Student loan forgiveness.

Discussion in 'Education' started by Ray9, Mar 25, 2022.

  1. Ray9

    Ray9 Well-Known Member

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    If you had a government made up of people who would pay off your maxed out credit cards, your mortgage, and force other taxpayers to cover your car payments would you vote for it? There is little doubt that many would jump on that train before it even stopped moving. You are never going to get that deal from any sane government but there is something brewing that comes remarkably close to that and it has been gaining support since about 2016 when an election did not go the Way Washington planned it.

    The US government responded to the Sputnik scare in 1957 by guaranteeing student loans so the country would not lose scientific ground to the former Soviet Union. But education in America has been a bitter disappointment with literacy rates that have plummeted ever since. Moreover, education has shifted in the US in recent years to rote leftist indoctrination. The Great Society has been a dismal failure and the chaos and crime that pervades cities and towns across America bear witness to the folly of bad central planning.

    Yet there are organized, well-funded groups that clamor for student debt forgiveness which would be nothing more than protection money for bad education. Hard working taxpayers would labor to pay the government to support an educational system that has struck gold by brainwashing citizens to hate the country and the people in it. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has just issued a warning to President Biden that he will lose support of a powerful wing of his party if he does not force ordinary citizens to foot the bill for bad student debt.

    What are your thoughts on this?

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...uld-signal-poor-turnout-among-dems/ar-AAVuEb7

    https://money.com/student-loan-forg...would stop the racial wealth gap from growing.
     
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  2. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    Mine are less like thoughts, and more like fury.
     
  3. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    A huge thing we should definitely not overlook in this debate is where the push for this student loan policy came from, and what arguments were used at the time.
    We need to remember the reasons why this became government policy in the first place.

    They said that education was an investment and so therefore it made sense to loan money. But now we are finding a huge number of these borrowers are having difficulty paying those loans back.
    That has to bring into question the original premise, doesn't it?

    They also said this loan program was a way to fund education into perpetuity without costing the taxpayers money.
    Well that turned out to be wrong too, didn't it?

    I think the truth of the matter is that those who were supporting this policy totally knew what would happen, but this was the only way to push the program.

    Lots of powerful special interest groups in the universities who supported this as a way to get even more money. (It's easy to believe in a theory when being able to get other people to believe that theory will mean you will get more money)
     
  4. dairyair

    dairyair Well-Known Member

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    1. tell R's to stop killing funding to education. As you seem to understand, education for a country is vital.
    2. Should only rich be able to get an education in the USA?
    3. Does China only allow the RICH to get educated?
    4. From your OP. The US government responded to the Sputnik scare in 1957 by guaranteeing student loans so the country would not lose scientific ground to the former Soviet Union.
    5. What is your solution to education? HOPING you see education as a need for a successful leading country.
     
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  5. Chrizton

    Chrizton Well-Known Member

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    I have student loan debt. I will pay it as scheduled when they restart my payments in May. In fact, I had intended to keep paying them throughout but they threw me into auto-deferment and I was like eff it. Now you real americans having to pay it off if they wrote the debt off is not supported by reality. You real americans pay taxes based on your income. No more and no less. Whether I pay it off or Uncle Joe writes it off will not change your tax burden one single penny. In fact, the money was already spent so it costs the taxpayers exactly zero dollars going forward either way.

    Not what happens in the real world. That $600 a month or whatever it will be when it resumes will be $600 less I spend on having a real american cut down a tree, sing me a song, sling me a beer or whatever. No big thing for me. For that real american beer slinger, however, who knows. Maybe she has to abort her unborn child because her tips aren't what they were when people weren't paying their student loans so she can't afford to have that baby. Maybe that tree cutter decides to start selling drugs for extra money when their job doesn't have as much work and he ends up pulling time on a felony when caught. Who knows. I have about $2K a month in discretionary money to blow so that $600 will make really no difference to me. For others, however, well, the consequences may be different.
     
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  6. Melb_muser

    Melb_muser Well-Known Member Donor

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    In Australia we have a means-tested student repayment scheme. You pay off your loan through the taxation system as you begin to earn. I think the notion of wiping off debt is far-fetched and probably is vote buying.

    The real question is why does the US swing between pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and overblown "government bailout and leniency?

    It's like that in every facet actually. E.g. law enforcement.
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2022
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  7. unkotare

    unkotare Well-Known Member

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    Basically.
     
  8. Kranes56

    Kranes56 Banned

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    Kinda ignoring the context of student debt. It’s not just that people are paying off student, but that they’re paying the interest off first. So if their payment is $200 a month, and all a person spend on it is $200 a month, they might not have at all scratched the principle. So they’re paying debt for years and years and years, for a degree that’s not returning on its initial promises of getting students a higher wage and therefore a better life. Ironically enough it’s thanks to defunding colleges in the 1980s that caused the price of colleges to soar out of control.

    Now I shouldn’t have to explain why having a large, underemployed, angry population of educated people is bad. Because that’s how political extremism is encouraged. Saying we need to cut more funding to education will only make a lot of things worse, not better. Because all that does is encourage anti-intellectualism. And we see with *waves vaguely at a lot of political problems in the US* that leads.
     
