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The difference is that people on food stamps and people who are in homeless shelters are in need of help. They are our most needy (perhaps in addition to those

The difference is that people on food stamps and people who are in homeless shelters are in need of help. They are our most needy (perhaps in addition to those on mediaid). I am not needy, yet for some reason I would have been a beneficiary of Biden's original student loan forgiveness plan. Giving money to people for having loans for a college degree doesn't seem like a great way to redistribute to "those in need". I haven't looked it up, but I'd be willing to bet that people with student loans earn more than others their age, even after accounting for their loan payments. And it does create a massive moral hazard. I still have my student loans, because why would I pay them off? I'd rather wait for someone to get elected and decide to pay them off for me. (And you can bet that everyone considering taking loans is thinking the same thing, and factoring the chance of forgiveness into the expected cost of the loans.)

dahart 1y ago
FWIW, that strikes me as a somewhat myopic view of ‘need’. Homelessness and food stamps are certainly an incredibly acute need, for daily survival. But investing in education is something our country needs for long term survival. The US makes more money on the additional income tax of college educated people than it costs to educate them, many times over. It’s in our collective interest to put you (and anyone who wants to go) through college. I totally get the personal responsibility angle here, but the actual moral hazard here is that our country chooses not to cover education in the first place, when it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything else, and not educating people is worse for everyone (except perhaps a few CEO billionaires). As a total side note, it’s also really interesting to me how strong our ingrained no-free-lunch and teach-someone-to-fish mores are, even when there’s lots of strong counter evidence. Poverty is extremely damaging and getting people out of poverty by giving them what they need is more important than forcing people to struggle through it and learn something. The (often) unspoken assumption that rides under that stuff is that people are poor because of bad choices and low work ethic, which is frequently completely and utterly wrong, and anyway extremely complicated because being poor forces people to make bad choices. Breaking the cycle allows people in need to live and breathe and make good choices.
- nradov 1y ago
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  - deleted 1y ago
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  - dahart 1y ago
    On the contrary, we absolutely need variety, we people to study weird things, we can’t all be doctors and lawyers. No idea what “bizarre ideologies” you’re referring to but generally speaking, lack of education combined with polarizing politics, propaganda, and misinformation are a risk that is orders of magnitude larger than having an educated populace. Why does it matter if every single degree is perfectly relevant? What evidence is there that we need to be selective, or worry about and try to ensure value? How do you define value? Sounds like the Nirvana Fallacy. When it comes to research, thinking this way often reduces positive outcomes; we have to risk and allow failures in order to capture the bigger breakthroughs. Not just true in research, but true in business too. Why would you think education is any different? Plus, people are already quite self selective for the high paying jobs on average, and there are countries that pay for education and have higher per capita GDP than the US, like Iceland and Norway. Education and research already provides a return to the economy of multiples on investment. There’s no demonstrated economic need to try to exert control over it.
    - nradov 1y ago
      On the contrary. If graduates can't even manage to pay back their loans then that's pretty good evidence that their education didn't have much value. If you want to claim some sort of abstract "value" measured in other ways then the burden is on you to provide evidence. I'm not interested in vague hand waving arguments to justify spending tax money.
      - dahart 1y ago
        That’s not good evidence at all, you’re making massive assumptions that don’t hold up. I did already provide some hard evidence you ignored: several other countries are already paying for education for all interested citizens and are doing better than the US by economic measures, not worse. My salary is not my GDP. The financial cost of a loan is not equal to the financial value education provides to society. I’m asked to pay back my loan very early in my career in my 20s, before I have the chance to build a career and accumulate any savings. On top of that, the financial cost of education has risen faster than inflation for a few decades due to incentives that wouldn’t exist if education was provided. According to the St Louis Fed, among other sources, income taxes collected on college grads is more than 2x the taxes collected on people without degrees, and the lifetime total collected for college grads is many multiples of what college costs even today. Think about the taxes a little harder and it should become obvious that it’s a waste of tax money to not ensure that everyone who wants a degree should get one without having a financial burden. We won’t spend more tax money providing free education, we will collect more tax money.

dahart 1y ago

FWIW, that strikes me as a somewhat myopic view of ‘need’. Homelessness and food stamps are certainly an incredibly acute need, for daily survival. But investing in education is something our country needs for long term survival. The US makes more money on the additional income tax of college educated people than it costs to educate them, many times over. It’s in our collective interest to put you (and anyone who wants to go) through college. I totally get the personal responsibility angle here, but the actual moral hazard here is that our country chooses not to cover education in the first place, when it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything else, and not educating people is worse for everyone (except perhaps a few CEO billionaires). As a total side note, it’s also really interesting to me how strong our ingrained no-free-lunch and teach-someone-to-fish mores are, even when there’s lots of strong counter evidence. Poverty is extremely damaging and getting people out of poverty by giving them what they need is more important than forcing people to struggle through it and learn something. The (often) unspoken assumption that rides under that stuff is that people are poor because of bad choices and low work ethic, which is frequently completely and utterly wrong, and anyway extremely complicated because being poor forces people to make bad choices. Breaking the cycle allows people in need to live and breathe and make good choices.

nradov 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dahart 1y ago
  On the contrary, we absolutely need variety, we people to study weird things, we can’t all be doctors and lawyers. No idea what “bizarre ideologies” you’re referring to but generally speaking, lack of education combined with polarizing politics, propaganda, and misinformation are a risk that is orders of magnitude larger than having an educated populace. Why does it matter if every single degree is perfectly relevant? What evidence is there that we need to be selective, or worry about and try to ensure value? How do you define value? Sounds like the Nirvana Fallacy. When it comes to research, thinking this way often reduces positive outcomes; we have to risk and allow failures in order to capture the bigger breakthroughs. Not just true in research, but true in business too. Why would you think education is any different? Plus, people are already quite self selective for the high paying jobs on average, and there are countries that pay for education and have higher per capita GDP than the US, like Iceland and Norway. Education and research already provides a return to the economy of multiples on investment. There’s no demonstrated economic need to try to exert control over it.
  - nradov 1y ago
    On the contrary. If graduates can't even manage to pay back their loans then that's pretty good evidence that their education didn't have much value. If you want to claim some sort of abstract "value" measured in other ways then the burden is on you to provide evidence. I'm not interested in vague hand waving arguments to justify spending tax money.
    - dahart 1y ago
      That’s not good evidence at all, you’re making massive assumptions that don’t hold up. I did already provide some hard evidence you ignored: several other countries are already paying for education for all interested citizens and are doing better than the US by economic measures, not worse. My salary is not my GDP. The financial cost of a loan is not equal to the financial value education provides to society. I’m asked to pay back my loan very early in my career in my 20s, before I have the chance to build a career and accumulate any savings. On top of that, the financial cost of education has risen faster than inflation for a few decades due to incentives that wouldn’t exist if education was provided. According to the St Louis Fed, among other sources, income taxes collected on college grads is more than 2x the taxes collected on people without degrees, and the lifetime total collected for college grads is many multiples of what college costs even today. Think about the taxes a little harder and it should become obvious that it’s a waste of tax money to not ensure that everyone who wants a degree should get one without having a financial burden. We won’t spend more tax money providing free education, we will collect more tax money.