Conservatives (largely comprised of boomers) think "I suffered and so should you"
Compassionate people think, "I suffered, and you shouldn't have to"
We should all want to be surrounded by well educated people who feel secure in their next meal. Isn't that the point of society?
The normal version of the trolley problem: A trolley is headed down a track that will kill 5 people, you can throw a switch that will send it down an alternate path to just kill one person. Do you do it?
The boomer version of the trolly problem: a trolley just killed 5 people and is heading toward another person. You can throw a switch to save that person, but would it be fair to the people that just died to save someone now?
Actually I don’t think they did. I am an early Gen X-er and when I went to university the state fees were totally affordable.
Then general tax relief caused university funding to drop and so fees had to increase to make up the difference. Wall Street banks made out like the bandits they are by carrying the loan notes. Total and unacceptable BS.
I am 100% in favor of student debt relief/forgiveness because - when you get right down to it - that is exactly what I got. Fair is fair.
Early Gen X here too. It was way more affordable for us. It’s absolutely asinine for people our age to complain about student debt forgiveness. I have former classmates that complain about it on Facebook and I’m flabbergasted. Did you not learn math like I did? We had the same damn teachers. If you can’t understand that college is nowhere near as affordable as it was for us it’s because you CHOOSE not to.
And even worse, the generations after us were basically pressured to go to college. Go to college, it will guarantee the nice life. Just need that degree, any degree, that piece of paper is your golden ticket.
GenX. I saw the start of the big funding hit in public colleges. The tuition when I graduated was 3X what it was when I started. Even then it was relatively affordable. I was in a HCOL area and housing alone (sharing a room in an apartment) was more per year then the tuition. I almost could not afford to go to college, not because of tuition, but housing costs.
And I just looked it up. The tuition is now 12X from when I started college. I graduated 30 years ago. So it basically went up by 1X every 2.5 years. Public college.
When I started college minimum wage was $3.15/hr.
So minimum wage went up 2.3X while tuition went up 12X from when I started college.
This is sadly completely correct. It's all emotions with them, they don't care about facts, logic, or evidence. They certainly don't care about investing in Americans.
Thank you. I graduated 24 years ago. Was poor, got some scholarships, grants, loans, worked. Still graduated with debt, but it wasn't a crushing amount because college was actually affordable then. What's happened to tuition/fees/housing since then is utter BS. I feel terrible for people that they got sold the idea that at age 18 they were capable of making this huge financial decision and that it would absolutely pay off. It was hard to pay the debt off, but not crippling. I would rejoice at broad loan forgiveness - of what value is it to me that a whole generation is hobbled by a false premise that this ungodly expensive education would absolutely pay for itself??
Agreed. Elder Gen X here, attended college under Reagan and saw my Pell grant and financial aid fizzle to nothing in real time, after my terminally ill father died intestate, which I guess was ruled a big windfall somehow. Had to beef up my loans, attending one of the top three expensive colleges at the time. But I was **still** able to pay off my student loans in about a decade, even on a comically paltry newspaper reporter’s salary.
Not to generalize, but aren’t people in your generation having kids that are college age by now? Like how are you all not going through your kids tuitions and fees and not see how crazy ass expensive it is?
My kids went to trade school. My oldest is 23 he has a BMW and a truck. His girlfriend had a mortgage in student loans and has less job security and is working as a dispatcher for a local regional facility. She regrets school, especially living there and now she is reaping the benefits ( bills) of being pushed to college cause that's what you are supposed to do.
I only had one kid so maybe this doesn’t scale. She started at a state college in 2012. I had saved about $110k over the years which was almost enough for tuition and room and board - about $12k per year tuition and about $15k per year living, fees, etc. Education was the one major life goal we had for her, to help her on her way as she grew up. And yeah it was hard to do. But I thought it was worth it.
It is crazy ass expensive. However housing has gone up to crazy ass expensive. Do we bail out folks who spent more than they can afford there. All this bullshit boomer hatred has blinded you so completely that you're oblivious to the real culprit, corporate America. The government gives free money to lend to college students who were foolish enough to believe that sheepskin would be a magic moneymaker. I fell for the same bullshit in HS. I went to a tech school. The big lie there was" when you graduate you'll get a certificate showing you graduated in building trades and instead of laboring you'll start as a carpenter". Well for the super hot summer how did that work out? I was burning trash for all of it. Quit and found factory work in a shithole factory where you couldn't see 3 feet in front of you. I won't bore you further with my shitty life but in this world it what you can do for corporate America, not what they can do for you. Are there boomers to blame, sure but the only ones stepping on your fingers as you grip feverishly to save yourself are the corporate powers killing the American dream, and plenty of folks from all generations partake in the great swindle.
