6165

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

$231K of debt per taxpayer. when interest rates get back to their historic level of 5% for 30 year Treasuries, interest on the national debt will be largest expenditure, bigger than Medicare.

6166

That’s basically everyone in the US in that age range whether you have a college education or not. But your solution is ‘fuck the 63% of people that don’t have a college education’ instead of focusing on how housing costs have sky rocketed and salaries have stagnated.

I have around 60,000 in debt, which is why I took a government job. I live in a smallish house in a small town and I save on costs where I can with my wife and 3 kids.

But it’s been a shitty economy for everyone for the last decade at least.

6167

Never have I said we shouldn’t help out other groups so no, that is in fact not my position. And it’s not clear to me that the other issues can be alleviated with an executive order.

I mean if we’re playing poverty olympics my student loan debt was a lot higher than that. It’s paid off now, so I wouldn’t get any benefit from forgiveness. I still think it’s a good idea.

6168

And I still have student loans, and I think this is just a handout to the middle class.

So, I guess we are both people arguing against by self interest because we draw the lines of helping people vs cost at different places.

Per your article, I see it as a hand out to the middle and upper class, that might benefit some poor people, while you see it as a vehicle that helps 20 and 30 year olds.

6169

Stop putting words in my mouth. You’re very bad at it.

6170

I agree that Millenials have gotten a bad deal. So why not focus, the help on the 50% of millennials without college degrees?

From the Pew research.

" The financial well-being of Millennials is complicated. The individual earnings for young workers have remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. But this belies a notably large gap in earnings between Millennials who have a college education and those who don’t. Similarly, the household income trends for young adults markedly diverge by education. As far as household wealth, Millennials appear to have accumulated slightly less than older generations had at the same age.
Millennials with a bachelor’s degree or more and a full-time job had median annual earnings valued at $56,000 in 2018, roughly equal to those of college-educated Generation X workers in 2001. But for Millennials with some college or less, annual earnings were lower than their counterparts in prior generations."

By your infographic millennials with high school degrees are twice as likely to live at home as those with a college degree. Boomers have heaped benefits on themselves and often screwed the millennial. So for example ACA artificially capped the difference it costs to provide health care for 20-29 in order to lower the cost for 50-64. That makes no sense we should lower the cost of health insurance for young workers and ensure that older workers pay their fair share.
The same thing is true in for BBB we should eliminate the programs like dental and hearing aid for medicare, and elder care subsidies, and use the money for programs that help young people, like the Child Tax Credit, subsidized child care (using the military childcare system as the model), and paid maternity leave. (Not many boomers or X have kids under 18, even less have newborns).

As Lego has pointed out, forgiving student loans is just bandaid, the entire higher education program needs to be reimagined.

6171

Then I don’t know what your point is because your argument seemed to be how hard it was in your 20s and 30s but that you somehow paid off your loans.

Sorry for misunderstanding.

6172

You know folks we’ve debated this a bunch here and I haven’t seen a single new argument all day in this thread.

The realities are this:

1)Higher education costs have gone up much faster than inflation over the last 50 years and now both higher education costs and student loan burdens are MUCH higher for Millennials and Gen Z than for the prior several generations.

2)The best solution to this would be to increase access and funding to multiple forms of higher education at the both the state and federal levels, including 4 year colleges, community colleges, and vocational training, to bring the cost down, along with some reasonable level of relief for the current generations of loan bearers.

3)However, #2 is impossible in our current political climate. The votes simply are not there, taking into account all of our stupid rules, gerrymanders, malapportionment of representation in the Senate and so forth.

4)The one option that IS possible is for Biden to use executive power to forgive some amount of student loans. This would be litigated and I consider the current US Supreme Court extremely biased and unreliable and yet based on long precedent of how the plain language of statutes are interpreted, there is IMO a strong chance this would pass muster (nothing is certain given the terrible USSC majority we have.)

