RE the student loan thing, it's not the fault of people who had more opportunities than the guy who joined the Army, that they were funneled into a system that top-to-bottom encouraged that sort of "risk taking".
The plain truth is, this system's been building for several generations. Milton freaking Friedman of all people said back in the 60's that debt was the wrong model for education financing because you can't secure the loan - you can't repossess knowledge. Universal IBR should be the model going forward.
However, since seizing control of the academy, the left and Dems have been beholden to the upper echelons' interests, and are largely (I'd say 70/30 here) responsible for enabling the cost crisis by driving administrative bloat and fighting tooth and nail for expanding student loan access (not to mention the general costs of ambient NIMBYism). It's been what Ezra Klein termed "cost disease socialism" the entire way down, and Republicans were only happy to enable the Dems to do it by using it as a bargaining chip for other things.
Now, what you're ABSOLUTELY CORRECT about is that student loan forgiveness was always a shitty idea. I'm so freaking sick of the left pushing for these One Wierd Trick bankshot policies that don't actually help anyone and play hideously in the court of public opinion.
There WERE other options. As I intoned, we SHOULD have converted to Universal IBR with fixed terms and income percentage limits, such that it functioned more like an "equity" model of financing education. Investors would pay tuition for their students up front, like a loan, which would give them leverage to bargain with universities for group discounts/cost-cutting, while the repayment side would function like a record label: you sign everyone and their cousin at a mild-to-moderate loss, in the hopes of landing the high-earning whales like a Beyonce or Taylor Swift.
But all of that doesn't mean that (1) there wasn't a genuine problem that a lot of people like me faced and NEVER GOT HELP FOR**, and (2) because of #1, there should have been a better way for the center-left and moderates to deal with it instead of saying "tough titties, the lefties' loan forgiveness is nuts and therefore that means this problem isn't real". It was just plain inhumane to keep funneling people into a system that forced them to mortgage a large portion of their early adulthood like that.
** I myself am pretty close to paying off my loans, and rather than make me join the "I paid mine, you should too" crowd, it just makes me bitter AF that no politician ever did a GOTDAMNED THING to help mitigate such an obvious freaking crisis.
Bitter is a better word. I have a bunch of credits to no where and paid for all of them as I went to Community College part time and worked full time. I got screwed! I was going for a certificate program when the rules changed to make it an AA with a year of internship. While I was close to getting the AA, they changed the programs to 4 yr degrees. I couldn't afford to quit work to pursue a 4 yr degree like a newly graduated teenager surviving on my parents generosity.....I was an adult., unmarried and paying my way through life. The joke was that I should take a fake gun and go rob the gas station down the street so that I could get convicted, sent to jail and get a free education from the state while being housed in the Pen with 3 hots and a cot and all the time in the world to study.....only with my luck, I would have been sentenced to probation or time served.
There is one person in the election who said America sucked and he won the election. I would never vote for a disgusting anti-American traitor who eats pizza with a knife and fork but other people don't seem to agree. America was already great.
RE the student loan thing, it's not the fault of people who had more opportunities than the guy who joined the Army, that they were funneled into a system that top-to-bottom encouraged that sort of "risk taking".
The plain truth is, this system's been building for several generations. Milton freaking Friedman of all people said back in the 60's that debt was the wrong model for education financing because you can't secure the loan - you can't repossess knowledge. Universal IBR should be the model going forward.
However, since seizing control of the academy, the left and Dems have been beholden to the upper echelons' interests, and are largely (I'd say 70/30 here) responsible for enabling the cost crisis by driving administrative bloat and fighting tooth and nail for expanding student loan access (not to mention the general costs of ambient NIMBYism). It's been what Ezra Klein termed "cost disease socialism" the entire way down, and Republicans were only happy to enable the Dems to do it by using it as a bargaining chip for other things.
Now, what you're ABSOLUTELY CORRECT about is that student loan forgiveness was always a shitty idea. I'm so freaking sick of the left pushing for these One Wierd Trick bankshot policies that don't actually help anyone and play hideously in the court of public opinion.
There WERE other options. As I intoned, we SHOULD have converted to Universal IBR with fixed terms and income percentage limits, such that it functioned more like an "equity" model of financing education. Investors would pay tuition for their students up front, like a loan, which would give them leverage to bargain with universities for group discounts/cost-cutting, while the repayment side would function like a record label: you sign everyone and their cousin at a mild-to-moderate loss, in the hopes of landing the high-earning whales like a Beyonce or Taylor Swift.
But all of that doesn't mean that (1) there wasn't a genuine problem that a lot of people like me faced and NEVER GOT HELP FOR**, and (2) because of #1, there should have been a better way for the center-left and moderates to deal with it instead of saying "tough titties, the lefties' loan forgiveness is nuts and therefore that means this problem isn't real". It was just plain inhumane to keep funneling people into a system that forced them to mortgage a large portion of their early adulthood like that.
** I myself am pretty close to paying off my loans, and rather than make me join the "I paid mine, you should too" crowd, it just makes me bitter AF that no politician ever did a GOTDAMNED THING to help mitigate such an obvious freaking crisis.
Bitter is a better word. I have a bunch of credits to no where and paid for all of them as I went to Community College part time and worked full time. I got screwed! I was going for a certificate program when the rules changed to make it an AA with a year of internship. While I was close to getting the AA, they changed the programs to 4 yr degrees. I couldn't afford to quit work to pursue a 4 yr degree like a newly graduated teenager surviving on my parents generosity.....I was an adult., unmarried and paying my way through life. The joke was that I should take a fake gun and go rob the gas station down the street so that I could get convicted, sent to jail and get a free education from the state while being housed in the Pen with 3 hots and a cot and all the time in the world to study.....only with my luck, I would have been sentenced to probation or time served.
There is one person in the election who said America sucked and he won the election. I would never vote for a disgusting anti-American traitor who eats pizza with a knife and fork but other people don't seem to agree. America was already great.
If I had to think of the best blog title you could have that would generate the most hate mail, you nailed it!
Fun fact: I believe that famous Speed line was actually written by Joss Whedon.