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Comment by catillac | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that generally things improving is an affront to people who lived before improvement. To me it sounds like saying we shouldn’t have indoor plumbing because it’s unfair to people who lived without it before it was invented, or don’t have it now.

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It might not have been before, though. Maybe two people graduated at the same time. One person lived it up, making the minimum loan payment so they could afford to eat out, go on vacations, etc. The other person was "responsible" and paid off the loans early. Now the government is effectively rewarding less responsible behavior.

Or the US government is taxing the poor kid who worked at a non-profit more, relative to his wealthy classmate who graduated debt free and landed a job at his dad's hedge fund.

Student loan forgiveness in bankruptcy is hardly free. There would be a huge advantage to having paid back the loan.

Which is why I think forgiveness should be an option ~7 years after leaving school. You still have to convince a bankruptcy judge that you can’t pay but wrecking your finances at 30+ would discourage most from going down that path.

Is this what is being discussed? My limited view of the debate made it seem like this was more of a 1-time blanket loan forgiveness than something only enabled through bankruptcy.

It’s part of the spectrum, various people are talking about various ideas and implementations.

This is a very American thing though, unfortunately... various demographic groups have been easily persuaded over the years that they are "special" because they "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" and that if they could do it then others should as well. It's a very specific kind of gaslighting such that it's a miracle we have any degree of social services, even if the ones we do have are shit.

The significant part of the affront is asking people who paid for their own tuition to then pay for someone else's in addition.

It costs money to forgive loans, which either could have been spent elsewhere or must be raised in new taxes.

The analogy is if you build a house with plumbing, and your neighbor builds without, then the city uses tax money from you to pay for their upgrade.

There is no point in comparing apples to bananas.

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