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I've got mixed opinions on this one––I feel like we often wrongly conflate "the elite" and "those with a college degree". The real losers if we cancel student l

I've got mixed opinions on this one––I feel like we often wrongly conflate "the elite" and "those with a college degree". The real losers if we cancel student loan debt is probably decamillionaires+ due to taxes. That said, I'm not in favor of immediate student loan cancellation. I think we need a sustainable solution to prevent a rebuild-up of student loans first, and I think we also need to aim to implement the same solutions for those in trade school for the same reason the author mentions. If we're in favor of public funding for secondary schools, why not post-secondary where folks actually tend to learn to critically think and learn their skills for the job market?

fr11 6y ago
I think we all lose, if we do decide to pay for this entirely through taxing the rich. We (further) lose social trust between the rich and the rest of us, and we (further) lose the sense that we're all in this together, and we encourage ourselves to further think about how we can get those people over there to pay for our stuff over here. To be clear, yes, please, tax the rich. But do so with a progressive taxation that we all pay into, so we all share the cost to the best of our ability.
zozbot234 6y ago
It's a hard problem. People who incur a lot of student debt are basically a random mixture of "students at actual elite colleges", "non-traditional students at for-profit colleges of wildly variable quality" and "people who incurred debt to get their MBA or other professional degrees". It makes no sense to treat all of these people equally wrt. debt forgiveness, and no they aren't just "the elite" either.