Like Elizabeth he won’t tell us what cancel means. They talk as if student debt is a bad TV series.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, actually. It seems to pretty much screw people who were responsible and did not rack up debt like mad. I went to the state school because it is what I could afford. I know plenty of others who chose commuting to community college for 2 years then the state school because they were being financially responsible. And no they weren't happy about giving up the "going away to school" part -- at all. So to me it seems wrong to retroactively say "sorry, I know you gave up going away to your dream private school in order to be fiscally responsible but now look, you could have had it all and it could have been free!!!"

I dunno.

For an opposite perspective, here's an a-hole who is perhaps the most galling example of blatant fiscal irresponsibility. He racked up $260K in student loans and is paying them back at $35/month. He just dropped his hours to part time so as not to increase his "income-based" repayment plan. OTOH, he doesn't seem to feel a whit of guilt at the fact that his 70 year old parents are paying $600/month for the loans they cosigned for him. He is blatant about the fact that he wants to live it up now and doesn't feel like he should have to sacrifice any quality of life at all and seems to be just biding his time until his loans are forgiven.

http://money.com/money/5647242...debt-money-makeover/

And an interview with him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...bBZLdYz&index=3&t=0s

On a college forum I follow, people looked up his CV and he is happily touting the fact that he studied abroad in all sorts of subjects in all sorts of exotic locales (all paid for, I'm sure, by his student loans). I took 20-24 credits a semester so I could finish in 3 years (all I could afford) and spent all my spare time in college working for money to pay my tuition -- and after graduating, I made it my mission to pay off the student loans I did rack up as quickly as possible.

So I do not see how it could possibly be fair to forgive this douchebag's student loans while telling people like me "tough luck, should have lived it up while the pursestrings were open...."

It ISN'T fair, and more stories like that will become staples of the GOP's counter blast. You have punished good behavior and rewarded bad behavior. You have transferred massive wealth to the well-off (who are the ones most likely to borrow large amounts).


We also have the adverse incentive effects. You have given future borrowers the incentive to over-borrow, presuming that they too will ultimately be forgiven for living it up today.

This kind of idea will be the death of the democrats once it's thoroughly picked apart and demonized as an election approaches.

We have so much we could do with a trillion $$ than engage in this kind of pandering.

Where did this come from? I’ve not seen any articles or opinion pieces demanding that students be allowed to default on loans.

I smell a Rat.

I wouldn’t say that, Steve. There are tons of pieces in the press about how horrible student loan burden is. And of course it is for many people.

I’d even say it’s an over-represented topic in the press. After all, your average writer is probably 30ish, still in debt from an elite education, with a middle class income, but nowhere near the lifestyle of the top decile that many of them grew up in.

Bernie went on Fox.

"I" went on Chicago's Morning Answer!

Chicago's Morning Answer


Amazing 10 minute lead in of right wing drivel. I felt just like I had stepped into a potential ambush.

But then I had a chance to say my piece, largely uninterrupted. Well, that's probably because I didn't have much good to say about Bernie's "free stuff" and Warren's debt wipe. I wish I had steered the conversation toward my preferred policy options (expanded Pell). That might have made their heads explode.

Fair? How fair is it that wages have stagnated for decades? How fair is it that all increases in wealth go to a minuscule portion of the population? Fair!?

However, if one thinks college should be free, then student loan forgiveness could be thought of as retroactive implimentation, and besides cancelling currently held debt you'd have to reimburse people who paid their debt after such-and-such a reatroactive date.

The question is, should college be free?

Reduce the interest rate they are paying?
I understand the rate on some of those loans is 9%.

quote:

Originally posted by Bernard:
Fair? How fair is it that wages have stagnated for decades? How fair is it that all increases in wealth go to a minuscule portion of the population? Fair!?

However, if one thinks college should be free, then student loan forgiveness could be thought of as retroactive implimentation, and besides cancelling currently held debt you'd have to reimburse people who paid their debt after such-and-such a reatroactive date.

The question is, should college be free?

What this ignores is the fact that people would have been presented with different options, and possibly made choices, if college (or public college) had been free.

If you took out loans to go to Middlebury, would you have gone to UVM instead if UVM had been free?

Do you pay off loans for people who went to private college, or just public college?

And what about the people who went to community college because they didn't want to take out loans? What do you do about them? Do you give them the money they could have spent, if they had taken out loans? Or do you say, tough luck, them's the breaks?

And there is some evidence (and PD will, I am sure, correct me if I'm getting it wrong) that going to an elite private college results (on average) in higher annual income. What about all those people who didn't take out loans to go to Middlebury or Dartmouth, but went to UMass instead, and gave up a lifetime of potentially greater income?

