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Sanders to propose canceling entire $1.6T in US student loan debt
- partiallypro 7y agoBernie and Warren are currently in a race to see who can unrealistically promise the most things to shore up the youth vote. I'm getting tired of unrealistic proposals that are akin to political grifting. These would never pass congress, even if Democrats controlled both chambers with super majorities. We can't get anything done in Washington because neither party puts forward anything realistic that can actually pass. It's tiresome. No one is willing to compromise and everyone puts up nonstarters.
- untog 7y agoThe Affordable Care Act was absolutely a compromise. It's not difficult to imagine a compromise being reached on a pledge like this in a similar fashion. It's primary season after all, candidates are laying out their philosophy as much as they're laying out actual legislation.
- bredren 7y agoRight now you can’t pay down employee’s student loans without it being considered taxed income. Even if the money goes from the employer to the loan servicer. It’s ridiculous. This does not need to result in a cancellation of all debt to result in progress.
- untog 7y agoSo what you're saying is... there's a compromise to be made?
- partiallypro 7y ago... It's not a compromise if you're negotiating with yourself.
- usaar333 7y agoWhy should not that not be considered taxable income? If it wasn't taxable income, you'd incentive students taking unnecessary loans senior year so they could get tax free income the subsequent one. Which accomplishes nothing but reduced government revenue and additional government money going to loan servicers.
- partiallypro 7y agoHow are this and ACA even remotely similar? This proposal doesn't even address the cause of high costs of education. So, we pay it all off and then wait for the next bubble. That's like implementing TARP in 2008/2009 to buy up bad banking assets and doing nothing else to prevent it from happening again.
- untog 7y agoI didn't say they were similar, I said that the ACA is an example of legislation that was passed through compromise.
- partiallypro 7y agoThe ACA was only voted for by one party hardly a compromise, and because of that it had been crippled on the state level where it absolutely needed support. So, still a poor example.
- untog 7y agoThe reason I mentioned it is because the OP said: > These would never pass congress, even if Democrats controlled both chambers with super majorities.
- javagram 7y agoThe ACA wasn’t a compromise between parties , it was a compromise between the conservative and progressive wings of the Democratic Party - Senator Joe Lieberman’s (a former Democrat who had run and won as an independent) vote was crucial to passing the act and also to the removal of the public option from the bill.
- partiallypro 7y ago...and it doesn't really work because it wasn't a compromise between parties...since the GOP controls most state governments, they have stripped out the Medicaid portions. So...it is largely a failure in many regards. If there had been real party to party compromise, the bill might have actually helped cut costs. Instead it was just something to pass quickly to notch as an accomplishment. The Democrats aren't the only ones who have done that...the GOP is equally guilty. It's time to start compromising across party lines, and things like what Warren and Bernie have put forward do the polar opposite.
- ma2rten 7y agoIf Sanders won the presidency on this platform, there would be some pressure to support the policies that got him elected.
- partiallypro 7y agoAnd what evidence do you have that this is true? Someone can win the Presidency but it doesn't always mean that Congress falls in line. Even with a tremendous wave behind him, Obama barely passed ACA, with no bipartisan support. The people in swing states that voted for it were axed in the next election. People claimed this about Trump too, that people would be pressured to support his platform because he win...where is the evidence? The only person I can think of that this happened with in the past 50 years is perhaps George W Bush's tax cuts in early 2001.
- krastanov 7y agoWarren's suggestions seem more practical/plausible/informed. Any particular reason you are lumping them with Sanders'?
- scythe 7y agoI think Warren knows when her unrealistic ideas are unrealistic. She has a background in econ, after all. She also knows that she has to negotiate, which means she has to open with an offer the other side won't accept. Her track record in Congress shows she's capable of that; she's gotten major bills passed before. And I have a hard time thinking of someone more qualified to lead the Dems -- you've got the foot-in-the-grave (Biden, Sanders), the foot-in-the-cradle (Harris, Buttigieg, O'Rourke, Castro), the memes (Yang, Gabbard) and the anaesthetic (Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, Delaney etc). That leaves Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.
