Investing in Americans education is single handedly the best investment America can make as a country. I rather see bad business models fail and watch educated Americans fill in the gaps.
Which loan forgiveness program are you talking about? The PPP loans was explicitly designed from the outset to be forgiven, if they were used for payroll. In the end it was a roundabout way for the government to ensure people continued to get paid during lockdowns, not a way to "socialize their losses and privatize their profits".
Loan forgiveness is not an investment in education
If you are trying to argue that the increased tax levied on the particular indebted people with a better education adds up to the exact amount they owed, someone would have to prove that. Additionally, this additional tax from better education was never intended by Congress, when the tax rate was calculated, to go to paying anyone's previous education debt. So other services (arguably benefitting the entire population) would have to be preempted to pay for it. Either way, you'd have someone else paying for the debt.
A thought upon budget allotment and condition for loan forgiveness every year is significantly better than spending it in one go for publicity.
The one time forgiveness was adopted roughly simultaneously with reforms to lending and, particularly, repayment programs designed to ameliorate the creation of the same debt problem, it wasn’t a policy adopted by itself in a vacuum.
> Yes, yes it is
No. It most definitely is not.
It's paying off a bunch of loans that people freely agreed to accept in exchange for their chosen degree. It's the abdication of all responsibility. It's the creation of a society where commitments mean nothing. It is also rewarding behavior that isn't constructive and, devoid of consequences, is caustic.
Plenty of us have taken-on these commitments and worked hard for decades making good on our agreement and paying off the loans. What entitles this generation to behave as children when they should behave as adults?
How about we pay off half of everyone's mortgages then and call it an investment? I guarantee that would have far greater impact than the student loan bailout?
And, BTW, after you pay off my mortgage, I get to keep living in my house forever. Because, well, if we pay off someone's student loan/s, they get to keep the degree and use it to make money.
The whole thing is laughable.
Want to fix student loans? Get government out of that business ASAP. The minute loans don't have that guarantee, the cost of education will drop precipitously.
The other thing that is important is to remove non-degree coursework as graduation requirements. Someone going for an engineering degree has to spend about one full year on coursework having nothing to do with engineering. One way to look at this is that, in the US, 25% of your student loan is for shit that is not going to help get you hired. Or that 25% of your loan isn't for engineering coursework.
Being that this is a requirement for graduation, this means that this unnecessary 25% of the cost of the degree is being imposed on every single student. That's wrong.
What about accepting risks? Should those who used SVB have been bailed out?
No. Absolutely and most definitely not.
Then do it. And show us how you do it.
Nothing prevents you from setting the example, using some criteria to find a target for your charity and paying off some or all of their student loan. Maybe you can take over the payments?
In fact, you could start a foundation of like-minded people and help hundreds, or thousands, of people.
Here's the difference: You get to do whatever you want with your money. Including finding people who think like you and want to join you.
The other approach is forcing everyone to jump on your bandwagon. And that is wrong.
I paid every dime back. So did my wife. We did without lots of things for a very long time while meeting the obligations we entered into to go to school. We both worked full time jobs while we were in school. We didn't take vacations for a long time while we evolved financially and in our respective careers.
That's what commitment and honoring responsibilities looks like.
People with student loans whining about not being bailed out is the pinnacle of adults behaving as petulant children. Grow the fuck up! They bought something that will benefit them for the rest of their lives. The government facilitated that by guaranteeing that loan. No sane lender would have ever provided these loans without this guarantee. Time to behave as an adult and pay for it.
Bullshit degree?
Too bad. Not my problem. I am not responsible for someone paying $150K for a Masters in Underwater Basket Weaving. Tough shit. You fucked up.
Want to blame someone for that expensive Ms in Basket Weaving that can only make you $35K/year? Blame yourself. Stop voting for snake oil salesmen who promise the world and end-up damaging everyone who voted for them. If government was out of the student loan business that degree would not be worth more than $15K to $30K, if that. Your voting decisions have consequences. You have to pay for those just as well.
How about paying off everyone's cars? And then, we don't take them away. They keep using their car for free, just like a student loan bailout would allow someone to use their degree for profit forever.
Of course, some will have bought sensibly-priced cars, while others will have spent $150K for a car to drive the kids to school.
Lets force everyone in the nation who paid-off their vehicles through hard work and responsible behavior to pay for the cars bought by others who are now whining about their loans. Brilliant.
If you want to pay-off people's cars, be my guest. Again, private money and private decisions, you are free to do this...and more.
Let us know if you pay off someone's loan or start a private foundation to do just that. I'm sure many on HN who share your way of thinking will gladly donate tens of thousands of dollars (or more) to demonstrate these are not just empty words and the truly get behind what they say with non-trivial financial commitments for the benefit of others.
https://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/rpr_2_6.pdf
Also, and I mean this sincerely… are you okay? You sound angry, resentful even. Please go talk to someone, this seems much bigger than student loan forgiveness.