Do Michigan and Virginia count as public colleges for out-of-state students, or private ones? What about Virginia Tech? William and Mary?

Cornell is partially private, partially public (the Colleges of Agriculture and Industrial and Labor Relations are state colleges ... Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and Hotel Management are private). Will part of Cornell be free?

It's an intractable problem.

Well, here's a genuine lefty critique of the intellectual muddle of free stuff and debt wipe...

The Student Debt Forgiveness Muddle Continues

The problem isn't intractable, but it is complicated.

There are a couple of questions at play here. One of them is "Should the cost of post-secondary education be eliminated or reduced?" I think there's an argument for this. It is an artifact of history that our default presumption for most Americans is that education should be free from ages 6 through 18. Free kindergarten, at least part of the day, has become more the norm during my lifetime. Pre-K, too, is coming on strong. It is not that big a step to add two years of community college or even four years of college to the education provided to citizens. I think there's a case to be made for it, based on longer lifespans and the increasing complexity of the technology that young people must learn.

The student loan forgiveness plans are an attempt to address the problems that have arisen over the past thirty years or so as it has become increasingly difficult for most people to afford this extra education. I do think that young people have been taken advantage of by predatory loans and for-profit institutions and, in a harder-to-quantify way, by the pressure that often came from everyone around them to take out the loans to get the college education that would be so critical to their future. This is particularly sad because eighteen-year-olds don't have the life experience to understand the fallout of such far-reaching decisions. To an extent, that's life, but the tremendous scope of student debt leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

And thus the question of student loan forgiveness rears its head. Things seem to have gotten out of hand for our young people for reasons that aren't wholly their fault. Can we do something to help them? I'd like to see us try.

Any such plan is going to have some inequities. Some people will miss out because they already paid off their debts. (My children-in-law fall into this category.) Some people would have made different choices if they'd known this might happen. No remedy for any problem is perfect. That doesn't mean we should do nothing.

I'd like to see any student loan forgiveness first address people dealing with predatory loans and those who paid overpriced tuition from for-profit schools (like Trump U). Beyond that, even a partial forgiveness would be a shot in the arm for a large fraction of our children's generation at a time when they are thinking about buying homes and having children.

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:

quote:

Originally posted by Bernard:
Fair? How fair is it that wages have stagnated for decades? How fair is it that all increases in wealth go to a minuscule portion of the population? Fair!?

However, if one thinks college should be free, then student loan forgiveness could be thought of as retroactive implimentation, and besides cancelling currently held debt you'd have to reimburse people who paid their debt after such-and-such a reatroactive date.

The question is, should college be free?

What this ignores is the fact that people would have been presented with different options, and possibly made choices, if college (or public college) had been free.

If you took out loans to go to Middlebury, would you have gone to UVM instead if UVM had been free?

Do you pay off loans for people who went to private college, or just public college?

And what about the people who went to community college because they didn't want to take out loans? What do you do about them? Do you give them the money they could have spent, if they had taken out loans? Or do you say, tough luck, them's the breaks?

And there is some evidence (and PD will, I am sure, correct me if I'm getting it wrong) that going to an elite private college results (on average) in higher annual income. What about all those people who didn't take out loans to go to Middlebury or Dartmouth, but went to UMass instead, and gave up a lifetime of potentially greater income?

Do Michigan and Virginia count as public colleges for out-of-state students, or private ones? What about Virginia Tech? William and Mary?

Cornell is partially private, partially public (the Colleges of Agriculture and Industrial and Labor Relations are state colleges ... Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and Hotel Management are private). Will part of Cornell be free?

It's an intractable problem.

Yes, that's all true, but life changes. After all, we use wheels even though neanderthals didn't have the option. Surely they would have made different choices if they'd known about the wheel. To use an extreme example.

So things change, c'est la vie. I never went to college partly because 1) it was basically discouraged, and 2) I had no means. Would I have made different choices if college had been free at the time? Quite possibly. Will I begrudge those of today who could end up having free college available to them? Of course not.

I realize that nowhere in that long post did I address what "forgiveness" means and how it would be funded. I'm watching our 2020 presidential candidates for a sign of how they plan to do this. It looks like Elizabeth Warren has proposed a per-transaction tax on stock trades, or something similar. I don't know whether this is realistic, so I'm just watching and learning.

quote:

Originally posted by Bernard:
Would I have made different choices if college had been free at the time? Quite possibly. Will I begrudge those of today who could end up having free college available to them? Of course not.

This is the way I feel about it. There's a meme floating around Facebook asking if people who had diphtheria should begrudge later generations who had access to the vaccine and comparing that situation to student loan forgiveness.

I'd like to think that if I'd suffered through diphtheria it wouldn't leave me bitter that other people might be spared that suffering.