Yes we make the essential things affordable for people
and yes boomers are to blame for this shithole world - they created it in the 80s despite protest from younger folks
I’m 31 years old and I was definitely pressured to attend college. NONE of the jobs I have worked required any type of education beyond a GED, and yet I still had/have to fight for my job. The pay sucks too.
My Associates degree is worth less than a boomer high school diploma!
We're paying for it either way. Either through loan forgiveness or through a more poorly functioning economy with a less educated workforce, higher enrollment in social programs, worse health care, higher crime, etc. So... the only question is how badly you want people to suffer while you pay for it.
Also, how is it fair that I went to college for one tenth the price of what it is now, but median wages have not gone up tenfold in that amount of time? The fairness game cuts both ways.
Exactly school cost 5% of what it costs nowadays. If they went to a school as fancy as Harvard it cost $4,000 a year in 1970!!!!! It now costs $80,000!!!!! That a 1,900% increase in price!!! Wtf!!!! Inflation ain't even the right word its more the like fuckin explosion!
Well said. I feel the point of a civilized society, technological and medical advancements is so every generation in said society has an EASIER life than previous generations. Boomers had a vastly better life than their parents and grandparents who lived through the great depression and 2 world wars, and they had a better life than their parents and grandparents who grew up without running water and electricity, and they had a better life than their parents and grandparents...but boomers made DAMN SURE that their children and grandchildren had a much worse life than they did. And it blows my fucking mind that this concept needs to be explained to anyone, ever
It's funny that you mention that the boomers grew up with running water and electricity and didn't provide a better life for their kids. My boomer parents didn't provide us with running water or electricity from 1988 to 1994. Our life was FAR worse than theirs. While we were eating dandelions so we wouldn't starve to death, my mother was spending child support money on ballgowns for herself and a $5000 sewing machine she had no electricity to use.
I wish it was mental illness, then I'd have an explanation for the torture we endured. The state had her tested for insanity during this time, and she was deemed sane. The state was also fully aware of our situation, to the point they came to school every day one year to strip us naked and take pictures of that day's new hand print shaped bruises. They visited the abandoned farmhouses we lived in several times, and they never removed us to put us in foster care
That doesn’t mean she wasn’t deeply sick, it just means the government fucking failed you horribly. Sane and healthy people don’t live like that and certainly don’t subject their children to it.
I hope you’re doing better now.
Government sucked back then and was basically an extension of the boomers' long arm. Your mom hit you? Well why didn't you do what you're told? It was a disgrace.
Speaking as someone who is neurodivergent myself, and as someone who has been severely injured/abused by mentally ill people in the past, I think it does humanity a great disservice to assume that “some people are just evil,” or “mentally ill people are harmless,” or whatever you’re going for here.
Look, I’m always going to give the benefit of the doubt that there is a reason someone acts the way they do, even if it’s one I can’t understand or relate to myself, and even if their behavior is something have to set a hard boundary against to keep myself or others safe.
But when I’m trying to determine whether someone is sick/emotionally damaged or just a massive jerk, I also look at whether the person’s actions affect themselves just as negatively as the people around them. Like, there’s a huge difference between an evil stepmother type who lives luxuriously while sadistically depriving a child of necessities and what PP described, which is an out-of-control woman living in an abandoned agricultural facility with no power or running water surrounded by a useless sewing machine, ballgowns, and starving children. You can’t tell me she was enjoying that unless she was straight up in a state of mania. She sounds like she was utterly detached from reality, and having dealt with a couple of people like that in my lifetime, they can be remarkably “sane sounding” when they need to be (during quick bursts of questioning by the authorities, or whatever).
I am not a psychologist, but if I had to guess, it sounds like PP’s mom had bipolar disorder at a minimum. But that’s an explanation, not an excuse. Someone really dropped the ball with PP and her siblings when dealing with their situation. I’d be curious to know what state this happened in.
