U.S. forgives 40k student loans

> ...it would force them to work and study

This was very normal and possible when I went to college. I could work part time during the year, full time in the summer, and pay my tuition. It didn't leave much free time but it was possible and a lot of people did it.

These days tuition is so high at most universities that it just isn't possible. Yet they are not actually teaching anything more or any better than they were back then. It's just way more expensive.

> If someone graduated with $100,000 debt because they partied all the time, didn't work, and tomorrow Biden just gave them a tax-free forgiveness....

> I am not punished by this.

Imagine a fair and equitable spending program that distributed $100k to everyone. It's fair, and people with debt could use it to pay off their loans (you could even require it to be used to pay off student loans first). If your goal is to help people with loans pay off their debts, it is an effective program. It's also obviously fair.

Then, tax 100% of the distribution for people without student loan balances. This is the step that imposes a punitive expense, relative to a fair program, on people without student loans.

That's what these proposals look like. There's no particular reason recent college students as a group should be the sole recipients of a wealth transfer.

> Bad roads? Well, Congress and the states won't raise the fuel tax.

We overbuilt infrastructure based on Government accounting practices that don't adhere to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP or US GAAP). Representatives get elected based on promises of new roads and highways, not on successful stewardship of what we have. People realize this misaligned incentive, that isn't propaganda.

> Bad education? Congress lets loans go to shite diploma mills

For profit schools account for 10% of students[1] and 15% of loans[2]. They're a problem in several ways but not the root cause.

> Just look at how underfunded (intentionally) the IRS is. How audits are primarily focused on the bottom 50% of earners, while the top 50% skate.

I agree that the IRS wrongly targets working class people, but the rest of this is wrong. The tax to GDP ratio in the US has been constant for decades, and we have the most progressive tax code in the OECD[3]. The US obtains more of its revenue from income taxes than any other OECD nation by a factor of 2 in percentage terms. We have no VAT which is regressive, and almost every other OECD nation has one.

Americans distrust government for a lot of historical reasons. We are the 2nd largest democracy that was a former European colony, and our founders fought a revolution against a remote and disconnected government. Most large waves or immigrants to the US were fleeing some sort of government oppression. We also should remember that some 14% of the population was officially discriminated against by the government in living memory. The war on drugs also give people plenty of reasons to be suspicious about the government. We're an individualistic society that is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-cultural and people practice a range of religions it should come as no surprise that people are wary of Washington.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2021/01/12/the-fo...

[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...

[3] https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...

I have an unpopular opinion that forgiving loans hurts those that did not go to college because of ability or cost. This font read to me like a blanket forgiveness is object to though.

I understand the support from those who’ve already paid off their loans but this does not apply to those who did not go. Also I suspect it depresses wages as people will not need to demand higher wages and this seems to be used to funnel them into government jobs.

> Dare I say it, but it was better when a uni education was the preserve of the elite few.

I agree, but there is fundamentally no reason this level of education need be restricted to the elite few today even if we ran the clock backwards on everything related to university. We live in the information age now. I can have access, for free, to all the educational material of any university in the world. I can't have access to their equipment[0], and I can't have access to their professors[1], but the only real problem with that today is that I don't get a piece of paper at the end that says I got a piece of paper from a university.

[0] Could be solved with some kind of rental program I guess, at least for equipment that isn't ridiculously rare and valuable.

[1] How much access do the students have these days? From what I hear, TAs do a lot of the actual interacting with students part.