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I must say, as someone who made quite a few sacrifices to pay off my school debt, I'll be pretty miffed if less responsible people from my same generation get a

• deleted 8y ago
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• barrkel 8y ago
  The best is the enemy of the good. You'll find that in most peace deals, bad people get excused of crimes, but it's necessary for the greater good. There's certainly a moral hazard, but that's part of the deal - if we do things right, the bad situation won't be repeated.
• cagenut 8y ago
  that's called being a spiteful jerk
• thatjsguy 8y ago
  Somebody getting a break doesn’t bring you down, it just brings them up. I’m sorry you had to pay off your loans. I’m paying about $100,000 myself. But even if I didn’t get amnesty, I’d rather not have one more graduate who, like me, has sincerely considered whether simply being dead would be easier to deal with. And there are a lot of people like that. I’d rather be in debt forever if it means that subsequent multitudes can be free of the burden I carry. At least someone gets some relief.
  • TomMarius 8y ago
    It definitely does bring him down, as he could've pursued more opportunities/experiences/etc, but didn't. Something like "lost profits".
  • drcode 8y ago
    > Somebody getting a break doesn’t bring you down, it just brings them up. Well, the assumption here is that the money to "bring them up" can just be materialized out of thin air and doesn't have to be taken from other people, in turn.
    • thatjsguy 8y ago
      Taxation has been around forever. Society gets to vote and decide how to divide up shared resources. I’m perfectly fine with tax dollars going to education (coupled with drastically-reduced tuition, like it used to be a short couple decades ago). I’m curious why everyone thinks it’s so impossible to have affordable education, when not even a generation ago we actually had it in the US.
      • troupe 8y ago
        It is still possible today. There are schools that are an extremely good value. I've even seen some state schools where you can graduate pretty much debt free working a part time minimum wage job during the school year and full time during the summer. If people were acting rationally they would be flocking to these schools. Instead they are taking on massive debt to go to expensive schools. So basically to answer your question, the reason education is so expensive is largely because of the way we loan money to people to go to school.
        • thatjsguy 8y ago
          But who sets the price of tuition? The Boards of Regents/Governors/Trustees. Tuition used to be cheap _even at brand-name schools_.
          • troupe 8y ago
            Yes but if one school starts upgrading their dorms, student center, etc. kids starting spending their loan money there which makes the other schools try to do something a bit better. When there is almost unlimited money there is a race to be the top in spending on creating a cool college environment to attract more kids and their loan money.
    • stormbrew 8y ago
      The converse of this being the assumption that having a huge number of people stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt is not itself a drag on society that eventually comes out of other people's pockets one way or another anyways. "I survived a bad system" is not justification for the perpetuation of that system.
  • systems 8y ago
    well, the relative distance is usually more important than the absolute value your are rich, compared to other, not in the absolute, if you have 1 million dollars, and everyone else have one million dollars, you are not rich one way not to punish those who acted responsibility, is by bumping up their credit score, this way, they can get deals on mortgages etc ..., and those who were bailed out, should get their credit score neither penalized or bumped
  • bluto 8y ago
    Own your choices. You decided to go to college as opposed to not going. You decided to go to the college that you did in favors of others. You knew the cost of tuition and room and board. You knew how much you would have to borrow to afford the college you chose. You voluntarily borrowed the money that you did. You knew the amount of $ that you would owe. You knew the payment schedule. You had a reasonable idea of how much you wold earn given the degree and college that you chose. I feel a little sorry that you now have to make sacrifices to pay back the money you chose to borrow. Maybe you have to do without for some period of time while others you know don't.
    • lovich 8y ago
      My loans were based on the LIBOR rate. That rate was shown to be manipulated by many banks[1]. Did I chose to do this going into the agreement for the loan? Did I get the chance to leave the agreement after the rate was manipulated, or to not pay back interest for the portion of time it was manipulated? Personally, my loans are almost all paid off and any wiping of student loan debt would barely affect me. I can still see how letting the system continue as it is does nothing but funnel money from the public, and students in particular, into the banks pockets. I don't see why we need to protect the banks from any negative results when they have actively subverted the rules [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal
    • thatjsguy 8y ago
      Wow. Fuck you, tbh. Just fuck right off.
