On canceling student debt
(Or even a little bit of it)
Pres. Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the U.S. government would forgive $10,000 for federal student loan borrowers who earn $125,000 or less a year, and $20,000 for Pell grant recipients.
The outcry was predictably loud and full-throated, and mostly centered around “I took out loans and worked a million jobs and paid off those loans while walking barefoot through the snow uphill both ways, and everyone else should, too.”
Strangely, it wasn’t just people on the right stamping their Mary Janes. On both sides of the aisle, it was as if everyone became their Drunk Uncle Ed, pulled up a Barcalounger, and shook their collective fists at the young whipper-snappers who are being coddled.
Spare me the sermons. Please. Student debt has been crippling the last few generations, and beyond the immorality of that, none of us benefit.
Besides, as Public Citizen shared on Twitter:
I took out college loans, too, and I worked as many as three jobs — in addition to an on-campus work-study arrangement — at once to get through college, first as an in-state student and then, after I transferred to Univ. of Maryland, as an out-of-state one. Do I feel sorry for my struggles? I do not and you shouldn’t, either. A few months after I graduated, I started paying those loans back because I knew that behind me stretched a long line of people very bit as worthy as I was of a college education, and defaulting was not an option. I did without a few niceties so that I could pay off the loan early, and writing that last check made me feel like a Rockefeller.
I’m with Julie B(rooklyn) Multi Racial Resister on this one. I take no comfort that others should suffer. The student loan industry is fraught with inequities and questionable if not downright illegal methods that dangle money and bright futures that (fraudulently) seem there for the taking. This is a good start.
The backlash against this small aid to help is disgusting. 10k is a small drop in the bucket but it’s certainly something. My two 30 something kids went to college with assistance from us, scholarships, money from jobs and loans. The price of college and grad school has skyrocketed and few can do it without loans.
As parents, we took out loans too but with a good salary we can pay ours back. My son works for a nonprofit at an abysmal wage just praying that the loan forgiveness will help. It’s nothing like it was when I went in the 1970s.
$10k loan forgiveness nice! and how much is the military budget this year that only profits those that produce weapons of war and increase fear and distrust between countries ?