- malvosenior 7y ago> I think Warren knows when her unrealistic ideas are unrealistic Does she? Because this seems extremely unrealistic: https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/1141705066656751616 https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/1141705066656751616
- scythe 7y agoAre you sure you linked the right tweet? I thought you were going to be complaining about the wealth tax (which I think is an intentional, rhetorical oversimplification of the real plan) or some social program, but not a minor tax cut that affects less than 2% of the population!
- malvosenior 7y agoI'm not complaining about anything, I'm giving you an example of her being very unrealistic.
- scythe 7y agoWhat exactly is unrealistic about that? It’s barely a blip on the radar in any economic sense. Politically it might not be popular right now (???) but that’s irrelevant for evaluating competence.
- rmrfrmrf 7y agoThe thing is, given a large enough voting bloc, you can vote out everyone that disagrees with you and pass sweeping legislation without needing to compromise. The goal is to force every legislator in Congress to pick a side for the sake of knowing who to vote out.
- pytester 7y ago"Unrealistic" is how most popular, realistic ideas that every other industralized nation has managed to put in to practice are put down. Single payer healthcare is similar. I still remember Chilean right wing commentators declaring free tertiary education as unrealistic not that long ago, before it became reality. Once it became reality it was declared "unfair". America will be no different.
- apexalpha 7y agoWhy exactly is this unrealistic? I think Trump's tax cut was $1 trillion annually. So a one time $1,5 trillion payments doesn't sound too unrealistic to me. It can even be done without Congressional approval. > "the Higher Education Act in 1965 gives the secretary of education the power to write off federally owned student debt unilaterally, under the “compromise and settlement” provision. Doing so would wipe out an enormous financial burden on the working and middle classes overnight. The Department of Education could also purchase the roughly $64 billion in privately held student debt, then use the same authority to write it off." https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/student-loan-debt-forgiveness-college-bernie https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/student-loan-debt-forgiveness...
- booleandilemma 7y agoRight after I’ve finished paying mine off, of course. Do I (and everyone else in my position) get money back? Or did we spend all those years cost-cutting for nothing?
- hprotagonist 7y ago"But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’" This is a very bitter pill. But you get to choose how to swallow it.
- CaliforniaKarl 7y agoI’m curious, where is that from?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hprotagonist 7y ago'the parable of the workers in the vineyard', one of the weirder and more radical ones. It's a real hard thing to think about, which is probably why it sticks in my mind. It takes every normal rule about sensible economic practices and just stomps on it. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+20&version=MSG https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+20&vers...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- RandomTisk 7y agoJesus [0]. Now if that 1.6T was the money that Bernie Sander's himself had loaned out to students, I could see the connection here. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Workers_in_the_Vineyard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Workers_in_the_...
- hprotagonist 7y agoCancelling a loan, naively, is a taxable income. What's the mechanic being proposed such that "you just 'earned' $60,000 this quarter" doesn't trigger?
- ipython 7y agoThere was an exception made during the recession to exempt cancelled mortgage debt from federal taxation, for example.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- compiler-guy 7y agoCancelling the debt will require a bill. That bill can include whatever terms it wants, including a term that makes the benefit untaxable. The government can make the rules work however it wants. [With no comment on the wisdom of the plan itself.]
- creddit 7y agoInteresting strategy. Clearly hoping to effectively buy the votes of those with debt but the flip side is he dramatically alienates himself from anyone even approaching the "fiscally conservative" portion of the political spectrum. I guess his gamble is that he had already lost all those potential voters. Not sure it's a winning strategy. I would not have voted for Bernie before this, but it further reaffirms my fears of his election. The fears are probably largely unfounded as he would be likely blocked by the legislature but who knows.
- untog 7y agoI don't know why anyone even touching the "fiscally conservative" end of the spectrum would even consider Sanders. Anyone alienated by this proposal was alienated long ago, so I really don't think this is going to have a big impact on him.
- creddit 7y agoAgreed, hence my point "I guess his gamble is that he had already lost all those potential voters".
