There’s a term for this attitude: maybe you’ve heard it: “Crab Bucket”.
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If we don’t embrace this, the persistence of increasingly entrenched malign Republican politics will, in good time, very likely destroy us.
ETA
If we think that we can’t afford as a society to make college free, then just tax the wealthy
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Just an FYI – I have four kids in college or about to enter it. Tuition, rent and food for state schools here in Maryland is about $18,000 a year. So if you come in with zero dollars (i.e., borrow every penny and don’t work during school including during the summer break) you can get a quality education for about $72,000. Student debt beyond that is poor planning and poor decisions, at least for a Bachelor’s degree.
I’m fine with student debt relief, but I think it should provide the same level to all students regardless of their total. Lop $25k (or whatever number fits) off of everyone before spending a penny on people that owe more than that.
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Somehow millions of other millenials have Served and earned the GI Bill, gone right into the workforce, trade schools, other options to not go into debt.
So why is there an imperative obligation for everyone else to bail out the ones who have the advantage of the degree (estimates run around $1 million more in lifetime earnings vs. without an undergraduate degree)?
What are you going to do for the folks who never went to college because they couldn’t afford to take on the debt in the first place and are working lower-wage jobs now because of that? Shouldn’t they be getting $50K to reimburse them for the lost wages or to apply towards schooling?
And why only current debt? What about the person who just paid off their $50K in debt, they get nothing, while the person who deferred on payments gets a windfall?
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Or Trump University.
Could TPM get rid of this Cafe stuff? Damn, if I want op-eds I’ll read USA Today.
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I think college should be free and the outstanding loans paid off. I went part-time for 9 years while working full-time to get my degree. And that degree was selected by my employer since they paid for it (that program no longer exists.) My sister spent ten years paying off her loans in spite of the financial help she got from all of her siblings. The other two skipped college because they couldn’t figure out how to pay for it.
College was and is the path to the middle class. It shouldn’t be impossible to get a degree. If a few kids that could otherwise afford it benefit, that’s fine. Better than slamming the door on thousands of kids and their families that could really benefit from the help.
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In my view this is not about so much about student debt but rather about the Government’s commitment to make it possible for all Americans with the ability and desire for higher education to obtain that education.
Prior to Ronald Reagan, the federal Government made it possible for every American to attend college without drowning in debt. That is if you went to college before 1981, you likely incurred only a small percentage of debt to your college expenses including tuition and room and board. Reagan abandoned the federal Government’s commitment to allow all Americans who wanted to and could attend college and 40 years later America is where it is.
One other comment about this issue, has anyone checked how Suburban votes are trending?
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This discussion is another version of how some feel that others might not be “deserving” of whatever is being proposed (tuition forgiveness, covid relief, etc.). I’m in favor of policy that stabilizes society at large, the economy at large. For too long that’s only been demonstrated by letting huge financial institutions and corporations off the hook, and if we want to lay a foundation for a more prosperous and stable future, we need to apply this for citizens as well.
For at least one generation already, parents have struggled to save for retirement, for their own parents’ care, and for their kids’ education at the same time. Let’s begin to repair some of this at the most basic level, by wiping out debt for the generation we’ll be depending on more than ever.
Getting off my soapbox now 
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An assumption that it’s only the older folks who have an issue with this would be misleading. Look at page 5 in the attached, only 26% of respondents favored blanket student loan forgiveness, everyone else was in a range of partial to none. While not broken out by age of respondents (a pity), that’s a pretty good indicator that just wiping everything out is not exactly popular.
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One way to handle this (and to address the “but what about those who worked their way through?”) is to increase the current grant programs, and couple it with a tax credit, which you can make post-dated back some specific number of years. As somebody who worked their way through back in the '80s, I shouldn’t be getting relief, but pushing it back say ten years would be equitable and fair and recognize the fact there is a public good component to higher education.
And as to the amount, make the tax credit enough to free up the cash needed to service a loan for the agreed upon amount so folks get out from under the burden, but cap it so they are incentivized to get it paid off.
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You answered your own question.
One million in more income from a college degree is about 200,000 more in taxes paid.
That’s about 3 or 4 more college degrees paid for.
Funny how that works.
Ummmm… I guess you missed the part where the folks without the degrees, already making less, will be subsidizing this windfall for the folks with degrees who are making more already, which only will make them make even more money than the rest of the people.
We’re supposed to be progressive, not regressive.
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For state colleges and universities, taxpayer support has typically declined to a quarter or less of what it was 30 years ago (and it wasn’t great then). Tuition has gone up from the high hundreds or low thousands (in-state) to the high teens and twenties. Meanwhile, low-end wages have stagnated. Somebody working a minimum wage job in 1990 could cover tuition in less than 1000 hours of work a year. Today, that’s more like 2500 hours of work a year.
And yeah, that’s before we get to the for-profit institutions that take money and often teach effectively nothing.
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Typical hypocritical privilege stuffing it’s own face and pockets while whining about “those people”
You had money and privilege to afford college? Whoopie-bully for you.
You went to school went a part-time job for a part of the summer paid full tuition? Whoopie-bully for you.
You had connections and, yes, luck to get a job/career fully paying for you debt, if any? Whoopie-bully for you.
Our nation, our economy, our society needs all forms of education and skills to survive. Greedily insisting “I got mine; f*ck you” will take you down with the rest of us. The economy destroyed by GOP policies (and utter OBJECTIVELY, it is GOP policies) can only recover if we give it the means to recover.
Supply-Side (“greed is good”) is a dead, dis-proven, empty husk.
A worker’s meal needs a grocery store to supply the food which needs a factory or farm to produce the food which need equipment to build the factory which needs a person to build the equipment who needs to not be starving, hence they need…
Tracy Hall
I enlisted in the military at 17, earned the GI Bill, worked a full-time job and took evening classes to get my undergraduate degree.
Some privilege.
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I just watched this again the other night. The most durable film every paid and the funniest.
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The story and the issue itself is bigger what the author of this story describes.
Mr. Biden has endorsed canceling $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower through legislation, and insisted that chipping away at the $1.7 trillion in loan debt held by more than 43 million borrowers is integral to his economic plan. But Democratic leaders, backed by the party’s left flank, are pressing for up to $50,000 of debt relief per borrower, executed on Day 1 of his presidency.
More than 200 organizations — including the American Federation of Teachers, the N.A.A.C.P. and others that were integral to his campaign — have joined the push.
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Whatever the banks borrow at via the Federal Reserve Discount Window is the rate of interest we should charge students for loans. If it’s good enough for the investment banks, it’s good enough for the students. I think that rate is about 0.25 right now.
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I’m just frankly disappointed that so many people respond like it’s a black-and-white issue, and you have to either be totally on board with blanket giveaways, or you may as well be a Republican.
Quite off-putting when people won’t even consider all of the nuances and implications of debt relief at various levels and differing populations.
I’m much more empathetic, for example, to wiping out debt from for-profit predatory colleges who didn’t deliver degrees that are worth something, vice giving a dime to an Ivy League graduate who is set for a cushy life even if they have some debt in the near-term.
But it seems so much of the Left isn’t even interested in hearing anything less than full handouts for everyone.
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