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Same problem with the student loan forgiveness being pushed in the US currently. My cynical take is that they’d just do the forgiveness and refuse to talk about

by sfblah 4y ago

Same problem with the student loan forgiveness being pushed in the US currently. My cynical take is that they’d just do the forgiveness and refuse to talk about the people in the situation you described.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Most of the attitude I’ve seen to that situation is “tough luck, life isn’t fair”… seemingly oblivious to their original argument for forgiveness being it’s unfair they’re saddled with that debt.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  There’s no shortage of single-ply thinking in the world of politics.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Politics is a numbers game, though, not a moral one. There are ~258M adults in the US. ~43M of them have student loans. Already you can see a problem. 17% is nowhere near a majority. If you are looking to make people happy and vote for you, targeting a 17% demographic is not an ideal strategy to begin with. But some amount of the remaining 83% had student loans and paid them off. Comments on HN and Reddit notwithstanding, a non-trivial fraction of those will be put off by a decision to forgive current student loans. Some other amount of people, probably a majority, never went to college to begin with. From their perspective, you just gave free money to a minority of people who were already privileged to begin with, by even being able to go to college at any price. This is not how you win elections, and politicians primarily exist to win elections. It is entirely possible that forgiving student loans would result in a net-negative change in votes in the next election, and maybe for a while after that. At the very least they need to fix the underlying problem before creating such a moral hazard, or the next round will be much bigger. If they really want to buy votes this way, it would probably be more effective to just give yet another stimulus -- a nice, big one -- to every voter in the country.

by sfblah 4y ago

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

Most of the attitude I’ve seen to that situation is “tough luck, life isn’t fair”… seemingly oblivious to their original argument for forgiveness being it’s unfair they’re saddled with that debt.

sokoloff 4y ago
There’s no shortage of single-ply thinking in the world of politics.
rootusrootus 4y ago
Politics is a numbers game, though, not a moral one. There are ~258M adults in the US. ~43M of them have student loans. Already you can see a problem. 17% is nowhere near a majority. If you are looking to make people happy and vote for you, targeting a 17% demographic is not an ideal strategy to begin with. But some amount of the remaining 83% had student loans and paid them off. Comments on HN and Reddit notwithstanding, a non-trivial fraction of those will be put off by a decision to forgive current student loans. Some other amount of people, probably a majority, never went to college to begin with. From their perspective, you just gave free money to a minority of people who were already privileged to begin with, by even being able to go to college at any price. This is not how you win elections, and politicians primarily exist to win elections. It is entirely possible that forgiving student loans would result in a net-negative change in votes in the next election, and maybe for a while after that. At the very least they need to fix the underlying problem before creating such a moral hazard, or the next round will be much bigger. If they really want to buy votes this way, it would probably be more effective to just give yet another stimulus -- a nice, big one -- to every voter in the country.