- ajross 7y agoI don't know why anyone even pretends there is a "fiscally conservative" end of the spectrum. A few writers at the WSJ and a banker or three does not a demographic make. No one cares about that stuff. No one. Everyone wants the government to spend on their priorities. Everyone thinks spending on other people's priorities is wasteful and unsustainable. Everyone is wrong. The galaxy brain end of things is the realization that, yes, US government debt is almost literally free money in every sense of the word and we're absolutely bonkers not to be spending it on objectively useful junk like education.
- sgjohnson 7y ago> Everyone I don’t want the government to spend at all. I don’t want a government at all. Yes, I’d be happy to pay a toll on every other road and every time I cross a bridge. Yes, I’d be happy to carry a firearm at all times (the SCOTUS ruled that the police don’t really have the duty to protect you anyway). Most ambulances are private already.
- CaliforniaKarl 7y ago>...$1.6 trillion of student debt held in the United States... According to https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/student-loan-debt/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/student-loans/student-..., $119.31 billion of the debt is private. >Sanders is proposing to pay for these plans with a tax on Wall Street his campaign says will raise more than $2 trillion over 10 years, though some tax experts give lower revenue estimates. So, a portion of the tax would go right back to the banks financing that private student loan debt. Interesting!
- inamberclad 7y agoHow does it go back to the banks?
- jonahbenton 7y agoThe private entities that hold this debt are generally completely different from the entities whose activities would be taxed.
- noobermin 7y agoHmm, that's less than 10% of the debt held. Given they as a whole will pay $2T over two years, wouldn't they be losing money as a whole?
- povertyworld 7y agoHe's going to wipe out grad school debt too? So instead of working and being cheap to pay off my undergrad you mean I could have been racking up fat debts doing master's degree this whole time? Wow, can I get the last decade back?
- kevmo 7y agoThis has been coming for decades. A functioning democracy was never going to let the debt slavery that student debt represents stand. It's been hard to talk about it on this forum, though. Conversations invoked by Bernie Sanders are generally quashed on HN.
- jquery 7y ago>a functioning democracy will implement [policy I like] This is demonstrably not true.
- evanriley 7y agoLet me preface this by saying I 100% don't see this happening anytime soon...but. Would you prefer we just keep going at this pace and hurting future students because in the past people had to pay? Sounds like a pretty shitty future.
- rhino369 7y agoYou don’t have to cancel old debt to protect future students. Just ban student loans. In fact a one time cancellation could screw future students because they’ll expect the same. And it might not happen.
- prewett 7y agoMaking student loans dischargable by bankruptcy again would be a much better solution. Not only does Sanders' suggestion not solve the problem, it hurts people who did actually pay off their debt. Whereas the problem fixes itself if bankruptcy can wipe out student loans: loaning institutions would be more careful about loaning money. Right now they are guaranteed to get the money back, so if you want a $100k loan to study Aboriginal Literature, sure no problem. If they had to think about whether you could ever pay off that loan, they might think it's a problem, and then the Department of Aboriginal Literature might have to rethink their tuition and/or cost structure.
- kevmo 7y agoSanders is a movement candidate. People who want real change should support him
- phaedryx 7y agoYou should also consider if the changes he wants are the changes you want, right?
- anonuser123456 7y agoCould the same not have been said about comrade Lenin?
- tim58 7y agoCan the US Government really "cancel" private debt (Debt a former/current student agreed to pay a private bank?)
- dqpb 7y agoIs it really private if it's backed by the government and immune to bankruptcy?
- anonuser123456 7y agoMen with guns can do anything they want.
- jki275 7y agoIn general, student loans in the US are no longer private loans. The federal government essentially funds all student loans in the US for the last ten years or so as I recall.
- farmerdave 7y agoThe problem is that it is not canceling the debt. It's like if I loan my son a $100 and then instead of saying you don't have to pay it back I raise the rent (taxes) on someone else to pay for it.
