That’s all fine and dandy until you realize the people who where smart and careful have to foot the bill for those who weren’t.
I was smart and sacrificed a little by going to community college so I wouldn’t have debt. I was also smart enough to get a degree in stem where jobs are actually available and in demand.
Why should I have to foot the bill for someone who just partied and got a useless degree? I did everything in my power to avoid student loans because I knew they where insane, I shouldn’t have to pay for others student loans because they didn’t think about any of this.
How much do you really think this is taking out of your pocket? You are paying for others all the time with your taxes, which can’t be selective for the system to function
If the 1.6 trillion in debt was divided evenly among every human in the US it would be 4k. If we’re ball-parking and say that the top 20% of earners would foot the bill it’d be about 64k per household.
You can't practically quantify this. If we forgive current loans, you could assess a dollar value - but what you can't do is project what those individuals will do once that debt is forgiven. Buy a new car? Take out new loans? Shopping spree? Or what precedent it sets for the public contemporaneously. Or what precedent it sets for the future. What we're not doing is working in a vacuum.
It's the principle that matters. A society that rewards bad decisions and punishes (or ignores) good decisions is bad and we should not allow our society to be like that.
> until you realize the people who where smart and careful have to foot the bill for those who weren’t.
> Why should I have to foot the bill for someone who just partied and got a useless degree?
Because you're a human being and recognise that while here you made no mistakes and had no bad luck, perhaps someone could have done that or had that. It's called decency, and you have it not because it benefits you. You have it because it benefits everyone.
Forgiving student loans doesn't benefit everyone, it benefits the people in proportion to their student loan debt, which is to say it disproportionately benefits the upper classes including a lot of people (like me) who could pay off their debt but instead they invest it in the stock market where the returns outpace the interest.
Student loan forgiveness is both unfair and regressive.
I have had plenty of bad luck, and made plenty of stupid decisions. Some of them financial. Nobody bailed them out. I'd be in a better place today if someone had. That's for sure. But do I think that makes for sound macroeconomic policy? No.
I was smart and sacrificed a little by going to community college so I wouldn’t have debt. I was also smart enough to get a degree in stem where jobs are actually available and in demand.
Why should I have to foot the bill for someone who just partied and got a useless degree? I did everything in my power to avoid student loans because I knew they where insane, I shouldn’t have to pay for others student loans because they didn’t think about any of this.