12 ms·

For less than this same price tag, we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, l

by CSSer 2y ago

For less than this same price tag, we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home and/or feeling more comfortable starting a family. It would stimulate the economy in predictable ways. Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
This is the problem with capitalists / the billionaires currently hoarding the money and the US' policy, it's all for short term gain. But the conservatives that look back to the 50's or 80's or whatever decade their rose-tinted glasses are tuned to should also realise that the good parts of that came from families not being neck-deep in debt.
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
  Yes you don't want to destroy your food chain. If everyone is poor except you then you are now poor.
buran77 2y ago
Repaying student loans makes a lot of people a little richer. The current initiative makes a few people a lot richer. If you ask some people, the former is a very communist/socialist way of thinking (bad), while the latter is pure, unadulterated capitalism (good).
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
  That and a lot of people do not have the means to convince current power centers ( unless they were to organize, which they either don't, can't or are dissuaded from ) to do their bidding, while few rich ones do. And so the old saying 'rich become richer' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  - buran77 2y ago
    That was the implication indeed. Money is like gravity, the more you have the more you can pull in. This will give a person the power to do anything to make more money (change the laws as desired, or break them if needed) but also the perfect shield from any repercussions.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  One of the more destructive situations in capitalism is the fact that (financially) helping the many will increase inflation and lead to more problems. When a few people get really rich it kind of slips through the gaps, the broader system isn't impacted too much. When most people get a little rich they spend that money and prices go up. Said differently, wealth is all relative so when most people get a little more rich their comparative wealth didn't really change.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    you can redistribute real resources - every person spending their life working on a rich persons yacht rather than helping educate the next generation due to the price system, for instance, is a real distribution of resources. this is why consumption taxes are modern and valuable
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      If we have to have taxes, I'm very much in favor of a consumption tax. It doesn't work for our current system though, capitalism kind of hits a wall when spending money is disincentivized (compared to saving money or simply not trying to earn more). Redistribution of wealth is tricky and almost certainly runs into the same wall I mentioned in my last comment. When everyone competing with each other (financially) see a similar bump in income they didn't really change anything. Redistribution is more helpful when targeting the wealth gap and not very useful when considering how wealtht the majority of people "feel". That said, I 100% agree people shouldn't be working their entire life on a rich person's boat. That's a much bigger, and more fundamental, problem though. That gets to the core of a debt-based society and the need for self reliance. The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income. 100% this but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn't happen at scale. even here on HN if you post something along these lines but in real terms you will get downvoted like crazy and get even crazier comments. the system is setup to make sure there are workers, w2 workers. this is why there is student loans and this is why schools do not teach you to be an entrepreneur, to be a salesman, to hustle for yourself and not for someone else. I see so many people here talking about leetcode and faang and I think to myself that is just modern day slavery. if you are LXXX at say Meta making say $750k/year, I think the same - you are a modern-day slave. if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more. no company is going to pay you more than you are worth to them and they won't even break even with you so-to-speak so you can bank on this fact whoever you work for and whatever you bank. though there is a big difference between working on someone's yacht and making $750k the principles are the same but system is working hard and succeeding in making sure it stays as it is...
- refurb 2y ago
  You can make the same argument about going to the moon. Why bother when so many problems could be solved on earth.
hcks 2y ago
I know!! Also we could have given an IPhone to 500 million of people for the amount!! It’s such a waste to think they’re investing it in the future instead
nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
Eliminating some student debt is a fish. Free university is the fishing rod. Do that instead.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Free to the student sounds nice, but who pays for it in the end? And does an education lose a bit of its value when anyone can get it for free?
  - was_a_dev 2y ago
    Free to US citizens would be a better policy, the state investing in its own people.
    - diggan 2y ago
      Granted! Now US universities consist of 99% immigrants/people on student visas. As long as you let universities act like for-profit businesses, their profits will be the only thing they optimize for.
      - weakfish 2y ago
        Has that happened in countries with similar policies?
        Fidelix 2y ago
        No. It's a disaster. The poor pay for the richest to go to public universities. See Brazil. There are more low-income people in private universities (with private or private/public loans) than in public universities.
        weakfish 2y ago
        Source?
        2y ago
bitlax 2y ago
Let the schools pay back the people they scammed.
visarga 2y ago
The problem with allowing student debt to rack up to these levels and then cancelling it is that it would embolden universities to ask even higher tuition. A second problem is that not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it. It would be unfair to them.
- jimkleiber 2y ago
  Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully fair. And there could be a change in the law that allows people to forgive student debt in personal bankruptcy, and that could make sure higher tuition doesnt happen.