- pdq 7y agoMoral Hazard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard Who would pay toward their current student bill, if there were any chance of this passing? And what is the incentive for anyone to choose a cheaper public school, rather than a more expensive private one?
- supercanuck 7y agoI remember 26 year old me making this same argument in 2008 on Craigslist Message boards about the housing crisis.
- angel_j 7y agoThe housing crisis that the government bailed out?
- tim58 7y ago> And what is the incentive for anyone to choose a cheaper public school, rather than an expensive private one? From the article > as part of a package that also would make public universities, community colleges and trade schools tuition-free. There would be no incentive to pick a cheaper school because all schools would have the same price -- $0.00. Students should go to the best school they can get into. Schools should enroll the best students they can attract. It's better for both parties.
- rhino369 7y agoMost schools are private.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoHuh? In what country? In the USA, most schools are public, if we go by students that attend public vs private universities and colleges.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lettergram 7y agoCan someone else propose a bill to bar senators who are running for president from proposing bills? I find this disgraceful. Most of these loans were taken by students and co-signed by parents / guardians. Meaning everyone knew what they were getting into. Presumably, because the parents / guardians are on the line if the students can pay their debt, they would / are providing guidance (i.e. thinking of the long-term impact). Buying votes is the hallmark of American politics, usually with political favors; but this is a tad more than normal. I'll take my $70k in loans over selling my soul.
- ImGunter 7y agoSounds fine to me
- andrewstuart 7y agoThey'd be better to redefine every individual debt as having an interest cap, retrospectively applied.
- kenneth 7y agoThis is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard suggested yet. It goes against every value of fairness we hold. Bernie essentially wants to forcibly take money from everyone who was financially responsible enough to save and pay off their loans early, or who like me worked their asses off through college to be able to graduate without debt, and use it to pay those who were irresponsible enough to dig themselves into a massive debt hole. I have little empathy for people with student or credit card debt. You took a deal knowing the terms full well, you have no right to complain that you owe the money you already spent but never earned.
- jvm 7y agoNot to mention that the beneficiaries are by definition college educated, meaning they are currently or will in the future be among the highest income groups in the country!
- krastanov 7y agoLike you, I have hard time empathizing with people that put themselves in debt "knowingly". It is hard to not think they are just stupid. The issue is, I was lucky to have the opportunity to be educated about these risks early enough. I have hard time blaming people of not knowing something that was never alluded to when they were growing up (e.g. credit is not free money). Otherwise I agree with you, this is a ridiculous solution to an otherwise real problem.
- nightski 7y agoMaybe Bernie should fix the fact that our education system does not even include financial literacy courses instead of just mass forgiving debt. EDIT: Apparently down voters on HN are against financial education in our public schools.
- krastanov 7y agoThe etiquette is to not discuss votes on your comments. For what is worth, I suspect people dislike the snideness and lack of effort in the comment, not the notion of financial education.
- cwperkins 7y agoI understand moving the Overton window, but a plan like this just seems infeasible and dangerous. Like drug prices, the price of higher education should absolutely come down (or wages rise faster than the cost of higher education). I actually think the Department of Education's strategy is a good step forward here. By publishing earnings data of grads by major it helps inform prospective students of what would be a prudent major. My hope is that with the resurgence of the space sector with private space companies and going to Mars, that kids will have a new found interest in the sciences and move into more technical fields.
- alexandercrohde 7y agoI feel like sometimes short-term solutions can undermine long-term solutions. If the root of the issue is skyrocketing college cost due to lack of supply then this is going to reward all the consumers who weren't financially responsible (i.e. majored in something unprofitable), which in turn alleviates the market pressure on colleges to offer better value.
- padseeker 7y agoI went back to grad school to get my computer science degree, I still owe more than 35K from my bachelors and masters combined and I can say honestly this is a terrible idea. According to both liberal and conservative economists making higher education completely free is an awful economic policy. We're already running a deficit. Make it means based. For those those making less than 100K, for teachers, social workers, working for non-profit give those people a break. We loaned billions to financial institutions at exceptionally low interest rates during the economic crisis, give those same rates for college loans. But don't just cancel all of it. That's terrible economic policy.
