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> As a hypothetical, you’re arguing that society should have more sympathy for your wife’s family than GP’s partner’s family? No, I'm arguing that taking away

> As a hypothetical, you’re arguing that society should have more sympathy for your wife’s family than GP’s partner’s family? No, I'm arguing that taking away from the general public to provide for a subset of people requires that the subset boundaries be well justified. Good examples are "people who are poor", and "people who are sick". A bad example would be "people who owe money on their house in 2022". Do those people benefit from debt forgiveness? Of course! And I'm sure they'd be very grateful for it. Meanwhile, people who decided to rent in 2022 or pay their house off in 2021 are footing the bill, for no discernible reason. > How exactly are we supposed to litigate a “wife’s family vs other wife/husband’s family” debate in these terms? Did the people working low-wage jobs spend time on food stamps? Section 8? Subsidized phone service? Those are just benefits for poor people. Those are good, and though some of them could stand to be "ramped" better, they're generally the right idea. Again, the problem is selecting a highly arbitrary subset of people while excluding their peers who differ only in the decisions they made (to take out a loan or not, to pay off a loan quickly or not). The boundaries don't even bother selecting for people in real need. 125k/250k household income? Contemplate those numbers for a minute. So you went to college and you have a world-class job in the 90th percentile of the USA and you're getting money from the government to give you that boost you need so you can, what, remodel your home theater a year sooner than you planned? > If the answer is no, do you think that people working low-income jobs do not, on average, take advantage of public money in any way? People with no degrees driving our food to us and our garbage away can take public money, yes. Being against any form of wealth redistribution is light-years away from being against this one particular redistribution.

braingenious 4y ago
How do people that got fooled into useless degrees that end up working low-wage jobs anyway factor into this? For example the people that fell victim to the likes of Devry that are only now (after decades of payments!) looking at maybe getting their debt erased due to a lengthy and complicated class action lawsuit. There is a huge industry based around selling people on the value of a college degree. It is very competitive and aggressive and wholly uncoupled from the actual value of a degree. There are quite a lot of poor people working at McDonald’s and Walmart with student debt. But fuck those people because some engineers might have a slightly reduced monthly payment is your line of reasoning?
- rcoveson 4y ago
  I don’t think you’re even trying to understand what I’m saying. I don’t think it’s wrong to give genuinely struggling people, including students, money. I think it’s wrong to draw the particular box that this policy drew: people with outstanding student debt and income below 125k/250k. That is a bad boundary. There are people excluded who should clearly be included, and people included who should clearly be excluded.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    Which of the following scenarios is preferable to you? A. People that make under $125k get $10,000 of student debt forgiven B. Nothing happens. Everyone’s debt stays the same. Are you aware that in reality, complaining about this happening for people that make $124k is exactly the same as complaining about this happening for people that make $15k? Are you aware that by pointing out that this helps people making 90th percentile money you’re also admitting that 90% of people do not make that much? There phrase “throwing the baby out with the bath water” comes to mind.
    - rcoveson 4y ago
      I think one of the things you're saying is that "whatever legislation ends up passed was the best legislation that anybody was capable of passing in the current political environment", which is sort of a truism. Could these exact politicians, in this portion of their election cycles, and with this opposition, etc, etc, have passed something better? Almost by definition no, because those are all the parameters of the system. A different result would imply a different upstream. You're also misrepresenting "B. Nothing happens. Everyone's debt stays the same." That's not an accurate description. Every expensive program that gets rejected alleviates a little pressure on all the other programs that might be put in place, and the ones that get accepted put pressure on everything else to get rejected. It's not easy to say what those 400 billion would have been spent on if it weren't this, so answering the question of whether I'd pick A or B isn't easy. I personally don't think that a modified version getting passed instead that gives out less money but to a broader set of people (broader in some ways, narrower in others; the income threshold should definitely be lower) is all that unlikely. Frankly I think the version we got is surprising. So I suppose that I would pick B, fully expecting the federal government to spend 400 billion on something else that I probably won't be 100% happy with either, but which I think is more likely than not to be an improvement over what we got.

braingenious 4y ago

How do people that got fooled into useless degrees that end up working low-wage jobs anyway factor into this? For example the people that fell victim to the likes of Devry that are only now (after decades of payments!) looking at maybe getting their debt erased due to a lengthy and complicated class action lawsuit. There is a huge industry based around selling people on the value of a college degree. It is very competitive and aggressive and wholly uncoupled from the actual value of a degree. There are quite a lot of poor people working at McDonald’s and Walmart with student debt. But fuck those people because some engineers might have a slightly reduced monthly payment is your line of reasoning?

rcoveson 4y ago
I don’t think you’re even trying to understand what I’m saying. I don’t think it’s wrong to give genuinely struggling people, including students, money. I think it’s wrong to draw the particular box that this policy drew: people with outstanding student debt and income below 125k/250k. That is a bad boundary. There are people excluded who should clearly be included, and people included who should clearly be excluded.
- braingenious 4y ago
  Which of the following scenarios is preferable to you? A. People that make under $125k get $10,000 of student debt forgiven B. Nothing happens. Everyone’s debt stays the same. Are you aware that in reality, complaining about this happening for people that make $124k is exactly the same as complaining about this happening for people that make $15k? Are you aware that by pointing out that this helps people making 90th percentile money you’re also admitting that 90% of people do not make that much? There phrase “throwing the baby out with the bath water” comes to mind.
  - rcoveson 4y ago
    I think one of the things you're saying is that "whatever legislation ends up passed was the best legislation that anybody was capable of passing in the current political environment", which is sort of a truism. Could these exact politicians, in this portion of their election cycles, and with this opposition, etc, etc, have passed something better? Almost by definition no, because those are all the parameters of the system. A different result would imply a different upstream. You're also misrepresenting "B. Nothing happens. Everyone's debt stays the same." That's not an accurate description. Every expensive program that gets rejected alleviates a little pressure on all the other programs that might be put in place, and the ones that get accepted put pressure on everything else to get rejected. It's not easy to say what those 400 billion would have been spent on if it weren't this, so answering the question of whether I'd pick A or B isn't easy. I personally don't think that a modified version getting passed instead that gives out less money but to a broader set of people (broader in some ways, narrower in others; the income threshold should definitely be lower) is all that unlikely. Frankly I think the version we got is surprising. So I suppose that I would pick B, fully expecting the federal government to spend 400 billion on something else that I probably won't be 100% happy with either, but which I think is more likely than not to be an improvement over what we got.