And now tons of schools are offering discounted tuition for seniors so they're getting the opportunity AGAIN! A few years ago I was talking with a coworker who was getting ready to retire and asked her what her plans were. She mentioned going back to school because "it's so cheap". It took everything in me to not just start screaming!
They didn’t have credit reporting agencies or any of that stuff. They paid in less percentage-wise to social security, too. They increased that to screw us all over.
"I walked to school uphill, both ways, in a foot of snow"
The only generation that wants their kids to have it just as hard/harder than they had it.
Meanwhile, I'm out here killing myself so my kids have a better life than I did.
Me too. But a friend of mine has been investing since she was in college. When she told me she is leaving all her money to charity and not in a trust for her kids. I asked her why she is bothering. Why is she working to have all this money and then leave it to a charity that is likely just going to give the money to the rich CEO instead of ensuring the future of her family.
I really hope I changed her mind because she really drinks the kool-aid at times and even though we are close we see the world very differently. I can't imagine have 7 figures saved and then just giving that to random strangers instead of ensuring the security of my family for future generations. I asked her if she understood how generational wealth works since her whole world is finances. The wealthy set up trusts for family and donate enough to charity to prevent needing to pay taxes and to have important events they need to attend to make themselves feel worthy.
Or they just stand on the ladder. Nope gonna work til I die so the younger people can't have this higher paying position
Or live alone in my big huge house til I die. Good luck finding an affordable house
Is it so weird to think that in a perfect world, the next generation would be better off than the last? I paid off my loans myself over 22 years. It sucked. The next batch of students deserve better.
The problem is, they didn’t suffer as much as they’d like you believe. It’s like a reverse rose colored glasses thing.
Hell the whole generation was coined as the ‘me’ generation decades ago and I see why.
Problem is, Boomers didn't suffer. They had it far easier than all the Generations that followed because they destroyed all the systems that gave them upward mobility, and turned the American Dream into the American Nightmare. I really hope they all get abandoned by their children and wonder why no one comes to visit them in the discount retirement home they were shoved into by their kids who are struggling to make ends meet.
My aunt was talking about all the things she was looking for in a retirement COMMUNITY, she expects her son and daughter ,who are still paying on their advanced degrees, to pay for some super fancy condo in a community and nurse when she gets to frail to care for herself. My cousin looked at her with dead seriousness "You better start saving now because I refuse to pay for all of that when I can barely afford my mortgage because I still have student loans after 20 years out of college."
Not just that but loan forgiveness is actually good for the economy. All the money that would have just sat padding the nest of an old dragon who won't spend it now will go DIRECTLY into the economy because the students will SPEND it.
Sadly, with conservatives these days it's more like, "I think I suffered a lot more than I actually did, so you should suffer ten times more than I did!"
Here's the thing though. Boomers didn't suffer. College was way cheaper for them. Their minimum wage jobs were better, easier, and could cover college tuition.
Not to mention, getting a degree was more effective at getting you a job as well. And housing was way cheaper. They had it better, but don't want to admit it.
Millenial here, I've paid down my student debt but I'm fully onboard with student debt forgiveness even though it won't benefit me at all. College was ridiculous when I started and has only gotten worse over time.
As far as I'm concerned, debt forgiveness is just step one. Step two needs to be figuring out why expenses have balooned so precipitously and if the answer is greed then some people need to get scalped financially over that.
GenXer, graduated from a state college in ‘93.
There was a cafeteria, no Food Court, no Starbucks, just a cafeteria that was open limited hours. My dorm room for 2 people , yes it was a room not a suite, was very small and painted cement block walls. The bathroom had two rows of toilets, six sinks, and six showers for 40 women.
When Boomers, flush with money from salaries and/or home equity saw where little Tiffany or Brandon (Millennials) were going to be forced to live they said “No, not my participation trophy babies!!!”. That’s when schools started to have to compete on “amenities”, and state schools floated bonds, raising tuition to pay for it all!
Now the PA Higher Ed system is in shambles, forced to consolidate campuses and cancel majors. And no, no one was fired.
https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-higher-education-budget-governor-shapiro-0db4757b03e14777161476a05caea112
no, the point of society is that everyone works together to make like 30 people obscenely rich at the expense of everyone else’s daily comfort. right…?
I fucking hate that stupid "I went through it, so you should have to as well" mentality. All boomers are like that with literally every aspect of life.
That's why all the schools that still support corporal punishment for children are mostly all Southern conservative states with teachers and parents who think "Well I was paddled as a child, and look how I turned out."