- atmosx 7y agoFor comparison, Obama bailed out wall street in 2008 for 3.6T. Bernie is still on the cheap.
- jupiter90000 7y agoyou mean this one signed by Bush? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilization_Act_of_2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilizati... 'free market economics'
- jquery 7y agoThat was actually a great example of bipartisanship coming together to save our economic system from a total meltdown. "Let it all come crashing down" was the alternative. We (the taxpayers) were paid back and measures were put in place to prevent a recurrence.
- atmosx 7y agoYes, that is what I had in mind.
- jquery 7y agoThe "bailout" was the mass purchase of troubled assets which had underlying securities. IIRC we were paid back in full by Wall Street. So this proposal to cancel student debt is not a parallel. Completely federalizing existing student debt would be a more accurate parallel but would not cancel any individual's student debt.
- prewett 7y agoYou mean the TARP program which was proposed for 0.7T, authorized for 0.475T, actually spent 0.426T and recovered 0.441T? The one that was signed into law by Bush? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
- KingMachiavelli 7y agoI wanted to make this comparison (since I want something to be done even if it isn't a direct canceling of the debt) but there is a key difference; the government bought the toxic assets to stabilize financial institutions. I don't know all of the details but it seems it also bought shares of the institutions it was savings at super low prices. This in addition the the the amount that was paid back under the TARP means that it was net cost neutral (depending on how you count inflation, etc). To cancel students loans would mean getting 0% back on the entire ammount. An student loan equivilent of the TARP would be extending the loan payment period, adjusting the interest rate, pausing interest for a period, and other progams to ease the burden of the loans but still keep them on the books.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tehjoker 7y agoHopefully this just leads to free tuition in the US. People in other countries already make fun of us and say we "buy our degrees".
- thrill 7y agoDoes that mean people in other places are forced to buy their degrees?
- imnotyourkeeper 7y agoWish I would have known this before I served 6 years in the military to get my GI bill to go to college. Is this ridiculous to anyone else?
- aaomidi 7y agoYou design a system for the citizens you're representing. Not for citizens you ideally want to be representing. Are these debts using people's ignorance about financial terms to make money? AKA Are they predatory? - If so then that's a bad thing. You might not care - but I care about the well being for people I'm sharing a society with. I don't want people taken advantage of. I don't want education to have capital associated with it. I want people to be able to get education without "oh will i be able to pay off the loans for this education." So you might think you did a good job working your ass off affording education. People like Sanders and I think that getting a quality education should be completely unrelated to "working your ass off." I've also worked my ass off to afford my education. I still think it's a bad system and I don't care if my taxes are rerouted from killing people in foreign countries to helping my society get stronger and better.
- m3kw9 7y agoIs a case by case thing, some maybe predatory, some ignorant, but some are not. You can’t just say everyone gets off Some bad apples are there
- aaomidi 7y agoRight, but who cares! Why do we want to preserve this system that doesn't allow everyone to have a fair chance of progressing? Why does education need to be artificially limited? It's not difficult to imagine a world where education isn't limited by the amount of money in someone's bank. Think about all the possibilities if everyone can go learn whatever their heart desires without worrying about paying something back?
- turtleofdeath 7y ago> Think about all the possibilities if everyone can go learn whatever their heart desires without worrying about paying something back? They can do that online and or in a library. Once you start paying someone to teach them, it starts costing money and that money has to come from somewhere.
- 7y ago
- wtdata 7y agoAlthough I do think that education should be mostly free (which also means that the university degrees will be at according to the country needs... so there it goes most liberal arts degrees out the window), I think it's a very bad idea to change the rules of the game ad posteriori. We can't trust a state that just keeps changing the rules like this.