Yeah, sure, people can write papers to justify anything.
Like I said, let's cancel everyone's auto loans and mortgages. I'll be we could write a compelling paper in support of that.
> are you okay?
Very funny. Insult shrouded behind fake sincerity.
I am fine, than you. Are you? You don't seem to understand reality at all. Please go talk to someone.
> You sound angry
Everyone who isn't a under heavy sedation should be angry at the stupid nonsense our society today seems to insist on passing for virtues. It is destroying our society to the bone. Splitting us up into more and more subsets brought into resonance by expert manipulators.
Don't believe me? Give it ten years, come back and compare notes. If we remain on this path nothing good will come from it. Sadly, we might have already passed a point of no return years ago.
The issue here is that it is far easier for political actors to work on the basis of creating resonance in subsets of the population than to actually do the difficult work of governing and solving real problems --which isn't easy at all.
Far easier to portray daily life as an ideological civil war with many "us vs. them" slices of society than to actually solve real problems over time.
One approach leads to easy votes and easy paths to stay in power. The other requires hard work and the risk of not delivering results, which could end political careers. The internet and social media gave politicians the tools necessary to focus on nothing except divide-resonate-and-conquer.
It's a game. The masses play. Politicians win. Society gets screwed.
For the unthinking among us, if they can reduce life to a set of mono-variable issues and clear good-vs-evil players, maybe feed them a few great looking graphs, PDF's and websites in the process, maybe even an idiot well-known actor who is stupid enough (most of them are) to get behind the cause, well, politicians and the money brokers that surround them do just fine.
Of course, the population doesn't do fine. They do worse and worse with the passage of time. Pick a time line, say, 50 years:
- The healthcare system is a horrible train-wreck
- Our system of education K-12 is worse than in some third world countries
- Our university system sells, for hundreds of thousands of dollars,
a product that, at most, should cost tens of thousands, or
be free (as it is in countless nations)
- Our systems of mass transportation are a mess
The California high speed train project is an example of just
how incompetent we have become
- Our actions on business, nationally and internationally, have
driven entire industries out of the country --forever
- Air travel lately? OMG!
- We can't build anything at scale any more
Remember "shovel ready projects"? Yeah, good luck
Just one drive up and down Interstate 5 in CA summarizes where
we are well: We can't build anything, and, when we do,
it's third world
- We have degrades so far that we can't even manufacture masks
and medical equipment during a pandemic
- And, yes, we have layers of society who would rather whine
and be taken care of by government than engage in the difficult
work that elevates societies and people at all levels
One way or another, we have managed to allow our politicians (note I have not pointed at a single unique party) to devolve our nation and society into something that is simply not headed in the right direction at all. The things these people have done and are doing continue to guarantee the irrelevance of the US (and Europe) on the world stage and 100 to 200 years (if not more) of Chinese domination at nearly all levels.
I guess the unthinking among us need to find themselves in that reality before they understand just how stupid they have been to not laugh these politicians off the stage and replace them with people who will deliver results and not focus on dividing the population into subsets that are easy to manipulate for votes.
I have worked in manufacturing, technology, electronics, software, commercial, industrial and aerospace domains for four decades. We have been moving backwards, for decades. We have eroded our ability to sustain and grow our economy to a point that likely has no return.
Just try to manufacture any non-trivial product in the US and Europe and the realization of how bad things are will feel like a bucket of ice water. In fact, try to manufacture most trivial products (masks, gowns, syringes, disinfectant wipes) in the US and Europe and the results will likely be the same.
This is the result of decades of incompetence and politicians focusing on their political objectives rather than going to work for us doing the difficult job of managing the affairs of a nation.
Yes, everyone should be angry, because, without a massive unifying force and a clear vision of common goals --without everyone pushing in the same direction-- this is going in a direction most are not going to like. It's like the proverbial crab being slow-boiled. Ignorance, as it turns out, isn't, in the end, bliss.
Look, I know bullshit when I see it. I've been around that long. Sorry, and I do not mean this as a personal attack, the study you posted is complete horseshit. And so is every single study that claims that forcing the entire population to pay for some X a subset of the population chose to buy on their own accord is not a way to build a society based on personal responsibility and the idea that your rights must end where mine begin.
I'll give you one example of this in healthcare. Our family was nicely covered and happy with an insurance plan that cost us $650 per month and had a low thousands deductible way back when. Then President Obama comes along and publicly promises everyone: "If you like your doctors, you'll keep them. If you like your healthcare plan, you'll keep it." He is on video multiple times making this assertion.
What happened? We were forced into Obamacare. Why? The terms of the bill forced companies to cancel all prior plans. And then, our plan went from $650 per month to over $1,800 per month. The deductible went from somewhere around $4,000 per year to over $9,000 per year. We could no longer go the the doctors we had been going to for years.
