MAGA is happy to ridicule and mock students who are buried alive in compounding interest, calling them "commies" and "dead beats" and "bums" and all the rest, but not a word about the Merchant Class being handed billions in free paychecks to sustain their private businesses during lockdowns. Once again, it's "socialism for the rich, consequences for the poor."
How can the feds justify loan forgiveness for the Merchant Class but not for poor students?
"Asking for a friend." 🙄
I'm blessed to not have any college debt, but I still clearly remember my high school counsellor handing out a survey. We were asked to list our intended major and the top three colleges we intended to apply. Then he said, "If you're not sure which colleges you're going to apply to yet, just write 'community college' so you're not a loser by default."
I still remember that phrase, "loser by default." He wasn't joking, either. Like you said, we were impressionable teenagers steered by authority figures into taking on lots of debt that we didn't understand. All we "knew" was that we didn't want to be a "loser by default." The truth is that almost nobody knows what they want to do for the rest of their life when they're 17 y/o. Which explains why almost nobody works in the field they studied in college.
Anyhow, they could forgive the debt, but they knew what they were doing when they made the loans exempt from bankruptcy. They were creating a new class of indentured servants, of debt slaves that, four years behind on the debt, could never hope to climb their way out from under the compounding interest. Biden was challenged on the legality of forgiving the loans, but he could have reappropriated money from the Dept. of Ed's budget to "pay" the loans. Anyhow ...
And those are just the stories about duped, but well-meaning teachers. It gets worse than that. Many years ago, there was a big scandal in the local news where some scam college was intentionally targeting vulnerable people with predatory student loans. Foster kids, the homeless, the mentally disabled—people who have generally have no life experience with colleges, nobody to look out for them, and no capacity to understand what they were signing up for. This shitty scam college got them to sign on to $100,000+ loans. This all entered the news when the college suddenly declared bankruptcy and shut down, leaving them all without degrees and lots of debt.
IMO, American citizens are owed reparations from the literal generations of psychological, pharmacological, financial, and straight up violent terrorism waged against us by our own government. If the US government can afford infinite bailouts to banks who knowingly made bad decisions, Ukraine, and Israel, then we can bailout the younger generation who got fucked over on the student loan issue. Frankly, the US government owes us a hell of a lot more than mere student loan forgiveness.
I think the problem is more that affording those infinite bailouts will then go right back to costing the same people you are trying to save in the long run.
Hyper-inflation here we come!
That's the same excuse Big Con feeds us every time someone suggests a bailout for the American citizen. "Oh no, muh national debt!" Meanwhile, the national debt handwringing is nowhere to be found when it comes sending more money to Israel or bailing out a corrupt bank that made bad investments. So until the US government shuts off the money to foreign countries and banks, I don't accept that as an excuse. If we can find the money for Israel, then we can find the money to help American citizens