  - greentxt 2y ago
    It would do more good in K12 or pre-K than it would paying off private debts held by white collar highly educated not rich yet due only to their young age university-bros.
    - ajmurmann 2y ago
      It truly is astonishing. We have kids who cannot afford school lunches, people working multiple blue-collar jobs and yet the problems of people who are statistically better off than average constantly jump to the front. People complain about Effective Altruism because of one dude messing up big but it would behoove everyone to read up on the basic philosophy of it before suggesting how we best spent billions to help reduce suffering.
      - jimkleiber 2y ago
        The problem with EA is in judging what is effective. Perhaps ridding the unforgivable student loans of parents actually helps the kids more than school lunches. And frankly, some of the most effective altruism may be just to directly give cash to people, yet I don't know how many people in the EA community would trust people so much with unconditional cash.
Octoth0rpe 2y ago
> Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die. AFAICT from this article and others on the same subject, the 500 billion number does not appear to be public money. It sounds like it's 100 billion of private investment (probably mostly from Son), and FTA, > could reach five times that sum (5x 100 billion === 500 billion, the # everyone seems to be quoting)
ajmurmann 2y ago
Or, prices of houses would go up even more because we still aren't allowing supply to increase and people having more money doesn't change that.
JohnPrine 2y ago
I'm starting to think there's no difference between this website and reddit
- actualwitch 2y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
  - JohnPrine 2y ago
    lol you got me
- azemetre 2y ago
  This site is way way way more capital friendly than worker friendly.
_heimdall 2y ago
Eliminating debt has a lot of unintended consequences. Price inflation would almost certainly be a problem, for example. It's also not clear to me what happens to all of the derivatives based on student debt, though there may very well be an answer there that I just haven't understood yet.
whimsicalism 2y ago
i’m sorry but student debt payoffs are probably one of the lowest socially valuable uses of this money, rather than basic things like snap or housing vouchers. sorta shows how myopic HN is, student debt is a relatable concern so it gets prioritized
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  also just: “why invest it when we could spend it on consumption now” is a good argument against letting private wealth usage be socially determined if most people just always vote for consumption now
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home I'd give the money to folks starting in the trades before bailling out the college-educated class. Also, wiping out numbers on a spreadsheet doesn't erect new homes. If we wiped out student debt, the portion of that value that went into new homeownership would principally flow to existing homeowners. Finally, you're comparing a government hand-out to private investment into a capital asset. That's like comparing eating out at a nice restaurant to buying a bond. Different prerogatives.
- talldayo 2y ago
  It's a fair comparison. Stargate is fundamentally about two things - America's industry needs a cash injection, and we're choosing a completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into. Problem is, the parent comment is right. Even if you think student loan mitigation has washy economics behind it, the outcome is predictable and even desirable if you're playing the long-game in politics. If not that, spend $500,000,000,000 towards onshoring Apple and Microsoft's manufacturing jobs. Spend it re-invigorating America's mothballed motor industry and let Elon spec it out like a kid in a candy shop. Relative to AI, even student loan forgiveness and dumping money into trades looks attractive (not that Trump would consider either). Nobody on HN should be confused by this. We know Sam Altman is a scammer (Worldcoin, anyone?) and we know OpenAI is a terrible business. This money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on and preserve the Weekend At Bernie's-esque corpse that is America's "lead" in software technology. That's it. It's blatantly simple.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into One, you’re not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off student debt. Two, if they do what they say they want to, they’ll be building new power generation, transmission infrastructures and data centres. Even if AI is a hype, that’s far from useless capital. > money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on OpenAI is spending their own money on this.
daryl_martis 2y ago
go to the uk. they have all the free abortions, genders, and education you could possibly want. apply for asylum since you're clearly afraid for your life.
b59831 2y ago
[dead]
rqtwteye 2y ago
"we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. " Don't throw more money at schools. They will happily take the money and jack up tuition even more. There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.
- aimanbenbaha 2y ago
  > There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does. There is and it's explained by Baumol's cost disease. Basically you can't sustain paying professors the same wage while productivity increases in other parts of the economy. Even if the actual labor of "professing" hasn't gotten more productive. You have to retain them by keeping up with the broader wage increases. And that cost increase gets passed down to students.
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    As far as I know the money doesn't go to professors but to ever increasing administration and shiny buildings.
eichi 2y ago
History says almost all society was corrputed and previous 50 to 80 years are slight exception. People with power prefer to give power to selected people selected by their personal preference.
cudgy 2y ago
Allowing student debts to be included in bankruptcy takes care of most of the issue. Those that were unable to find decent, paying jobs will have a path to relieve the stress of high student loan payments, while those that found high paying jobs will continue paying on the loans from which they received a benefit.
laurentiurad 2y ago
You are forgetting the fact that this is a private investment, whereas the student loans problem should be solved by the government. No private institutions will have any interests in paying off student loans.