      • dang 8y ago
        Please don't do this on HN, even when someone was needlessly harsh and provocative. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • troupe 8y ago
    So if person A got a degree that they can use to get a job with $40k of debt and has worked hard to pay it off, but person B has incurred $40k to get a degree that isn't going to lead to a job, you seem to think we can just forgive the debt of B without having any impact on A. Where do you think the money to pay for that debt will come from....well people who have jobs and are working. So basically person A has to pay for their degree in something that led to employment as well as the degree person B got that didn't lead to employment. Is that worth doing? Maybe, but don't pretend it has no impact on the people who did pay off their loans.
    • thatjsguy 8y ago
      So I dated a 41-year-old. He went to school about 15 years before I did. Know how much student loan debt he has? Zero. Zilch. Nada. In the amount of time it takes to reach the age necessary to acquire a learner’s permit, we inflated the cost of education into the stratosphere. Education used to be affordable. It is absolutely not impossible to go back. I’m curious to know how long you think education has been this unaffordable, because it’s a pretty new phenomenon. I’m therefore confused why it’s so hard to imagine a world where education is reasonably-priced.
      • troupe 8y ago
        There are still schools out there that are very reasonably priced. However, lots of students go to more expensive schools that cost more BECAUSE they can get loans to do so. The best way to bring the cost down would be to stop using taxes to subsidize loans.
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• mmanfrin 8y ago
  I'm reminded of my old boss, a native Italian who had spent 7 years getting American citizenship. He was vehemently anti-immigrant and thought anything that helped "illegal immigrants" was a bad thing. Your opinion and his are, to me, examples of one of the worst forms of greed: greed with a reasonable excuse. It is rational and I cannot really fault you for feeling that way, but this form of greed makes fixing the problem much harder to solve.
  • SamReidHughes 8y ago
    It is justice, not greed, that people have to pay back money they borrow.
    • jschwartzi 8y ago
      No. You're turning people into serfs for the better part of their adult life for a decision they made as a teenager. That's not justice, that's cruelty.
      • SamReidHughes 8y ago
        $22K in debt isn't serfdom, that's the price of a Honda Civic. It takes few grand a year to keep up with interest.
        • mmanfrin 8y ago
          22k is an average. There are many people whose debts are significantly more.
          • SamReidHughes 8y ago
            Even with 100k in debt you're talking 7k interest. Get a job in sewer maintenance instead of museum curation and you'll have no problem paying that off.
        • jschwartzi 8y ago
• medhir 8y ago
  I think this mentality is misguided. Many walk into student loans without a full understanding of the debt they are taking on. The mantra of “you must go to college, price be damned” leads many to bite more than they can chew. Should we blame those that fall prey to predatory loan practices? Especially at 18, most are not fully equipped to evaluate the debt they are signing up for and its implications. It seems a better approach would be to look at the root of the problem, which is that easy credit for education has incentivized bad apples to exploit vulnerable people. Just because you were smart enough to not be exploited does not mean others should suffer.
• Latty 8y ago
  The attitude of 'I suffered so others should have to' is really damaging. I get why that's the instinctive response, but it's also going to lead to a worse society. By all means argue for a solution that also helps people who made sacrifice in the past, but people who didn't or couldn't being left to suffer is not a solution. To be clear - I get you are not saying you don't want to solve this because of that, but unfortunately that sentiment often results in policy actually being set like that. We should always be asking 'how can we pull everyone up' not 'are they going through what I did'. Even if it ends up not benefiting you directly, we all benefit from a better society. If we could get past the initial point and start implementing stuff like that, it'd give people more faith that it doesn't just invalidate their effort.
  • drcode 8y ago
    > I suffered so others should have to I didn't "suffer", I just fulfilled the obligations I signed up for when I signed up to my loans.
    • stouset 8y ago
      This is not a defensible reason to allow the whole system to come crashing down.
      • SamReidHughes 8y ago
        It's not going to come crashing down. The national Debt is a much bigger deal.
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      • candiodari 8y ago
        If the system isn't beyond fixing yet ... no worries, have you seen the rate at which it's growing ? So of course it's going to crash. It's like watching a feedback loop in your motor controller, and seeing the numbers start going up, knowing there's too much force in the system to abort it now. It could be an hour before the loud bang comes, but nothing can stop it. If you interrupt it right now, you do less damage right now (still enough to destroy the system of course), but if you let it go, it remains undamaged until it overloads. And you know, you might get really lucky and have the axle melt or something, which avoids the damage. The odds, to put it mildly, don't favor that outcome though. Technically the better action is to interrupt it, but I've hardly ever seen anyone do that.
