this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
1920 points (95.5% liked)
Comic Strips
12721 readers
2168 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- [email protected]: "I use Arch btw"
- [email protected]: memes (you don't say!)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is this what's happening? Who said it's a one-time-only thing? Who said they can't also research permanently available cure? Wouldn't proving that removing the debt is a huge boon to everyone cause people to invest more in the idea of a cure?
Sure, once it becomes clear that students being debt-free on graduation is a benefit to society, I'm sure voters will scramble to wipe out student debt! That's why baby boomers, who graduated with very little debt, are such staunch opponents of heavy student loans! /s
Once the pressure is off millennials and gen z, you'll be able to watch the issue drop right out of public discourse. The focus will shift to housing costs, or health care, or some other topic that directly affects them. That's just how politics works, especially in the US, where the constant gridlock in congress means that things only get done in a crisis. If you think we young people are just better than the boomers, and we wouldn't forget to go back and fix the root causes even though we're not immediately affected anymore...you're in for disappointment.
If the goal is to help young people graduate with less debt, randomly forgiving large loans has got to be the worst possible approach. That only encourages educational costs to rise, and encourages students to take on ridiculous debts, and thus ends up transferring taxpayer money directly to schools and banks--and the more outrageous the loans and charges of those schools & banks, the more taxpayer money they get. That is legitimately a crazy way to solve the problem! As I said, it's like giving a drug addict a bunch of heroin. Surely these businesses won't want even more money, right?
So what do you do instead? Well, just off the top of my head: cap student loans. That's what Canada does. I applied for a student loan when I went to school there, and I didn't get to pick an amount. Based on where I was living and the school I was planning to go to, the government just said: "Okay, here's $N". It wasn't that much, something like $6k per term (in the late 00's).
Since students in that case won't have access to arbitrary bags of cash, schools that actually want students will have to, you know, lower prices and compete. So my tuition was something like $4-5k per year, not $20k or $80k. I graduated with something like $50k in debt, which I paid off in a few years.
That would be a reasonable first step. Do that first, while you've got the political support, and then forgive student loans. Don't do that first!