by CSSer 2y ago

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

This is the problem with capitalists / the billionaires currently hoarding the money and the US' policy, it's all for short term gain. But the conservatives that look back to the 50's or 80's or whatever decade their rose-tinted glasses are tuned to should also realise that the good parts of that came from families not being neck-deep in debt.

nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
Yes you don't want to destroy your food chain. If everyone is poor except you then you are now poor.

buran77 2y ago

Repaying student loans makes a lot of people a little richer. The current initiative makes a few people a lot richer. If you ask some people, the former is a very communist/socialist way of thinking (bad), while the latter is pure, unadulterated capitalism (good).

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
That and a lot of people do not have the means to convince current power centers ( unless they were to organize, which they either don't, can't or are dissuaded from ) to do their bidding, while few rich ones do. And so the old saying 'rich become richer' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- buran77 2y ago
  That was the implication indeed. Money is like gravity, the more you have the more you can pull in. This will give a person the power to do anything to make more money (change the laws as desired, or break them if needed) but also the perfect shield from any repercussions.
_heimdall 2y ago
One of the more destructive situations in capitalism is the fact that (financially) helping the many will increase inflation and lead to more problems. When a few people get really rich it kind of slips through the gaps, the broader system isn't impacted too much. When most people get a little rich they spend that money and prices go up. Said differently, wealth is all relative so when most people get a little more rich their comparative wealth didn't really change.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  you can redistribute real resources - every person spending their life working on a rich persons yacht rather than helping educate the next generation due to the price system, for instance, is a real distribution of resources. this is why consumption taxes are modern and valuable
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    If we have to have taxes, I'm very much in favor of a consumption tax. It doesn't work for our current system though, capitalism kind of hits a wall when spending money is disincentivized (compared to saving money or simply not trying to earn more). Redistribution of wealth is tricky and almost certainly runs into the same wall I mentioned in my last comment. When everyone competing with each other (financially) see a similar bump in income they didn't really change anything. Redistribution is more helpful when targeting the wealth gap and not very useful when considering how wealtht the majority of people "feel". That said, I 100% agree people shouldn't be working their entire life on a rich person's boat. That's a much bigger, and more fundamental, problem though. That gets to the core of a debt-based society and the need for self reliance. The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      The most effective way to get out from under someone else's boot (financially) is to work towards a spot where you aren't dependent on them or the job's income. 100% this but entire system is setup to make sure this doesn't happen at scale. even here on HN if you post something along these lines but in real terms you will get downvoted like crazy and get even crazier comments. the system is setup to make sure there are workers, w2 workers. this is why there is student loans and this is why schools do not teach you to be an entrepreneur, to be a salesman, to hustle for yourself and not for someone else. I see so many people here talking about leetcode and faang and I think to myself that is just modern day slavery. if you are LXXX at say Meta making say $750k/year, I think the same - you are a modern-day slave. if Meta is paying you $750k/year that really means that you are worth twice that, if not more. no company is going to pay you more than you are worth to them and they won't even break even with you so-to-speak so you can bank on this fact whoever you work for and whatever you bank. though there is a big difference between working on someone's yacht and making $750k the principles are the same but system is working hard and succeeding in making sure it stays as it is...
refurb 2y ago
You can make the same argument about going to the moon. Why bother when so many problems could be solved on earth.