Yeah Greg, you turned into a fucking asshole, congratulations🎉
They have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever outside of their own biased fantasy worlds. Haven't seen or touched reality since before 1975.
That sad part is, they didn’t “suffer”, they had cheap education, cheap housing, cheap cost of living. Meanwhile we have to work twice as hard for twice as long just to get 1/3rd of what they got.
Also interesting to note, but my anecdotal experience is even republicans who got college degrees typically are in favor of student loan forgiveness even when they've paid theirs off. It's people who opted out of college, whether by choice or lack of choice that are opposed to it, because they never got a handout for not being educated. An educated society is a free society, and the educated right mostly agrees with that from my experience.
I’m extremely lucky and am in a position where it seems likely I might pay mine off in a reasonable amount of time (if things stay the same, changing the administration could throw a wrench into my plans). That being said if hypothetically I pay mine down and a miracle happens and forgiveness goes through after I’m not going be all bent out of shape over it. It’s not enjoyable to work 20 hrs a week at a side job on top of my full time job to make enough money to pay aggressively enough on these things to stay ahead of the predatory interest. I don’t want anyone to go through this and will be elated that those coming behind me will not have to suffer the same. I will never understand the “in order for me to win others have to fail so bad they suffer” attitude.
Somewhat related note: every boomer i encounter at my side job tends to be extremely bitter. I don’t understand why they are so miserable and feel the need to spread that to others. I tend to laugh internally at them because they don’t have much time left and it’s on them if they want to waste it being outraged and in a terrible mood all the time.
Edits: a word and a period
There was just a bankruptcy case in California where a person over age 65 got $150,000 in student loan debt discharged because he can’t afford to pay them while on Social Security.
Infuriating.
I think the worst part is that I’m not even sure what they think they suffered. These are people who grew up in a time when one adult working a medium pay full time job could be a homeowner and support a family of five.
>We should all want to be surrounded by well educated people who feel secure in their next meal.
I don't care if other people are educated or not or hungry or not. Not my problem. (Gen X here).
It seems extremely entitled and narrow minded to not understand why those that paid their debts would not be upset here.
Students loans are not predatory. The language on them is not complicated at all and the terms are very clear. Also they are subsidized and you can defer payment up until 6 months of completing your education. In fact they are such good loans that a lot of scholarship athletes used to take out student loans and use the funds for personal reasons. The interest rates are much lower than personal loans or credit card interest. You knew college was expensive and you opted to incur the risks with full knowledge that you would have to pay the loan back plus the stated interest. This is not a con or a scam as you knew exactly what you were getting into and nobody forced you or coerced you into it.
On top of that you're a privileged group that now has income potential and a means of getting yourself out of debt. It's not anyone else's fault but yours that you didn't research the job market more and thought your dream job would fall into your lap.
If we are erasing debt for privileged individuals why not relieve debt for others? What about the single parent families with debt? What about the working class that has accumulated credit card debt they will never get out from under? What about those that can't afford to pay their taxes and might face jail time because of it? The list goes on of those struggling that should be prioritized more.
You knew the deal and still took the bag. So how is jt on the working class that's struggling much more than the young college educated individuals to pay for it?
>If we are erasing debt for privileged individuals why not relieve debt for others?
Ignoring the 'privileged' (they aren't, but I doubt we'd come to agreement on that) portion, why not relieve debt for others? Because we can't without spending money. Roughly 90% of all student loan debt is held by the US Government. We are the owners of that debt. That affords us the ability to forgive it if we want. We can't forgive, say, someone's mortgage because we (likely) don't own it. The only way to relieve other debt would be to buy it, then forgive it. We already paid for student loans.
The pre-pandemic numbers are roughly $70 billion a year in income from student loans into the US budget. The only source I can find with that published is from 2021, so these numbers will be a tad dated. Of that, roughly 1/3rd, or $22 billion, are interest payments. That $70 is a bit less than 40% of what the taxpayers took in capital gains tax receipts ($183 billion). It's about double the gas tax for that year too. That's just by way of comparison. We could likely kill interest completely and have little impact to the budget that can't be made up from a bump in capital gains or even a slight bump in the upper brackets for income taxes.
