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All Debt is bad and sad and ergo should go away
Doc B – like our old long-lost friend Doc Jay, but probably less likely to look at your chart, say “screw it,” rip out your tubes and drive you to Vegas – wrote about a patient thrilled by the promise of college debt elimination. The patient did not have a firm grip on things like “economics” or “reality,” but she’s not alone.
As long as we’re talking about college debt relief, why not all debt? The New Yorker is here to tell you what it means in terms of PHILOSOPHY and also justice.
In Congress, the freshman representatives known as the Squad have lifted up grassroots demands to cancel student loans, back rent, and mortgage payments.
But probably not your mortgage payment, because you can pay it.
Debt relief, Representative Ayanna Pressley, of Massachusetts, told me, makes sound economic sense, given that working families would put freed-up money “right back into communities, right back into the economy.” Pressley added, “We have to bail out the American people.”
Hold on. Wait a gol-durned minute. You mean if people have relief from mandated financial obligations, they use the money in other ways that stimulates economic activity? It’s trickle-out economics!
Though it would help struggling households make ends meet, debt relief isn’t just about money. There are also deeper moral questions to consider—and this is where David Graeber’s work is indispensable.
This is where you sigh with satisfaction and settle into the warm bath of moral questions the New Yorker writers permit you to entertain, and you smile to yourself: I have no idea who David Graeber is, but I will soon, and then I will know something indispensable.
In “Debt,” he sought to challenge his readers to rethink the very notion of owing: Who owes what to whom?
“Stop paying and find out” seems the easy answer to that one
Do all debts need to be repaid?
“Stop paying and find out” seems the easy answer to that one
Can our real obligations ever be quantified?
Dude have you ever looked at your hand? I mean really looked at it
As an anthropologist who had studied gift exchange,
Oh, a financial expert, is what you’re saying. “At E. F. Hutton, we make money the old fashioned way – by anthropological inquiry into the folkways involving gift exchange.”
and an anarchist determined to envision a world beyond capitalism,
Oh, a nutwad. Well, you have to admire his determination; the man sets his clock for 5 AM every day, goes into the study, and spends the fresh hours of the day fiercely envisioning.
“Are you coming down for breakfast?” the wife calls.
“Not yet! I am so close! A few more minutes and I’ll have the post-capitalist world fully envisioned!” Then he frowns and rests his chin on his fists. Okay where was I. No debt, no money, no rent, no banks, no societal heirarchies, no scarcity . . . then what? I’m almost there! I’m so close!
David wanted to help build a world unconstrained by the constant and petty accounting of debits and credits, one where value and worth were not denominated in dollars.
Because no one has any metrics for quantifying anything in life besides dollars, of course. But let’s go with that. We abandon a commonly-accepted medium of exchange to facilitate our daily exchanges of goods and services, and something without any of the characteristics of value and obligation will arise. WHAT IF THERE WAS LIKE, NO MONEY AND WE JUST DID COOL STUFF AND EVERYONE WAS COOL
Debt, he wrote, is “a promise corrupted by both math and violence.”
Well, if you borrow from Tony the Shark down at the social club, yeah
What other types of promises might we make to one another and strive to honor? And, in order to do that, what promises might we have to renegotiate or refuse?
“You make some interesting points sir but you ordered a ham sandwich and you ate it and here’s the bill. You can pay here, or at the cash register. And we don’t take checks.”
Debt cancellation is an essential component of any sensible response to this worsening disaster, especially one attuned to questions of racial justice.
Racism before: minority communities do not have access to credit, and that’s a problem. Racism today: minority communities have access to credit, and that’s a problem. Solution: upend the Etch-a-Sketch. As always, Year Zero beckons, with its boundless justice and limitless potential.
Published in General
So all they have to do is make several trillion-dollar coins, and everything is great! and will be great, forever!
Tri-state killing spree.
My thought is that the colleges are the beneficiaries of these terribly immoral loans that take young innocent children and make them paupers. As they reap the benefits, so should these colleges suffer the pain of the losses. People speak of the government confiscating IRA’s and legally purchased guns as if it is entitled to do so. How about the government just relieve itself of the loan responsibility and make the colleges collect on their own bad debt? If I were never concerned about getting paid by my customers, I could have given open credit to everyone and been the largest supply house in the world. But I had to be responsible for the bad debt I incurred. Why aren’t the colleges responsible as well?
