If it takes a socialist Rhodes scholar to organize a couple of Starbucks in Buffalo, this is going to be a tough unionizing battle.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/12/rhodes-scholar-barista-fight-unionize-starbucks/
Alstein
4241
Down in the South, Starbucks is just firing anyone trying to organize
Maybe they need some organizing help from socialists.
How about we zero out the interest rates on student loans? You read lots of stories of people paying thousands in payments over the years and making no progress on the principal balance. That is awful.
I don’t know how you do it, it just seems like a good compromise.
CraigM
4244
That would be good, because pausing repayment without also zeroing interest is actually not helping people. In fact it can even be hurting them as what they owe only grows, and so when payments resume they fall further behind.
I mean, sure. For everything but private loans, I imagine the executive can do that. Might be even better to do it retroactively, e.g. recalculate all the loan balances on the assumption the interest rate was zero and all payments were applied to the original principal. There never should have been any interest on government-funded student loans anyway IMO.
Cue the “wait I paid my interest why shouldn’t they” objections in 3…2…1…
OK, I’ll do that for you Scott.
I paid off every penny I borrowed for undergrad and law school as quickly as I could in order to avoid paying that interest.
And I did this at the expense of other investments I could have made instead.
P.S. And out of law school I worked as a state prosecutor making very little money I might add.
I thank you for your service!
JoshL
4248
Yes, we’d better not help anyone for fear of angering those that don’t get help.
CraigM
4249
All the while ratcheting up the costs and lowering the pay graduates receive, put those yutes in their place.
Yep, one liner rejoinders aimed at me for simply paying my bills certainly should solve this problem.
Houngan
4252
I think you mean, “those that pay to help others in ways they weren’t helped.” Or is this coming out of a never-paid-back deficit move? Can we set a salary cap, say $60,000/year, and exclude those people from receiving debt forgiveness? If not, any salary level?
JoshL
4253
I’m pretty pissed off about the subsidies to oil companies that I’m paying for, can we shut those down too under this rubric?
Any significant policy change, especially economic ones, will result in winners and losers. I think you just have to move past that or else never change any status quo.
The bigger issue for me is will that 0 interest simply be absorbed into the cost of education in the form of increased prices. Also, I’m assuming zero interest must come with some sort of non repayment penalties, or else it is just debt forgiveness.
Perhaps the more challenging thing for me is that college debt issues are a bit regressive, at least at today’s college attendance ratios—-it mainly benefits the upper half of the population.
Quick note, on federal loans, the pause in repayments had also meant a pause on loan interest. So, currently, we are dealing with a zero interest loan situation. But it is temporary.
Yes, this. I was imagining a scene from history in which Lincoln tells Douglass that he means to free all the slaves, whereupon Douglass objects on the grounds that he had to escape slavery himself and why can’t everyone else?
You really can’t change anything with this mindset. Want to permit women the vote? Wait, what about all those women who had to wait years to vote? Shouldn’t younger women have to wait, too? Want to get rid of de facto poll taxes? What about all those people who paid their de facto poll taxes for years?
This is a fair point, but it seems to be one that could only be addressed through legislation, in the form of some better approach to funding secondary education while also constraining tuition growth. But legislation seems to be off the table right now.
CraigM
4257
Hey, that’s cool. I didn’t know that, thanks.
@easytarget I’ve written at length in this thread, and others, on the topic. But the short form is that it is a massively complex problem, and that to address it requires an acknowledgement of a change in the fundamentals of the economy over the last few decades. The financial realities of college for millennials and younger are miles away from that experienced by older generation. Both in terms of cost and debt burden, but also the income potential post college. It is a legitimate drag on the economy and causing a lot of harm to individuals, as well as future potential as many are delaying or opting out entirely of things like getting married and having families.
Would I prefer a holistic approach that addresses school funding, cost growth, wage stagnation, decline in trade school, everything must have a degree mindset, housing costs, and bloat in school administration and facilities? Absolutely! But we sadly aren’t getting that with Manchinema. So is a debt forebarance/ forgiveness likely to do some good and is the best action that is politically possible? Yeah that may be true too.
DoubleG
4258
I’m wary of calling student debt forgiveness a complicated issue. It has popular support, and we’ve established in this thread that the Democrats can do it while they’re in power. The idea that it’s too controversial or difficult is what the politicians that are dragging their feet would like us to think.
Politicians like Joe Biden, unfortunately. He drummed up support on the Democratic side for the Republican’s 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Act which made it so you couldn’t discharge debt except where it’s an “undue harship”, leading directly to bigger loans and increased college prices. Today, his administration is still fighting borrowers to keep the definition of “undue hardship” as strict as possible.
I hate the idea that we need to wait for a comprehensive legislative solution, because the guys who are supposed to be on the right side of this issue are already doing nothing, even with access to levers that could help the problem.
Your article makes clear that the popular support is for some form of debt forgiveness. The support fractures significantly from there, unsurprisingly, as it gets into specifics.