  9. Creasy Tvedt

    Creasy Tvedt Well-Known Member

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    Forgiving student loans would amount to the largest transfer of wealth to the wealthiest of Americans in history.

    It's weird that the progressives want to make the rich far richer like that, but that's probably not what they think will happen if they forgive student loan debt, because, as with so many of their policies, they don't even understand what they're actually doing, and they don't care about the consequences of their ill-conceived actions.

    All they see themselves doing is handing out free money, and buying votes, and that's all they care about.
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2022
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  10. Creasy Tvedt

    Creasy Tvedt Well-Known Member

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    It's not a matter of cutting funding to education, it's a matter of cutting the heaps of taxpayer money that are going to the colleges who are jacking up tuition prices to ridiculous levels while they stuff their coffers to bursting, and hand out worthless degrees in Racial Grievances, and Angry Feminist Basket Weaving.

    How much did your philosophy degree cost the taxpayers? How's that investment working out for us? Are we raking in the big buck dividends now?
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2022
  11. Kranes56

    Kranes56 Banned

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    Actually nothing because I paid for my philosophy degree myself because I went to a very cheap school and was able to afford it thanks to my family.

    And ironically enough it’s not because the schools are getting bigger because they want to. They’re doing it because funding has become more constricted. So if the goal is to get more students in, you’re going to have to offer them more and more to attract those students as a source of funding.
     
  12. Chrizton

    Chrizton Well-Known Member

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    We do as well with government loans. Your payments are based on a percentage of your income above a certain level for your tax filing status ( meaning how many dependents you have on your tax returns). You send them your tax returns once a year and they adjust your payments up or down accordingly. After 20 years (25 years for those in the first phase of this program), any amount that hasn't been paid gets written off. The only real problem with that is that you have to pay income taxes on the amount discharged as if that is how much extra money you made during that year. If you just did undergrad, you surely should be able to pay it off in the twenty years, but if you went to grad school, maxed out your loans, returned home to some lower income area and spent your career there, you could really get smacked hard by the taxes that year it is discharged.
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2022
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  13. Creasy Tvedt

    Creasy Tvedt Well-Known Member

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    And you think the people who went to expensive schools they couldn't afford should be rewarded for their stupidity with loan forgiveness?

    Schools are getting bigger because they're fat and bloated from feasting at the through of taxpayer money.

    https://www.usnews.com/education/be...s/10-universities-with-the-biggest-endowments

    Endowments at these 10 schools range from a low of $11.3 billion to a high of $41.9 billion, U.S. News data shows.
     
    Last edited: Mar 26, 2022
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  14. Lil Mike

    Lil Mike Well-Known Member

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    Having a large, underemployed, angry population of educated people is bad, and they do turn into extremists, however that calls into question why we are loaning people money to go to college only to be underemployed and struggle with paying off college loans for decades. If you are going to end up being a barista anyway, you should probably start that after high school rather than borrow tens of thousands of dollars to go to college to get a degree that won't prepare you to do anything more than be a barista.

    They should probably limit student loans to degree programs where the financial pay off allows you to actually pay off the loan with no issues.
     
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  15. Melb_muser

    Melb_muser Well-Known Member Donor

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    Aren't the endowments private donations, though?

    To be frank a larger concern to my mind is enrolment based on anything other than chiefly academic ranking. In Australia I am supportive of scholarships for the needy and I am supportive of expensive seats for foreign students, however they also need to exhibit academic proficiency.
     
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  16. Kranes56

    Kranes56 Banned

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    I genuinely don’t know if you’re just ignoring what I write on purpose or you can’t follow along with what I’m saying.
     
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  17. dairyair

    dairyair Well-Known Member

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    Exactly,
    Student loan debt forgiveness will put that money directly into the economy.
    As the money can be used to buy things instead of paying for the past.

    The gov't can subsidize large corps, why can't they subsidize students education?
     
  18. dairyair

    dairyair Well-Known Member

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    Yes, all public money to support education needs to be met with a minimum criteria of at least a C average to continue to receive public money.
     
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  19. dairyair

    dairyair Well-Known Member

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    Source?
     
  20. unkotare

    unkotare Well-Known Member

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  21. dairyair

    dairyair Well-Known Member

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    Thx,
    I see it's a relatively new concept for them.

    From your link. 'China’s universities first began tentatively charging tuition fees in 1997.'

    Somewhere around the time they moved in the direction of capitalism.
    And as is prone in a system like that, bribes happen there now, just like we have in USA.
     
  22. unkotare

    unkotare Well-Known Member

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    Oh, the bribes were going on looooong before that.
     
  23. Mircea

    Mircea Well-Known Member

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    The federal government has no constitutional authority to get involved in education, so Republicans are doing the right thing.

    The cost of university education has increased because of:

    1) technology that did not exist and was not present on college campuses prior the 1990s
    2) dumbing down admission standards to increase the number of students
    3) having to have remedial English, math and science courses for the stupid students who shouldn't be there in the first place
    4) Extreme silliness like the Office of Diversity, the Office of Inclusion, the Office of Silly Walks (those things aren't free)

    The economy did just fine before the sob stories of student loans.