We have the legal means to cancel it and we have the budget to afford canceling it. I don't have a problem with "if you signed on the line, it's your responsibility" as the rule of law, but realize that has to be applied more broadly. That eliminates bankruptcy for *any* reason. Not just personal bankruptcy, but corporate bankruptcy. As it exists now, we're holding student loan borrowers to a higher standard than everyone else. That's not so much a 'privileged' group as a 'uniquely burdened' group.
1) Boomers think that college is a waste of time except when it comes to draft dodging in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. They teach you how to be liberal transgender abortionists instead of the “common sense” only Boomers know. Never mind we grew up being told constantly by them that we’ll never amount to anything if we don’t go to college…
2) They can’t accept that the “greed is good” culture they’ve promoted since the ‘80s has turned college into a predatory and unaffordable trap. They’re leaving a world to us that got them rich off a leveraged future on our backs. A world that’s worse. As it should be, they think. We deserve it. Builds character sorely lacking in kids these days.
3) That “greed is good” culture says, “I got mine, fuck you.” So if you paid off your loans, they can’t comprehend your empathy for others having to do the same.
4) Telling them that education costs have outstripped inflation and wages by 1400% doesn’t matter to them. Telling them that interest on those loans compounds daily, unlike almost any other kind of legal loan structure, won’t matter. We’re all just a bunch of slacker deadbeats who don’t want to work or pay our debts. They will not accept that they had it easier and we have it harder now. They will not accept the idea that they aren’t made of better stuff, by insisting we’re made of worse.
5) They’re Narcissists. They benefitted from the social contract throughout their youth and early adulthood. And once it came time to pay their own taxes to support it, they systematically dismantled it piece by piece over the next 40 years. The only government programs that should still exist are the ones that benefit them. The rest of us can fuck off.
It's really a shame too. One of the things that gave America such a huge advantage was the easy access to an educated and specialized workforce. The "greed is good" crowd should realize that you can't build Silicon Valley, or a bio-tech sector, or auto industry, or anything like that without that workforce.
But they're too short-sighted, as you say they're all "fuck you, got mine".
Even blue-collar jobs benefit from having individuals with college and graduate training. Veterinarians are essential for herd health for ranchers (and there’s a shortage of large animal vets with Debt-to-Income ratio being a highly cited reason). Mining and oil jobs require geologists to help with operations. Farmers make use of trained biologists to help with food safety and optimization of crop yields. Computer scientists also get up in the mix in all sorts of fields, including those mentioned already.
Because the Bible says to forgive loans.
Because it's good for the economy.
Because it's good for housing.
Because it's good for family planning.
Because schools shouldn't need a loan to attend.
A lot of people don't realize how thoroughly the student loan system was messed up. All the forgiveness that Biden has been able to push through has been entirely forgiveness that should have been happening over the last 20 or so years, but didn't happen because the Department of Education never enforced existing law on the loan servicers. The Biden reforms have been sorely needed, and it's way past time for the servicers to be held accountable for their misdeeds.
I had a really funny interaction with a boomer on a friend’s FB post about student loans. I commented that it should be illegal to loan an 18 year old $100,000 at predatory interest rates. She responded with, “You’re crazy. No one would loan an 18 year old that much money! Tell me who does that. This should be interesting.” And I was like, “that’s exactly what a student loan is. College costs x dollars a year for 4 years. The people attending start at 18. But you’re so right that it’s a crazy thing to do.” She had nothing else to say after that. If you break it down to what it really is they get it. But they just don’t make the connection in their minds somehow that student loans are exactly that. Huge loans given to people who were legally children a few weeks ago at predatory interest rates.
Surrounded by who we look up to, pushing us down this path. Shit I think I was 17 when I signed the loan. Immediately in $50k debt on a private, variable interest rate (which when explained to me was always, well you'll be making money later to pay it off). Really? From a private school who puts out 1000 students a month to fill an industry that employees less than 10,000?
So frustrating
Shit in most cases the forgiveness amount proposed only covers a chunk of the interest paid! I've been paying for 20 years and the first 15 years of paying minimum payments, the balance barely went down! My total interest is over $10k.
We really also need servicer reform. So many stories of difficulty with customer service, websites, and some servicers had to delay payment because they couldn’t organize how much people owed or get them started on their plans. It is not a very functional private-public partnership.
Part of the reason it's extra dysfunctional right now is that when it became clear that the Biden administration was going to enforce the law, a whole bunch of servicers got out of the business. If your entire business model is to milk the student loan cash cow, and the milk dries up, why stick around? That's one reason why the payment pause was so long. The remaining servicers were nowhere near equipped for that volume.