The other day, Squad member Primila Jaypal opined that thanks to MMT, the Democrats wanted to “explode the idea of paying for things.”
The full quote is either snort-coffee-out-your-nose funny or terrifying … maybe both …
“We just had Stephanie Kelton, who wrote that wonderful book on MMT, come in and speak to the caucus, because we are trying to explode the debt and deficit myths that exist even within some of our own progressive caucus members. But in the Democratic Party writ large, we are also trying to explode the idea of paying for things.“
Like re-election campaigns, one assumes.
JamesL,
I thought you were pulling my leg. The New Yorker actually published this piece of garbage written by someone with all the insights of a 9-year-old. She never got the memo. Hopeless wishful economic stupidity has been tried in the last 103 years more than once. Every time the results were three-fold. First, complete economic collapse/starvation, second, massive repressive tyranny, and third, genocide. Every single time.
Hopefully, we won’t need to try this stupidity again just because Ms. Dullard didn’t get the memo. Giving this person a word processor and a byline to write what she wants to is like giving a ten-year-old a Ferrari to drive. The only difference is that we are stuck as passengers in the Ferrari when she runs it off the road into a tree.
Regards,
Jim
She never stopped having college freshman dorm room bull—- sessions.
I, on the other hand, never EVER had those.
I didn’t see if anyone already brought it up, but the Direct Credits system developed by Alfred Lawson might be just the ticket. I also would like a time machine to go with the retroactive student loan debt forgiveness so that I didn’t have to turn my back in desperation regarding life choices.
Make the colleges responsible for unpaid loans. Put the bite on the perpetrators.
It’s not a debt jubilee, but it’s close. When I was a kid a home mortgage was 10 years. Then it went up to twenty. Now it’s thirty, which is nearly half an adult life. Something’s wrong with this. Probably the long-term housing overpricing, induced at least for the last twenty years by 0bama’s subprime loan efforts.
My place in Phoenix was paid off in 9 years, although that was partly due to a large pay-down from the estate of my father and step-mother. My new(er) place I mostly paid for with proceeds from the Phoenix place, but I have a private note with the seller for 6 years.
Neither place was terribly expensive though, so it may be that the main problem is people buying more house than they really need, or can afford in a reasonable time-frame.
Flick,
Funny you should mention this. It went to 30 years under Jimmy Carter. This while the interest rates went 15% and higher. The interest rate curve is inflected. This means as you go farther out on it the slope gets steeper and steeper.
Steep? Why 30 years at 15% was just murder. I described it as renting from the bank. You could dutifully make your massive monthly payment for 10 years and guess what, virtually all of it was interest. You hadn’t gained any principle. So for ten years you rented from the bank but had to pay all the utilities and maintenance. Great deal?!. Then Jimmy Carter says that the trouble with the American public is that they have a “malaise”. If only an angry mob could have tarred and feathered the jerk. It wouldn’t have been enough but it would have felt really good.
Regards,
Jim
Yeah I remember hearing people talk about getting mortgages in the late 70s, they would get a small, overpriced place that needed a lot of work, with a mortgage approaching 20%, and considered themselves lucky.
And you successfully avoided a bank loan.
Wow. I didn’t know it as that early. I remember a friend of the family was buying a home at that time and he anxiously waited months to close as the rate went (iirc) over 20%. And yes, I kind of thought that the raising interest rates was the main reason for the lengthier payment time, that and making more interest from a collateralized loan.
Recently I’ve been surprised to see cars being advertised with not monthly payments estimated, but estimations of price per paycheck.
Actually, no banks would do a mortgage for as little as the note is. There’s no margin in it for them.
I’m so old, I remember when the New Yorker was not garbage.
I’ll be interested to see how/when this concept gets extended to private universities – there are just too many of those academics/administrators out there.
And, importantly, “people should not be LIMITED to public universities”. What are you, in favor of the new caste system?
Hello, are you my brother? Did he change his name? He says these things all the time!
Thats roughly 204 billion for starters. Let’s get socialist with them.
“From each according to his ability” etc etc….
What I learned today is never lend money or household goods or anything of any value whatever to David Graeber.
Everyone but Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
@jameslileks,
Professor Kingsfield earned money the old-fashioned way for Smith Barney
… when EF Hutton talked, people listened