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Comment by will_brown | Hacker News Reader

Well if you are going to frame it as taxpayers paying off the loans (I don’t necessarily agree with you framing it that way), then the taxpayers are also the ones that extended these guaranteed loans in the first place.

So by your logic, yes taxpayers are responsible to the extent they are guaranteeing loans in the first place which is what allows the schools to charge artificial prices which the data shows can’t be repaid in millions of cases because the jobs and wages aren’t there. The article maybe just a few anecdotes but when the data amounts to 1M defaults a year, at what point are you going to stop complaing about the taxpayers having to make up for the bad decisions of 18 year old kids trying to better their future and question taxpayer funded loans allowing the runaway school costs in the first place?

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> taxpayers are responsible

Taxpayers have no choice: pay taxes or face fines / jail.

Arguably taxpayers also get to choose who they vote for. You can argue about the effectiveness of the democratic process in the US but it feels a tad disingenuous to suggest we have no responsibilities in this system we are all apart of.

A political ballot doesn't carry enough bits of information for you to express how you would like to see student loans administered, and every other thing you'd like to influence.

In the first place, a government like that of the US is a massive bureaucracy, only a tiny fraction of which is actually elected. No matter who is elected, pretty much the same people will be administering student loans.

Of all tax units filing income taxes, 76.4 million tax units pay no federal income taxes. That's 44.4% of all tax units.

That's approximately 44.4% of potential votes by people who likely choose politicians that are spending the money of those who do pay taxes. And of those that pay income taxes, a few pay the disproportionate share of those taxes.

So basically, many people who are tax filers but not tax payers are getting to choose who they vote for, but others are left shouldering all the tax responsibility for the bad policies of those politicians. These tax filers might be paying other taxes like state and local sales tax, but those taxes are pretty much all state and local and irrelevant when we are talking about federal loan programs.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/model-estimates/tax-units-ze...

* "A tax unit is an individual, or a married couple, that files a tax return or would file a tax return if their income were high enough, along with all dependents of that individual or married couple."

If the taxpayers actually cared about 1M defaulted student loans a year they could elect leaders who will take action.

Maybe you vote for a politician who will terminate federally guaranteed student loans. Maybe support one that will provide UBI, which will be adjusted based on student loan obligations. Maybe elect one that will reform the existing IBR/repayment options so 1M students are going into default every year.

But as we all know what your saying is a strawman when you have people like warran buffet paying less in taxes than his secretary. Obviously that’s not by accident and rich taxpayers have successfully organized/lobbied/passed multiple laws over the last 40 years providing tax breaks for the themselves and corporations.

> Maybe you vote for a politician who will terminate federally guaranteed student loans.

Problem is, that joker wants to criminalize abortion and lock up anyone who smells of weed. Now what do I do?

Make the schools pay for it.

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