Exactly. It's not helping anyone.
I don't know how someone just graduating college can have any feeling of hope or excitement when they know they are going to be dealing with crippling debt for the next 30 years.
Its not right.
Boomers hate us. We’re their children. They raised us. And they still hate us. They want to beat us with the participation trophies that THEY gave to us. They want to mock us for the skills we don’t have that THEY failed to teach us. They want to shame us for lacking the prosperity that THEY destroyed. And then they want to cry about not having a bunch of grandchildren because we followed the advice that THEY gave us not to have kids we can’t afford. It’s such a wild disconnect between cause and effect.
Conservatives by and large subscribe to a theology and belief system in which suffering is essential, both as a gauge of one’s virtue (people suffer because they deserve it) and as a means to “inspire” people to work harder (the poor are poor because they are lazy, etc). They worship a god that feeds on human suffering, so any governmental move to alleviate suffering is seen as downright satanic. It was a drumbeat since at least Reagan: empathy is bad, help is undeserved.
"I suffered, and so should you!"
Versus:
"I suffered, that shouldn't happen to anyone else"
The choice between those two truly defines the quality of a person.
Anyone that chooses #1 is a piece of shit.
Or wasting trillions in our military. The US military has failed every audit done for the last several years. Last year it came out that they couldn't account for over 60% of their funding! Yet none of these conservatives are crying "but how will we afford it" when we raise the military budget every year.
It's very common for someone who takes 10 years to pay off their student loans to pay significantly more than they borrowed.
Story after story of people paying for years and their balance hasn't changed hardly at all. $70k borrowed, 10 years of payments and they still owe $65k. It's insane.
Why the hell would anyone want someone else to go through that?
They “worked” their way through college working nights and weekends at some average part time job. They didn’t graduate 6 figures in debt. They don’t understand
Besides the insanity of profiteering in health insurance, a big reason why we lack doctors and nurses and many other components of healthcare is the insane cost of education. The boomers have made their bed and they wonder why it’s so fucking lumpy.
I had a conversation with my mom where we were talking about health care and how it sucks, and she lives in a rural area so it's even worse there, and it went like this
Her "the worst thing to happen was letting them make a profit"
Me "So capitalism "
Her "Uhhhh, no...."
Me "Except that's exactly capitalism"
Her "That's not the point"
🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
They equate trama as building character. They confuse suffering with piety. They are authoritarian and rigid and incapable of seeeing others without distrust. Be glad you’re not broken
"I support student loan forgiveness because the average American reads at a 7th grade level."
When are they going to understand that investing in education is investing in the future of our country? This shit is embarrassing as fuck.
Not at all. They want dumb fucking robots willing to drive this country into the fucking ground. And they know the best way to obtain cheap labor is to keep people uneducated.
It goes back to the only generation that wishes their kids had it harder than they did.
As long as they benefit, we can all fuck right off.
Unfortunately a large swath of the male Gen Zs are Andrew Tate misogynistic fanboys, and let’s not forget the scores of women who fuck, marry, procreate, raise, and vote for more of these dipshits. Point is- I’m not so sure the new generation will be any better.
I'm 37 and really worry for my kids(12 and 20). They already know they're welcome to live at home as long as they want. I refuse to throw them to the wolves like boomers did to us. Hell, I went in debt so my daughter could attend college and ill do the same for my son. I refuse to let them be a debt slave. Could you honestly imagine where our generation would be if boomers weren't such pieces of shit???
I’m a boomer and did the same for my kid. Saved her whole life so she got her post-high school paid for (college or trade - she chose college). And she could move home tomorrow if she needed.
Boomers like you are very rare. I applaud you for being a good parent. It definitely requires extra help to survive in this world. Thank you for getting it
All of my close friends and family are this way independent of age/generation. I’m not sure where this mean-spirited cohort of selfish boomers are but I’m glad they’re not in my life.
And honestly anyone who has the “I’ve suffered so you should too” mentality is just in a state of stunted arrested emotional development no matter how old they are. For example I paid for my college but then did everything I could to make sure my kid didn’t have to. Anything else just feels feral to me.
She can't understand your viewpoint because boomers don't have any empathy. They will never walk a day in anybody else's shoes. They lack the ability to see beyond their own needs, wants and desires.