- darepublic 7y agoI believe Andrew Yang proposed something similar
- bradlys 7y agoI see the debt forgiveness programs similar to decriminalizing marijuana and releasing inmates. Yes, it's unfair that it's now decriminalized, you had to either serve partial or full time and suffer, but you probably knew the consequences of your actions. Maybe not fully but you had an idea. Doing this entire debt forgiveness thing is to level the playing field. It's to unburden the people of the past of their fiscal sentence while unlocking the decriminalizing of college. People in the past would be pissed if they had to keep paying their loans (serving time) if it was all free now. People who already paid (served full) have it rough but it was a different time. You have to make the transition somehow. Maybe my analogy sucks but I don't see how you can get buy in otherwise.
- jhhh 7y agoI know we in tech see all of our coworkers, friends and acquantences with degrees but only ~35% of US adults have a B.S. or higher. I'm not sure these people, the ones with the BS/MS/PHD degrees and can acquire the higher requirement jobs are the one that need to have their debts cancelled. At least Warren's plan attempted to be more reasonable about the limitations on income, relatively.
- betolink 7y agoSome comments here are along these lines: "emancipation is an insult to those who worked hard to pay off their masters for their liberty" give me a break. I paid student loans and I'll be happy that the next generation won't have to.
- rmrfrmrf 7y agoThis is how I see it, too. Colleges at this point are just siphoning money out of the federal government by jacking up tuition by rates several times the rate of inflation every year, and it doesn't take much effort to realize that the next generation of students will have to take on insane amounts of debt to gain even the opportunity of entry to the professional class. Even nowadays I have a hard time believing the pseudonymous internet bootstrappers who somehow paid for a bachelor's degree in 2012 by waiting tables between classes.
- LanceH 7y agoThe "privileged" are the ones attending college. Cancelling their debt -- in practice -- would be seen as racist/classist once someone runs the actual numbers. So there would be means testing and possibly race testing, or first generation college student testing. Now you have a dividing line with some people above it receiving nothing, and a lot pro-rated in the middle. Everyone is jealous of those receiving more than they are. The line that schools are getting more expensive because the free-riders don't pay anything isn't going to sit well with those who failed the means test and feel they are subsidizing. There is a strong fracture between the two groups and suddenly we're producing a whole new generation of Republicans. Or nobody takes Warren and Sanders seriously when it comes time to actually elect them outside their echo chamber and this goes nowhere.
- m3kw9 7y agoOk that’s very nobl, but someone else is paying that 1.6T that is owed to lenders. Doesn’t make sense any way you cut it unless you either force someone else to pay, force lenders to take a cut and a longer term with lower rates.. or ask the students to pay it back once they get settled. Someone is gonna pay
- jmpman 7y agoI didn’t realize how crazy a number this is until I did some math. Sanders proposed to fund it through taxes on Wall Street. Maybe that’s a good plan, but let’s see what it would mean if we funded it as a tax on each H1B. Currently there are 350,000 H1B. Let’s say that their spouses work as well, so we are up to 700,000 jobs (yes, I know the rules have changed recently) Let’s then say that we want to pay off the $1.6T just by taxing those jobs over the next 10 years. That comes out to $228k per H1B per year for the next 10 years. So, taxing H1B alone isn’t going to do it. What about raising the estate tax for the next 10 years?
- what_is_this 7y agoSome of the taxes on Wall Street included stuff like a 1% tax on bonds, 0.05% tax on derivatives Pretty sure Sanders is also in favor of higher estate taxes. Even Clinton was
- RickJWagner 7y agoPeople who attend college are already at a huge advantage. (And yes, we certainly need skilled tradespeople.) College grads do not need an even bigger edge.
- King-Aaron 7y agoIn this thread: "I hate this idea because I paid money so other people should too!" Note: I don't personally agree that wholesale cancellation of debts is necessarily the right thing to do - but this is the argument I'm seeing in this thread more than anything else.
- javagram 7y agoJust remove the tax penalty from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income-based_repayment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income-based_repayment and student loans won’t hold anyone back. (You pay only up to 10-15% of your discretionary income. After 30 years the remaining balance is forgiven, but the IRS considers the forgiven balance income and will try to tax you on it) Also, this should be the default payment plan instead of the 10-year repayment which is currently the default. For some reason people don’t seem to be aware of income-based repayment and are always talking about how their student loans are holding them back, i’m not sure why but I’d guess like any program, the default settings are what most people stick with.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- andrenth 7y agoWhy isn't this called populism?