• Delmania 8y ago
  So, emotionally you may be angry, but realistically, how would that negatively impact your life?
  • whatshisface 8y ago
    The money to pay off the student loans will come from somewhere. Somewhere includes me. Should I ask you to buy me a new car if I spend everthing I have on what turns out to be a lemon? Can one investment firm ask another to cover the losses of its bad positions? Surely, if good and bad decisions are smoothed out to nothing then there's no reason left to make good, sometimes hard choices.
    • RandomInteger4 8y ago
      Do you get angry at people who have to file for bankruptcy?
      • whatshisface 8y ago
        The person who takes out a loan has already paid for their chance of bankruptcy, in the form of interest (because the risk of bankruptcy is priced in based on your creditworthiness.) However most student loans would never have been offered if the deal was the same as for regular loans. What's being proposed is that the deal be changed retroactively, and for innocent bystanders to foot the bill. Think of it like this: party A defrauds party B (by misrepresenting the value of what they're offering), putting party B into irrecoverable debt in the process. Party A isn't going to give the money back (we can't get humanities professors to return their salaries, not to mention the less visible involved), so party B turns to their side and sees party C standing next to them... The fraud is between the victim, the perpetraor, and the state. However I don't expect much to happen along those lines because even though what happened was clearly fraud, it's not clear exactly who was responsible or even how a law could be written so that they would have broken any laws. It's like that one scene in the grapes of wrath: when a hundred people each commit a fraction of a crime, you're just about stuck when it comes to holding any of them accountable.
• karmelapple 8y ago
  If someone majored in a degree that didn’t have great career prospects, should they suffer for that? Is college only for job training, or is it for something a little different? I’m not criticizing your viewpoint; as another commenter said, I understand some of the reasons you may hold this view. However, I do not feel that people who majored in, say, English - against their own likely knowledge that it would be difficult to find a job applying the skills they learned directly in search of a job - should suffer because of the debt they incurred. But I also think they should continue to get training in an area that is needed, or work at something for which they are already qualified.
  • UncleEntity 8y ago
    > However, I do not feel that people who majored in, say, English ... should suffer because of the debt they incurred. Why shouldn't they face the responsibility for the decisions they made? That's the crux of the argument, really. Either people are forced to be responsible for their actions or they aren't...doubly so with student loans since they never really go away. And I'm saying this as someone who got a "worthless" degree (back in the '90s when college was reasonably cheap) and has been in default on one of my loans for well over a decade but has never once asked anyone else to "suffer" over my decision to party, err...pursue a degree without a clear career track. Sure, it would be really, really nice if the good taxpayers subsidized my slacker lifestyle by forgiving my loan but I'm not holding my breath.
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• debtfreer 8y ago
  Some students experience circumstances that can place them into a bind, only to run into the presumed non-dischargeable nature of student loans. Third year students that are unable to qualify for additional loans to meet expected family contribution and then withdraw due to lack of funds, medical students that are unable to achieve proficiency but are sacked with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. The student loan corporations know this is an easy avenue to maintain a growing list of young people in indentured servitude. Granted, the government has tightened the rules around private student loans and encouraged students to pursue federal-only loans (which offer a ton of benefits compared to private loans), but if you look at the loan practices in 2000-2008, private lenders were effectively fly-by-night and doing everything they could (including questionable advertising) to encourage students to apply for private loans.
