
I disagree. The workers in Jesus’ parable all got paid what they agreed to in exchange for the work they agreed to do. Nothing was unfairly “taken” from the workers who started at the beginning of the day to pay the workers who started near the end of the day. That is not immoral.
A taxpayer funded loan repayment forces people (taxpayers) who never agreed to participate in a student loan program to pay from their pockets people who decided after the fact that they don’t want to fulfill the commitments they made. The people who would have their student loans repaid by the taxpayers are taking directly from someone else’s hard work. That is immoral.
cont…
They’re thinking they got screwed. Millennial’s in particular aren’t the “got a degree in feminist underwater basket weaving and can’t get a job with it” crowd. They are in their 30’s, “studies” degrees were in their infancy when they were in college, you’re looking for gen z people. What they did get was a regular degree they were told to get at about four times the adjusted for inflation cost. There were no other options for degrees. Yes, they could have gone to trade schools. However, everyone, Conservative and Liberal alike were telling them that those jobs weren’t coming back, that they needed to prepare for information age jobs. They did, and it cost them a fortune.
Again, I’m not saying this because I think my loans should be forgiven. I took them out, I will pay them. However, for those of previous generations I think it would be wise to look at political reality. Those in the Millennial generation were sold a bill of goods by those older than them who were advising them. Their degrees resulted in jobs that barely paid the minimums along with other expenses when they got out of college. The financial crisis didn’t help. I say this from experience because we barely paid our bills after leaving college and that was after my wife got a job with a global company and moving across the country to take it. The conservatives in that generation will begrudgingly accept that reality and do what they can. However, telling non-conservatives in that generation to “suck it up,” and “you knew it when you signed,”, and “Well I paid mine off,” is not going to win you any votes or friends. I’ll agree with you that it’s true, and I’m not going to pretend that previous generations did it without sacrifices, but the stats don’t lie. The increase in the cost of a degree for those of that generation is insane, and there was little else they could do but choose between making garbage wages for an unpredictable period of time or taking the risk they would pick the right emerging market degree and get a salary that would compensate for the cost. Most of them didn’t win that bet. That is the political reality.
I’m a conservative, I’m willing to take the consequences of my choices even though the options were limited, even if I don’t like them. This is not going to be true for a large number of my peers who aren’t conservative. That’s likely a big reason why the siren song of AOC and Sanders draws a large following. Food for thought.
That is the important point to keep making.
I wouldn’t support it. If the banks that made the loans want to forgive them, they can do that without my support. If the universities want to contribute to a loan forgiveness fund, they can do that without my support. But if somebody does have the means to forgive the loans, I would recommend prioritizing those students who didn’t go to work for the deep state or the non-profit sector.
How about a forgiveness program that is paid for by reductions in deep state employment and contracting?
Exactly. The Universities should bear responsibility too. They gladly took money to offer a product that would not provide income to pay off the loan.
There are lots of big blocks of voters. The principle should be that honest, hard-working tax payers should not have to pay for the mistakes of others. If you want to punish banks, do it. Start be removing interest on excessive reserves and then boost the reserve requirements. But it is a moral hazard to pay for a product that some adult chose to borrow money to buy, which they can not afford to pay for. There is a lot of credit card debt, should tax payers have to pick that up too? That is a bigger block of voters.
Dave of Barsham makes important points that I think should be listened to. We all have various forms of allegiance–on Ricochet, mostly political; in our lives, to our families; for many here, their religion. There’s also an intangible affiliation based on generational experience, and it’s not as neatly sorted as pundits think, and much of the time what we think. Every baby boomer didn’t burn their draft cards and run off to Canada. Most X-ers were not cocaine-sniffing Wall Streeters. And believe it or not, much if not most of what you read about Millennials is garbage generalization too.
“My crowd” thought differently than our parents did largely because our life experience was different. By the time we were adults, the cities were bottoming out, Fifties dream cars were replaced by Seventies rust buckets, and the postwar boom was over. We survived, and later in life some of us did exceptionally well. But our emotional thermostats, so to speak, were set (roughly) in our twenties, in the first ten years of our careers. We laughed at the strangely smug financial services commercials that were everywhere in the ’90s. “These kids think Wall Street is full of geniuses”. Why not? In their time that was their experience.
Dave of Barsham says many times that he accepts the basic premises of the loans, will pay them, and is a thorough-going conservative. But “his crowd” is just not ever going to trust the high command of the US economy the way my parents did.
Congress could do a lot of good on this issue through some relatively simple modifications of the bankruptcy code. The bankruptcy code is a well established and well functioning system, already designed to deal with a lot of these same concerns; at least with respect to other debts. It sits there as a great tool for this problem that everyone seems to forget about.
As most people know, unlike the vast majority of debts, student loans are completely non-dischargeable. You wouldn’t have to suddenly reverse that out of the blue. It would be very easy to revise the bankruptcy code to make them dischargeable after the debtor completes a Chapter 13 plan that pays a certain amount to them. This imposes a definite cost on the debtor which would satisfy those, who sacrificed to pay them off, who would feel slighted by a total forgiveness, and also provides a light at the end of the tunnel for those drowning in these debts.
The lenders would perceive themselves to be totally screwed over by such a change in rules, but I suppose it may as well be them as anyone else.