    Student loan debt did not keep people from getting jobs in a recessionary economy in the 1980s and paying 14% interest for a mortgage.

    Christen used her student loan to buy herself a car. And to buy a car for her lover (instead of buying one for her husband):

    Christen currently has well over $225,000 in student loans. (Id. at 51); (Ex. 3-1 to 3-3). Christen estimated that $128,453 in student loans were directly attributable to living expenses

    Christen used student loan money to purchase at least two vehicles—one of which was titled in her boyfriend's name. (Tr. at 64, 206) Christen's bank statements also evidenced financial irresponsibility. Christen spent much of her student loan money purchasing coffee from high-end coffee shops like Starbucks, Caribou, and Cup O'Joe; products and clothes from retailers; I-tunes; tanning sessions/products and massages; arts and crafts; OSU athletic tickets; and other food and entertainment. (2006 Chase Bank & Credit Card Statements, P's Ex. 7). Christen also made several ATM withdrawals for several hundred dollars at a time; it is unclear where this money was spent. (Id.). After reviewing all of the financial records, it is clear that Christen was spending more than the typical student on miscellaneous items and services, often incurring late fees for failing to keep up with her credit card bills. All of these expenses were in addition to the high living expenses that Christen incurred by choosing to live in Dublin, Ohio, an affluent suburb of Columbus.

    [emphasis in original court decision]

    I'd be willing to do that if the US did it exactly like Euro-States do it.

    For example, in Germany, everyone goes to Grundschule for four years, starting at age 6.

    Then the children test.

    If your child doesn't score high enough, then your child ends up in Hauptschule or the Schulart mit mehreren Bildungsgängen or Berufsschule, where they basically learn how to retread tires or something else akin to manual labor. It's general education focused on manual labor, including services, such as retail sales.

    If your child sores high enough, then they end up at a Realschule. The Realschule certificate allows students to attend the Fachoberschule, or the Fachgymnasium. Those are like technical schools where you can be in the medical field as a medical claims coder, a CNA or LPN, paralegal, emergency medical technician and other skills like that. And if you were a "late-bloomer" you can get a shot a free college at the Fachgymnasium.

    If your child scores really, really high, then they go to the Gymnasium and get an Abitur, which is a certificate of aptitude for higher learning, and they --- and only they and no one else --- get to go for free to university.

    Students that went to a Hauptschule or Realschule can still get an Abitur, if they are really, really motivated and spend a lot of time and their own money on additional education. They'd need a tutor or would have to spend 1-2 years studying on their own to pass the test.

    If you're willing to do it exactly like that, and I mean exactly, with no exceptions ever, then I'd be willing to ensure the best and the brightest get educated for free.

    A few other caveats that some of you just can't seem to wrap your brain around:

    1) Free college is only for public universities.
    2) Public universities are funded by the central government and not states, provinces, departments, counties and such
    3) Because they are funded by the central government, those Euro-States that are tied to the Euro cannot have a budget deficit in excess of 3% of GDP.

    There are several implications to #3. A university's budget is limited and fixed and it cannot exceed enrollment and something else, you can't go to just any college.

    To prevent waste through redundancy, European universities are set up just like their medical facilities.

    Unlike here in the US where you can have open-heart surgery at any hospital, in Europe, you can only go to certain select hospitals, which could mean a 4 hour drive to get there. Likewise, if you need cancer treatment or orthopedic surgery, you can't go to just any hospital. If you peruse the Eurostat database, you'll find that 4% to 12% of people complain they can't get treatment because of the travel distance.

    So it is with universities. If you qualify for an engineering degree, you can't go to just any university. You can only go to a university that has an engineering program, and that means you might have to relocate to another part of the country.

    Now, Euro-States do provide a living allowance for students, but let me tell you what, it is meager, and I do mean meager. It's just a step above "poverty."

    So, if you think you'll be hanging out at Starsux every day, that ain't happening. If you scrimp, you might have enough money to go once every other month as a treat, maybe a reward for having passed a mid-term or something.

    That's why Euro-States have "free" (snicker) college.
     
  24. dairyair

    dairyair Well-Known Member

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    So?
    There is a moral responsibility to keep a country as a leader. And education is a very large way to remain as a leader.

    They are not doing the right thing. If we want an educated society, we need money for education.
    And we need quality educators.
     
    Last edited: Mar 27, 2022
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  25. Zorro

    Zorro Well-Known Member

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    If the schools carry the notes on these loans, they will make sure that the student receives an education sufficient to repay them. As it is, all this free money has just turned them into zones of totalitarian hate.

    Legislatures beginning to step up for basic human rights on campus:

    Lawmaker discusses his pro-free speech bill to improve students’ experience at public universities.
    In America? That's a shame on all of us, this is a step toward mitigating that.
    It is fitting that it would be Republicans working to make the 14th Amendment Great Again.
    Good. They clearly need remedial First Amendment training, and if they can't pass the test at the end, they need to keep taking the class until they pass the test that allows them to resume their positions, with pay.
    Small wonder that OK is the OK State!
     

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