I did the math. My family would have to be run over by a truck before our insurance would pay real benefits. And yet we have been spending over $22K per year on premiums for over twelve years now. That's over TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS so far since being forced into this fucking abomination. Over $270K. For what?
And I voted for that fucker too. Biggest mistake of my life. Incompetent to the core. Well spoken like few before and after him. And, of course, he used that to divide this nation in ways most have yet to recognize. And costs will go up. At this rate I would not be surprised if it costs my family over a million dollars in my lifetime.
Perfect example of a politician promising to help people, yet causing great harm instead. One can find examples of this kind of thing across the isle as well. Not claiming Democrats are the only culpable here.
Politicians in this nation, by law, can lie to all of us and suffer no consequences for it. That's wrong and should change. They are causing way too much damage using that superpower.
The political "species" --because they are not human beings, they are parasites-- in the US has done more damage to this country in the last 50 years than any of our enemies could have hoped to inflict on us through any means available to them. They have destroyed this nation from the inside by only caring about themselves while pretending to care for those who's votes they want and need.
Why people do not wake up to this and revolt is something I might never understand. The fact that, in 2016, our only two choices for "leadership" were Trump and Clinton says a lot about just how stupid we all are and how putrid our political system has become. Out of all the brilliant and capable people in this nation, those two rose to the top? Amazing.
> let’s tackle this the best we can with the information we have
We have to be very careful. This "information we have" is deeply polluted by political forces and financial interests. I would advise anyone to almost, by default, discard anything that comes out of our universities one a range of topics. They have become paid political actors. The forces that be know how to manipulate this through grants and programs that only favor certain perspectives.
For example, go search for the body of articles challenging some of the narratives surrounding what we can and cannot do about atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate change. The number of studies --if you can find any-- is absolutely dwarfed by those showing we are Zeus and can lick this thing within a few years or even decades (which, of course, is complete and utter horseshit).
And so, if we were to tackle this with the information we have, the only conclusion they want us to reach is that we have to destroy entire economies to "save the planet" --which, again, is complete horseshit.
There are thing in life that don't require layers of research studies to understand or debunk. For example, any engineer with a reasonable amount of experience knows that building a submarine using a carbon fiber pressure hull is fucking stupid.
Bailing everyone out of X (which can be anything) isn't a way to build a strong, resilient, responsible society with self determination and ability to make good decisions and honor them despite outcomes. It's a way to build a loser society that will surely buckle at the first sign of trouble. Even worse, it's a way to build a society perennially dependent on government handouts, with all the downsides history has shown this brings.
I think there's reason to be angry. Some of us have been working hard for decades, only to see the people we hired to look after our nation destroy it from the inside and divide us to use us like pawns for their own benefit. That's not cool. That's something to be angry about. And rightly so.
I am flattered you see me as the son of God. I am not. If I were, I'd waste no time and fix the world with a single well-aimed divine fart.
Taxes and wealth transfers are something that a reasonable person can be angry or even resentful of.
If someone went into your house and robbed you, you might be angry. You have bills, dreams, and children to care for. A lot of people would even want to kill the thief.
These policies have the same effect, but you are powerless to defend yourself.
How do you feel about bankruptcy?
Well that's obviously false. I had a problem with it. And if you dared to say it during the pandemic, you were likely to get stoned by the wildly emotional pandemic mob.
The solution to the cost of education is the US, is to realize the cost somewhere, ie make someone actually responsible for the fact that very young adults with next to zero credit / income / responsibility are borrowing rather insane sums of money they can't actually afford to borrow. Society can debate who gets to be responsible (banks, universities, taxpayers, borrowers), someone has to be, otherwise the upward spiral (of debt) will just continue until it becomes an outsized economic threat (it's getting there). For decades the can has been kicked down the road intentionally, nobody wants to take responsibility. Biden and the Democrat approach is just more debt via loan forgiveness, which will result in an even bigger loan forgiveness after that.
It's identical to the healthcare cost problem in the US. The Democrats want to solve healthcare via universal healthcare, and they want to pretend it can be done without fixing the cost problem. They never talk about dramatically reducing the cost of healthcare, and how many millions of jobs need to be vaporized to do it, and how many medical professionals need to take a big pay cut to do it. The gravy train has to end, and that means millions of nurses, doctors, hospital workers get slashed pay; millions of related industry jobs vanish (in insurance, medtech, pharma, et al.), and the middle class and higher incomes that go with them.
Big education - the government borrowing pact with universities and their freewheeling ability to spend - is a gravy train for admin and universities generally, and has been for decades. It has to end just the same as big healthcare's gravy train has to end. Salaries have to be smashed, jobs have to be destroyed en masse, everything has to be squeezed, cut, slashed. Which is exactly how most of Europe manages their healthcare systems - tight rationing, tight controls.