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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

I assume "discharging student loan debt" is the euphemism for "let the taxpayer pay for that undesirable pile of shit that he chose to study".

That will only worsen the situation - more young people will study shit that's not in demand.

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What qualifies a degree as an "undesirable pile of shit?" Studying English is not at all useless. It definitely provides value to our society and produces people with useful skills applicable across disciplines. Being burdened with student loans pigeon holes great minds into safe jobs that don't make use of their skills.

It's quite simple - if you can't pay off your student debt with the skills you paid for, it's generally undesirable by outside world.

Whether English or history is somewhat useful is irrelevant - pretty much any area of knowledge is. They clearly are not in high demand.

The recently approved $717 billion in defense spending increased military spending by $80 billion dollars, far in excess of what would've been necessary to provide free college to everyone. Hard to argue the moral hazard on education spending when you're firehosing billions of dollars of taxpayer money into a dumpster fire already.

"Those concerns were brushed aside Monday night, as the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $80 billion annual increase in military spending, enough to have fully satisfied Sanders’s campaign promise. Instead, the Senate handed President Donald Trump far more than the $54 billion he asked for. The lavish spending package gives Trump a major legislative victory, allowing him to boast about fulfilling his promise of a “great rebuilding of the armed services.

Or with $80 billion a year, you could make public colleges and universities in the U.S. tuition-free. In fact, Sanders’s proposal was only estimated to cost the federal government $47 billion per year."

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/18/the-senates-military-spe...

Or with $80 billion a year, you could do lots of stuff like have a lower deficit.

Reducing defense spending being good does not mean that using it to discharge bad student loans is the best use.

You can argue all day about the 'best' thing to spend $80bn on, but there's no way the 'defense' budget will be reduced by any meaningful amount for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, and if we redirect $500 of your paycheck to me, I can eat for free. I find it extremely useful. Let's do it!

And yeah, I get what you're saying about the ridiculous military budget, I don't like it either. But can you change it is the real question. If you can't, it's all just a beautiful fantasy.

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