hcks 2y ago

I know!! Also we could have given an IPhone to 500 million of people for the amount!! It’s such a waste to think they’re investing it in the future instead

nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago

Eliminating some student debt is a fish. Free university is the fishing rod. Do that instead.

_heimdall 2y ago
Free to the student sounds nice, but who pays for it in the end? And does an education lose a bit of its value when anyone can get it for free?
- was_a_dev 2y ago
  Free to US citizens would be a better policy, the state investing in its own people.
  - diggan 2y ago
    Granted! Now US universities consist of 99% immigrants/people on student visas. As long as you let universities act like for-profit businesses, their profits will be the only thing they optimize for.
    - weakfish 2y ago
      Has that happened in countries with similar policies?
      - Fidelix 2y ago
        No. It's a disaster. The poor pay for the richest to go to public universities. See Brazil. There are more low-income people in private universities (with private or private/public loans) than in public universities.
        weakfish 2y ago
        Source?
        2y ago

bitlax 2y ago

Let the schools pay back the people they scammed.

visarga 2y ago

The problem with allowing student debt to rack up to these levels and then cancelling it is that it would embolden universities to ask even higher tuition. A second problem is that not all students get the benefit, some already paid off their debts or a large part of it. It would be unfair to them.

jimkleiber 2y ago
Yes but every policy is unfair. It literally is choosing where to give a limited resource, it can never be fully fair. And there could be a change in the law that allows people to forgive student debt in personal bankruptcy, and that could make sure higher tuition doesnt happen.
- greentxt 2y ago
  It would do more good in K12 or pre-K than it would paying off private debts held by white collar highly educated not rich yet due only to their young age university-bros.
  - ajmurmann 2y ago
    It truly is astonishing. We have kids who cannot afford school lunches, people working multiple blue-collar jobs and yet the problems of people who are statistically better off than average constantly jump to the front. People complain about Effective Altruism because of one dude messing up big but it would behoove everyone to read up on the basic philosophy of it before suggesting how we best spent billions to help reduce suffering.
    - jimkleiber 2y ago
      The problem with EA is in judging what is effective. Perhaps ridding the unforgivable student loans of parents actually helps the kids more than school lunches. And frankly, some of the most effective altruism may be just to directly give cash to people, yet I don't know how many people in the EA community would trust people so much with unconditional cash.

Octoth0rpe 2y ago

> Instead we gave a small number of people all of this money for a moonshot in a state where they squabble over who’s allowed to use which bathroom and if I need an abortion I might die. AFAICT from this article and others on the same subject, the 500 billion number does not appear to be public money. It sounds like it's 100 billion of private investment (probably mostly from Son), and FTA, > could reach five times that sum (5x 100 billion === 500 billion, the # everyone seems to be quoting)

ajmurmann 2y ago

Or, prices of houses would go up even more because we still aren't allowing supply to increase and people having more money doesn't change that.

