the economy only selects the best and the rest are left to compete in the same income bracket as the lazy, stupid, young, immigrant, unskilled etc.As a homeless person with more than 6 years of college who was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class, I think you are ...ill informed, to put it very mildly.
I turned down a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of school at age 20 with no student loans. I have one student loan that will be paid off about next July that is for a Certificate in GIS that is the equivalent of Master's level work. I have also had a college class on homelessness and public policy and I run (at least) a couple of websites aimed at addressing problems of the most desperately poor in the U.S.
In the vast majority of cases, poor people are not lazy, stupid or unskilled. In the vast majority of cases they are one of the following:
Female -- Poverty is a gendered issue and there are many factors that make it a gendered issue, more than I care to go into today as I am trying hard to resolve my own serious financial problems by doing as much paid work as I can here lately.
Chronically ill (or maimed for life) through no fault of their own -- One of the side effects of all of our modern medications and what not is that we can often "cure" things like cancer, but we don't really know how to get people well. We keep them alive, but often in a state where they are limping along and not able to work full time while saddled with high medical bills. (I have heard that more than half of all bankruptcies in the U.S. involve high medical bills, even when the person has good medical insurance -- I know this from someone very informed on the subject.)
Mentally ill -- and there is increasing evidence that mental illness and associated problems, such as alcoholism or addiction, have biological roots. So it may be called "mental illness," but it really is still a form of physical illness, one that even modern medicine does an incredibly poor job of addressing. We still don't have this one figured out all that well as a society.
Unable to find affordable housing -- There is a dearth of affordable housing in the US. This is a problem that goes back many decades and is only getting worse with time. I don't have time to find stats right now, by the shortage is really extreme and the result is, in part, increasing levels of homelessness nationwide.
Bailing out people who borrowed too much money for college falls far short of my priority list for trying to fix the problems in the U.S. Fixing those other problems would help all people, regardless of their educational achievement, income level or other details.
It would even help the fools who borrowed far too much for college. I dropped out specifically because I knew two people with a completed bachelor's degree and some form of college beyond that who were both delivering newspapers. One was living with his mother in his 30s. The other was mooching off his fool of a wife who eventually got wise and divorced his sorry ass.