• ryfia 8y ago
  I actually agree with you on this. Despite getting accepted to many top-tier universities (Berkeley, Yale, Rice), I chose to go to an in-state school with a generous scholarship so I could come out of school with very little loans. I sacrificed going to a really great school like Berkeley (and living in California!) so I would save money and not end up in so much debt. While I fully think that debt is a nondesirable thing to have, and that we do not educate people about debt enough, I don't know if loan forgiveness is the answer. I have personally paid off a close friend's student loans and old medical bills, and guess what? Even after all that she was just as financially irresponsible as before. As a related situation, I know a few people who come to me asking me for help with rent or medical bills. When I ask them, why don't you have any money, they say it's because their hours were cut, or something else. But when I step back and look at the whole picture, I realize that because they went on an expensive vacation, and went to the bars every other night, and spent lots of money on clothes, that's the real reason they didn't have money. So when they asked me to help pay their rent, they were really asking me to help finance their vacation. In a similar way, if we (collectively, the taxpayers) pay for the students who can't afford the student loans, we're actually subsidizing whatever the people DID spend their money on, or their choice to go to more expensive schools when less expensive schools are available, perhaps at the cost of those who, like me, chose to save money by going to less expensive schools.
  • drcode 8y ago
    Thanks, nice to have a single person agree with me. That said, I also agree that my personal situation (be it through luck or responsible behavior) now makes it possible for me to be generous to others, and I'm certainly happy to pay extra in taxes, to an extent. I guess what bothers me is just this sense of entitlement of people that originated from my same social stratum who now argue "the game was rigged" when I never saw evidence of this. (This annoyance of mine BTW does not transfer to disadvantaged folks who did not come from a middle class background... I agree 100% they got a harder lot in life than many of us and are often right to complain.)
    • thrownblown 8y ago
      i'm ok with student debt amnesty as long as it comes with compulsory civil or military service.
• fzeroracer 8y ago
  I must say as someone who has spent quite a lot of money on healthcare, I'll be pretty miffed if heathier people from my same generation get a break if they have a health crisis.
• troupe 8y ago
  It isn't just a matter of irresponsible people getting something for free that you had to work hard for. You'll basically be paying for their loans in taxes.
• zaroth 8y ago
  I’m of a similar mind having worked hard to pay my way through undergrad over 6 years. I would be OK with slashing interest rates. A loan which has such special status that it can’t even be cleared through bankruptcy should have a remarkably low interest rate. Something like, every month you make your payment the interest is credited back to the principal. Or perhaps require 6 months of consecutive on-time payments after which interest goes to zero or 1% as long as you keep making regular payments.
• vtange 8y ago
  Agree. I paid back my loans with money that could've really done better invested in stocks. Imagine if someone could've paid his loans, but was irresponsible and just risked /lost it all in stocks. Not only can he file a capital loss in his tax form to pay less taxes like Trump has done, and now he gets his loans and debt cleared (also like Trump has done). If the system aids people like that, why should there be anyone who responsibly avoids debt?
• debtfreer 8y ago
  Can I try to change your opinion? Thousands of people are filing for bankruptcy every day which – by implication – are getting a break on loans that you would otherwise pay. The issue is where debtors, who cannot presumably discharge their defaulted student loans in bankruptcy, begin to lose their savings, investments, and ability to stave off financial dependency on the government and become financially dependent on government programs now and into their retirement. By saying that since you were able to pay your loans in 2018 and therefore most other people should be able to pay is like looking at any bad investment. If you allow people to remain indentured and fall into perpetual dependency on government programs (welfare, SNAP, Medicaid) due to their default or judgment-debtor status, the overall cost of that is projected to be much higher than if they could have been eligible for a partial or full discharge of the debt in 2018. A bankruptcy prevents a bank from collecting interest. A judgment-debtor on financial assistance from the government is taking far more tax dollars from you than the bank is getting from the tax write-off on the charged-off debt. Obviously, banks want their money, so they lobby for bankruptcy provisions to keep people indebted. They don't particularly care if the side-effect is the government demanding higher taxes from you to pay for government welfare programs.
  • drcode 8y ago
    Clearly you have thought deeply on this issue. I can agree insofar that I think that I think it would be reasonable for student loans to be dischargable by bankruptcy IF we can have changes to the bankruptcy law to make it carry stronger deterrents. In particular, it is not rational to have limits on how long a bankruptcy stays on your record, if it includes student debt (a college degree cannot be repossessed by a bank.) The fact is that someone that made poor life decisions is at high risk of doing so again, and their credit rating should permanently reflect this. Otherwise, the loan & bankruptcy system rewards people who go into bankruptcy at the cost of other, more responsible people who are trying to get loans at a reasonable interest rate. Without this, abuse of the bankruptcy system to "wipe away" student loans would be rampant, and we'd just be kicking the can down the road in a new way again.