JohnPrine 2y ago

I'm starting to think there's no difference between this website and reddit

actualwitch 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
- JohnPrine 2y ago
  lol you got me
azemetre 2y ago
This site is way way way more capital friendly than worker friendly.

_heimdall 2y ago

Eliminating debt has a lot of unintended consequences. Price inflation would almost certainly be a problem, for example. It's also not clear to me what happens to all of the derivatives based on student debt, though there may very well be an answer there that I just haven't understood yet.

whimsicalism 2y ago

i’m sorry but student debt payoffs are probably one of the lowest socially valuable uses of this money, rather than basic things like snap or housing vouchers. sorta shows how myopic HN is, student debt is a relatable concern so it gets prioritized

whimsicalism 2y ago
also just: “why invest it when we could spend it on consumption now” is a good argument against letting private wealth usage be socially determined if most people just always vote for consumption now

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. It would in turn open a myriad number of opportunities, like owning a home I'd give the money to folks starting in the trades before bailling out the college-educated class. Also, wiping out numbers on a spreadsheet doesn't erect new homes. If we wiped out student debt, the portion of that value that went into new homeownership would principally flow to existing homeowners. Finally, you're comparing a government hand-out to private investment into a capital asset. That's like comparing eating out at a nice restaurant to buying a bond. Different prerogatives.

talldayo 2y ago
It's a fair comparison. Stargate is fundamentally about two things - America's industry needs a cash injection, and we're choosing a completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into. Problem is, the parent comment is right. Even if you think student loan mitigation has washy economics behind it, the outcome is predictable and even desirable if you're playing the long-game in politics. If not that, spend $500,000,000,000 towards onshoring Apple and Microsoft's manufacturing jobs. Spend it re-invigorating America's mothballed motor industry and let Elon spec it out like a kid in a candy shop. Relative to AI, even student loan forgiveness and dumping money into trades looks attractive (not that Trump would consider either). Nobody on HN should be confused by this. We know Sam Altman is a scammer (Worldcoin, anyone?) and we know OpenAI is a terrible business. This money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on and preserve the Weekend At Bernie's-esque corpse that is America's "lead" in software technology. That's it. It's blatantly simple.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > completely hype-dominated vein to push the needle into One, you’re not getting MGX and SoftBank to pay off student debt. Two, if they do what they say they want to, they’ll be building new power generation, transmission infrastructures and data centres. Even if AI is a hype, that’s far from useless capital. > money is being deliberately wasted to keep OpenAI's lights on OpenAI is spending their own money on this.

daryl_martis 2y ago

go to the uk. they have all the free abortions, genders, and education you could possibly want. apply for asylum since you're clearly afraid for your life.

b59831 2y ago

[dead]

rqtwteye 2y ago

"we could’ve eliminated student loan debt for ~20 million Americans. " Don't throw more money at schools. They will happily take the money and jack up tuition even more. There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does.

aimanbenbaha 2y ago
> There is no reason why tuition is going up at the pace it does. There is and it's explained by Baumol's cost disease. Basically you can't sustain paying professors the same wage while productivity increases in other parts of the economy. Even if the actual labor of "professing" hasn't gotten more productive. You have to retain them by keeping up with the broader wage increases. And that cost increase gets passed down to students.
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  As far as I know the money doesn't go to professors but to ever increasing administration and shiny buildings.

eichi 2y ago

History says almost all society was corrputed and previous 50 to 80 years are slight exception. People with power prefer to give power to selected people selected by their personal preference.

cudgy 2y ago

Allowing student debts to be included in bankruptcy takes care of most of the issue. Those that were unable to find decent, paying jobs will have a path to relieve the stress of high student loan payments, while those that found high paying jobs will continue paying on the loans from which they received a benefit.

laurentiurad 2y ago

You are forgetting the fact that this is a private investment, whereas the student loans problem should be solved by the government. No private institutions will have any interests in paying off student loans.