Student Debt Cancellation

The topic is usurious debt, of which student debt plays a significant role.

sure you do... take the lead and all those you've convinced will follow.

This should eliminate most (or maybe all) of my daughters' college loan debt. We paid for part of their schooling, but they got loans to pay for the remainder.

On the one hand, part of me thinks people should pay what they signed up for. On the other, I'm okay with this because IMHO the exorbitant cost of higher education has been caused by how easy the government made it to get these loans now. Back in the 80s, my family was solidly middle class (probably toward the lower end) yet I was deemed "too rich" to qualify for Pell grants, student loans, etc.

Now, colleges and universities can charge what they want because they know Uncle Sugar will make it easy for students to get the money to pay them.

I see this as government helping to ease a burden that it's at least indirectly responsible for causing.

It is giving your word, then breaking your word. There is no rationalizing your way out of it.

No-one is breaking their word.

Their debt is being FORGIVEN.

They are not refusing to repay it, they are being told they don't HAVE TO.

You cannot possibly be this fucking stupid.

That is the rule of law, the idea that all laws, whether just or unjust, must be obeyed. Only a fool would subscribe to such a belief in an unequal system such as ours.

I promise you he can. I'm sure he can be much worse, too.

Not all of of have trust funds full of Nazi gold to cover the cost of our basically honourary degrees.

holy high up on a cross, Batboy!

I'd ask if you'd never done anything worth asking/receiving forgiveness over, but the answer would seem apparent.

What is injust about willingly agreeing to take out a loan and agreeing to pay that loan back.

Reading Biden's student debt reform policy, it is incredibly comprehensive. It includes not just the $10,000/$20,000, but tons of reforms to payment relief programs, interest rate cuts, and new directives to police tuition rates.

No wonder this took so long to put together.

This may not be the "forgive every cent" some activists wanted, but it offers some sort of relief or reform to virtually every category of student debtor, AND takes a stab at reforming the broken institutions that drove high debt in the first place.

It's a very ambitious plan.

https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1562483001040068608?s=21&t=Dw3de0XVsiynvkFG3J-i8Q

Libertarianism 101: What if the child consents tho?

Maybe UA will be less upset about this once he realizes that at least some of the people having a portion of their student loans forgiven will be Nazis?

I’d bet dollars to donuts that UA gave more of his tax dollars to the Omaha Nazis (since the PD is funded through sales and property taxes) than he will pay to student loan forgiveness (since he likely pays very little if any income tax) and yet we see which one actually upsets him.

He’s TOTALLY not a racist though.

UA's the "I can forgive Nazis, but I draw the line at student loan forgiveness" guy.

Power dynamics. We don't live in a vacuum, and so every contract of which we become part and parcel has to be weighed against its fairness. You, for example, would be rightfully livid if buried deep within a 500 page contract it said that if you failed to make a single payment on a loan, you defaulted all of your property to the bank in perpetuity. There has to be a system in place to address legal cages like that one, and strike them down. That often requires dissent against them.

It’s a good thread on the subject. https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1562457431820890113?s=21&t=8mJUhnS8WssB_YlywSwJxw

Ease of getting student loans did not cause higher education costs to skyrocket. The increase in everything EXCEPT worker wages has increased. If worker wages increased at the same rate as everything else, there wouldn't be any need to cancel student loans.

God dammit! You beat me to the Nazi reference!

Maybe don't sign the contract in the first place or have a lawyer go over it first.

Not many people have the time or resources to hire lawyers to look over contracts, especially 18 year olds preparing to attend college. Seriously, the onus must be on the system itself to address its shortcomings, not those who seek that redress when inequalities crop up.

Most federal student debtors. For anyone who paid off their federal loans first (because they had higher interest rates), they get nothing.

That's not what the rule of law is. While I'm in agreement with you on student loans, you guys are both misusing that term. Rule of law refers to the principle of all people being equally subject to the law, as opposed to some of them being able to behave arbitrarily and be "above the law".
It doesn't refer to the principle that unjust laws must still be obeyed.

I speak more in the spirit than in the letter. People like UA talk about the law like it's some kind of sacred text, and not shit we slap together and change as necessary so people don't die in droves because they drank leaded water.

Personal responsibility. These all sound like personal problem and not something that should be hoisted upon the tax payers.

I have no doubt that UA follows laws that won't inconvenience him. I have doubts about the others.

What is the point of society if not to mitigate the inequalities of living within that society? We won't feed hungry kids, we won't cover the medical bills of disabled folks, but we'll issue PPP loans and then forgive them to the richest 10% in the US. We'll spend $800 billion a year on dropping bombs on poor villagers in the Middle East. We'll dump trillions of dollars into the stock market to bail out banks taking the debt of millions of homeowners and dropping it at the government's front door.

You talk about personal responsibility when you should be focusing on systemic inequality.

You really want to help foster responsibility? Remove the ruinous debt of student loans off the backs of the poor, make it so college is "free," paid for in taxes. It would cost less for everyone in the long run. Universal healthcare would lower the absurd levels of medical debt people cannot control because god forbid their heart gives out, or cancer rears its ugly head.

Create an infrastructure that gives people something to grip, to hold on to, so they can climb up the ladder of liberty, because I promise you that debt is not liberty, it is slavery. How do you advocate for personal responsibility in a system that depends upon debt to exist? Think about it.

True. UA's definitely the "that sign won't stop me, because I can't read" guy, too.

You've got to forgive (ha!) UA and FF. They're only parroting that august moral authority, Cokey McCokeFace himself, Donald Trump Junior:

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1562482366769115143?s=20&t=MTqMOm9RH13R05jiloyNXw

It just befuddles me, though, because it's like, what kind of freedom is there in starving to death because your body literally cannot work enough to secure you the basics in a society where there are people who buy multiple yachts because they know how to manipulate numbers?

The party of personal responsibility