5)Our choices as a society and government are very simple: either do nothing, which continues to allow a nasty and festering problem with large numbers of folks in the younger generations, or use the executive power to force a partial, imperfect, but better-than-nothing solution.

6)Of the various ways the executive power could be used, the most reasonable would be to forgive loans below a certain level (with median debt at $35K-ish, something in the $25K or perhaps $30K range is reasonable). This would benefit the hardest hit group (people who only took out small loans b/c they didn’t finish a degree, which means they didn’t get the income boost from the degree) while also helping a broad swathe of the population, without pouring tons of money at the very high loan folks who are also statistically those with the best future earnings prospects. You can add tiers of this, means testing, what have you although I prefer a simple threshold.

7)Sure, there are downsides to this (cost, extension of executive power) but the downsides of doing nothing are far more severe. Also, yes, without a long term fix in terms of funding public universities, community colleges and vocational schools to bring costs downs, this will only be a temporary stopgap measure. So what? If we wait for the perfect, we are going to be waiting forever.

These core realities have been true since this first came up in the primaries 2 years ago and the core has not changed.

Two things that have changed are timing and the diminution of alternatives: the reality of Manchin et. al. means that the alternative “better” options are even more impossible, plus the looming electoral debacle in 2022 makes it so that this needs to be done in the next few months.

Yes, Biden will take a political hit for doing this and the GOP will spin it as a giveaway to bad undeserving scum. So what? That’s going to happen NO MATTER WHAT BIDEN DOES. Biden will take a political hit if student debt collection resumes without loan forgiveness. Also, Biden is going to be hit by the GOP for helping “bad undeserving people” on like 3287293829 other issues, so who gives a fuck at this point?

You folks can continue arguing but that’s the basic outline of the realities here.

6173

I mean, in the current climate, I would be most in favor of a limited form of this. You can’t just give a blanket give away, but a targeted give away would have the most positive impact. Although, I still think the 10,000 that Biden original argued for ‘feels’ right.

That being said, is reducing Interest to 0 or so possible, or is the executive power limited to putting loans on hold or waiving them?

6174

The important thing is politically, it’s a big win for a group which hasn’t shown much enthusiasm before- maybe this will engage them.

At this point the biggest harm reducation that can be done is make sure Republicans lose, and I’m ok with anything that will help with that, even if it bankrupts the country, which it won’t.

6175

Yet you’d still borrow more money for the CTC, so it isn’t the debt, is it?

6176

This summarizes my view quite well.

6177
6178

Yup, it is a question of priorities. Reducing childhood poverty is more important than reducing student loan debt, since childhood poverty cause more societal problems than delaying house purchases or having kids.

6179

Maybe if you’re trying to optimize net social benefit not taking politics into account. We’re in a war here though, and if you can make a constituency vote, it’s worth it.

6180

I agree with that. Figuring out the politics are generally hard. Although, some are easy, raising the SALT is political malpractice, IMO. Democrats don’t need any more voters in California, NJ, or NY. For most of the others, I think there is a political benefit for doing it, like most of the things that help seniors and Child Tax Credit. I think since college graduates generally already vote pretty heavily Democrat it is not clear that bribing them with student loan reduction, gets more Congressional seats or electoral college votes… I think you’ll lose swing voters in purple states, who either didn’t go to college or have already paid off/didn’t run up large amounts of student debt.

6181

Most of the purple states are pretty well educated, with folks who don’t earn a lot despite those degrees. It helps there.

SALT- those folks are more reliable voters, and already made their choice known- don’t know if it helps much there. Also safe blue states for the most part.

The big reason young folks don’t vote is that they don’t see the difference, or don’t think Dems will do anything for them. This changes that.

6182

New idea: all front-line workers get $20k of debt wiped immediately and an additional $10k/year. People smarter than me can define what a front-line worker is.

6183

The problem here is, Biden has no statutory authority to do this. If we’re talking about things we could actually do, that is.

6184

And now I know that Auburn is responsible for “Grandma Got Runover by a Reindeer”.

Fucking Auburn…