- SSilver2k2 7y agoI have student loans, if next year all college students get free* tuition I'm not going to be upset that I had to pay. I'm going to be happy that they don't have my burden. We as a society need to push the next generation up, not bitch that they don't have it as hard as we do. *paid for by our taxes.
- totaldude87 7y agoJust too many questions at this point. what about the ones who have already paid the entirety of its loan? Isn't this problem a derivative of problem (insert costly higher education) here. Shouldn't this also mean that education loan will become one of the easy way to get into college even if you dont want to? What about the future generation? Its good to have free education in first place rather than giving out loans and taking it back. India took a similar stance on Farmer's loan waivers and it neither fixed the issue nor corrected it. Time to learn lessons.
- Simulacra 7y agoThis makes me very angry. I went to college twice, both times I got a federal loan, and both times, through blood sweat and tears, I paid it off myself. Why should I be penalized for choosing a major that pays, getting a job, and knuckling down to pay these loans? People must be held accountable for their poor decisions, even if it is $100,000 in student loans to get an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies [1] I also take offense to general tone of liberal policy these days of "giving" something away, or making something "free." Someone has to pay for it. There's a lot to be said and agreed upon for the common good, but there's more to be said for just paying your own damn bills and stop waiting for someone else to rescue you. [1]. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/your-money/student-loans/29money.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/your-money/student-loans/...
- bearjaws 7y ago"If I suffered then everyone must too!!" I didn't get any student loans when I went to college, but I see the economic benefit of freeing up that revenue to be spent else where. This is just an indirect way of saying that turning education into an "investment asset" for banks was a mistake.
- malvosenior 7y ago"I paid my bills so everyone must too!". Should we wipe out credit card debt next? Surely that's more of a burden than student loans since you can't defer payment and the interest rate is higher. How about mortgages, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt is definitely "suffering" levels.
- Simulacra 7y ago"In 2 minutes, primary charges will blow base charges and a few square blocks will be reduced to smoldering rubble."
- bearjaws 7y agoYou are being disingenuous when comparing spending too much money on your credit card to spending "too much" on education. I put "too much" in quotes because determining what the "right" education to get for the future is impossible. There are some educations that are more reliable (economically) but we have no clue what the job market will look like in 20 years, yet alone 30-40. Also don't even get me started on how we turned a literal requirement to survive (housing) into a "investment" asset (mortgages).
- human_banana 7y agoIf 18 year olds aren't mature enough to enter into financial agreements, or purchase handguns, or drink alcohol how could the possibly be mature enough to vote? Or get married? Or join the army? Either you're an adult at 18 or not. The 18-21 (maybe 25 for rental cars) grey zone is bullshit.
- rajekas 7y agoI am not American though I live in the US and I don't have student debt. I probably won't retire in the US either, which means that all the money I pay into social security is a donation from me to you. And I grew up in circumstances substantially more constrained than most people here who are complaining about the unfairness of Bernie's proposal. I don't agree with that one bit. The US is the richest country in the history of humanity. It owes its citizens a good life - education, health etc - no questions asked. In fact, it owes that to the rest of the world, since so much of the wealth has been created through the hard work of immigrants :) If I could vote, I would pull the lever for Bernie without hesitation for being the only candidate for the Presidency who truly understands the depth of transformation this economy needs. An America without pain and uncertainty will make the world's problems easier to solve.
- siculars 7y agoWrong problem. Make school cheaper. I'd seriously consider removing private (and public) schools tax exempt status. Or tax them at some non zero rate pegged to their fee curve. Tuition growing at double digit percent a year is utterly insane.
- sxp62000 7y agoThis would certainly solve the problem where smart kids go to good but expensive schools, and then take on garbage consulting jobs so that they can pay off their loans.