I’m a bit over halfway through paying off law school and still paying off college. I expect that I’ll be fortunate enough to be mostly or entirely paid off by the time any Warren plan actually comes to fruition, and even if I weren’t all the way there, I’ll still have paid off more than a quarter million dollars in student loan debt.
And I would absolutely, positively, 100% support both loan forgiveness and reducing or eliminating the cost of education. It makes things better for EVERYBODY–puts more money into circulation, increases the number of educated people, and reduces the financial precariousness of huge numbers of Americans.
In no way would I feel “totally screwed” by the idea that other folks get their debts forgiven while mine weren’t. I agreed to pay the loans when I took them on. The education they paid for improved my prospects immensely. If some of my loans get forgiven, I come out ahead. But if none of them get forgiven, I’m still ahead, because the thing the loans paid for is worth more than I paid for it.
There are so many smart people around here… seems like we could propose a way to do this that would work without “screwing” anyone, rather than arguing how it must.
Like… phasing the subsidies/forgiveness in, giving it first to those who accrued the debt longest ago (and have now paid a lot of interest), then to those with more recent loans/debt, and finally, making tuition free for everyone… and perhaps doing this by slowly raising some earmarked bit of tax over the next decades so that those who most benefit also pay into the solution more (some will find ways to game whatever system is used, of course)…
As someone who took some $25K in loans in the 1980s, and paid them back over the next decade… I wouldn’t feel too bitter about a phased-in system that I contribute a bit less to than younger generations… I still like the idea though, it’s a huge if hard to tange, societal benefit to educate our populace as well as possible…
There are smart people here, and if you read the comments you’ll see that the answer is that this isn’t “screwing” anyone. What you’re proposing is that because someone suffered we need to make someone else suffer.
This is antithetical to the proposal. The people who will benefit the most from free tuition are those who are utterly unable to pay into the system. That is the point.
We have been taught to spend a lot of time thinking about the lazy lout who could have saved and paid themselves but simply chose not to, and to never spare a thought for the single parent working two jobs and still not being able to afford healthy food for their kids. We’ve been told that it’s okay to let our disdain for the former overcome our empathy for the latter. We spend more time trying to punish a myth than we do trying to help real people who are suffering.
As far as I can tell the main message people have been telling you is “it’s very unlikely you would lose your money.” At worst you’d end up paying some additional taxes to keep a big wad of cash you’d already planned on losing anyway.
Students got screwed over the last 20+ years. It’s really that simple. It’s a sad public education policy that started with good intentions, but ruined lives; possibly including quite a few readers of this BBS.
I truly believe students thought they were doing the right thing by taking out loans. Who wouldn’t? Who doesn’t want to have a better life? We’re all told college is the path to a better life. For many of us it is.
But some students didn’t succeed at school or graduated into a job without being able to service debt they can’t escape. That’s a horrific public policy. If a student fails, then the school should feel the financial pain too. Given that, Student debt forgiveness is understandable.
But what about the colleges & universities? They’re responsible for this situation too. They got all the cash, right? College & University Presidents make MILLIIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR. Where’s the call, no the ANGER, for making one group millionaires while another group ends up with a lifetime of debt? Talk about your wealth transfer!!!
And now Ms. Warren propose to make college free?! We’re going to hand over even more money to this same group that helped to create this mess?
That’s exactly what most people in this thread are saying… and yet somehow, it keeps being misconstrued as some kind of nefarious plot to rip-off certain people’s hard-earned savings…
“I wanted to buy a pizza for everybody in the office today. Or I could take you out?”
“Why are you threatening the lunch I brought from home? What am I supposed to do now? Eat it later? If you give me a lunch, and I already have a lunch, I’ll starve because you’re trying to replace my lunch. That’s zero lunches, then.”
I guess what I find problematic about your analogy is that I think people really would feel upset about that. But maybe they’d feel weird complaining, even though they felt upset?
I still think I’d save my concern for the actual people going hungry saving for education than the theoretical people who might be vaguely unhappy about having too many lunches to choose from.
Thanks for reminding me about the other part of the mindset at work here. Not only…
But they also assume that a “successful” transaction needs to be as close as possible to a zero-sum one, where one party gets screwed over. It’s one of the reasons that Libertarians have so much difficulty with the concept of tax-funded programmes that benefit everyone.