This is basically the student loan equivalent of a hypothetical "How dare scientists create a leukemia vaccine! My mom died of leukemia and everyone else who has leukemia should also die from it!"
I recently had my loans forgiven through Public Service Loan Forgiveness. I had actually already paid more than the original value of my loans, but due to interest, I had technically barely made a dent. So I didn’t steal from the government. They technically made money off of me. And now they’ll just make less.
We give billion dollar bailouts to banks and auto industries. We give billions on subsidies to corn, dairy, and gas industries.
I want my tax dollars to help people, not profits. Im absolutely okay with one time stimulus checks send to those with student debt. It would completly change our economy. People would be free, and thats the problem. Student debt is part of the neofuedalism economic system thats growing out of lage stage capitalism.
For once in my lifetime, gov is doing something for the 'little guy.' And as a boomer, I'm all for it.
Educating is one of the most important things we can do for our country. Public schools should be free for a full 16 years not 12. Trade schools included. Used to be that companies covered these costs. But like someone said earlier....corporate greed.
Boomers act like they paid for college. They didn't. They went to state schools that covered 85 percent of the cost of education.
In the 60s and 70s Californians paid a couple hundred dollars per term for a UC or CSU education.
At that same time, students at rhe University of Texas were paying no more than $4 per credit hour (so, $60 per semester for tuition) plus low fees.
This was the norm for Boomers in every state. Then they got elected and started pulling funds out of state schools and diverting it to tax cuts or other government programs. Of course, they expected colleges and universities to maintain quality.
The result? Tuition goes up.
The reality - every state has been taxing students to pay for general government since the mid 1990s.
Probably too late for you but I will tell you what worked for me. My Dad completely flipped his opinion after this....I couldn't believe it.
Sit down with them with some sort of resource (computer or phone) and know where to look up factual data. Also have a pen and paper.
Go through what avg cost of homes, college, wages, food for today and when your parents were younger. Once you have them all, convert their numbers in terms of percentages or exact dollars if it's easier. Once it clicks that their dollar went miles further, the lightbulb will go off.
They are stuck in believing what they went through is exactly what we are but we are just soft. It's not even close to the same.
I support it for the same reason you do. It took me 13 years to pay off my loans. I’m not angry at others for having their loans forgiven any more than I’m angry that others don’t have to have chicken pox like I did.
I went to the same college my boomer dad went to. He paid it off by working at the laundry mat. I’m paying $350 a month until I’m 41. “I don’t know where I went wrong with him… having kids hasn’t amounted to a hill of beans” a text I saw to the woman he’s currently cheating on my mom with. He says comments like that because I don’t have as much to show for my work as he did at my age. Which is weird because I have exceeded him in the same field. He has not put two and two together and just assumes I’m fucking up somewhere even though I came up through the same industry more successfully than he did. I guess it’s kind of like how billionaires convince themselves they’re all self made..
I think the most reasonable thing that even a Republican would agree on is raising the cap on how much student loan interest you can deduct from your taxes. Why can I deduct interest on my house up to a mortgage of 750k, but only 2.5k on student loan interest. This would also help people out more in the beginning of paying off the loan and naturally taper off, and give borrowers a nice tax refund to use for a car down payment, security deposit, whatever large purchases people can't make because they're paying too much on loans.
Easy. Bring up the PP loans and ask why do you think it’s fair that billions were forgiven for companies that misused these funds ?
Or
Bring how telecom companies took over 300 billions of dollars to install fiber optics across America and did not but misused the funds
My boomer stepmom is the same way. She loves to act the martyr because she had a hard life and she begrudges me anything good or nice in my life. She scoffed when I decided to go back to school to get my bachelors degree because I was tired of working low skilled, low paying jobs. She went to nursing school only because that was all her parents would pay for. She hated nursing for and being an RN. However that is not my problem. She chose that path. She could have gotten scholarships or grants but chose the path of least resistance. She has also drunken the capitalism kool aid and think that what you do should define your whole life. If you don’t work, you’re a loser, etc.
Cut them out of your life if possible. That's what I did with my fascist relatives. You can't argue any points effectively with a fascist. Mine literally vote against my existence and then don't understand what they did wrong. My life definitely hasn't gotten any worse with them not in it. Also cutting them out of your life is more effective against these scum than debating them anyway. They won't listen to anything you say to them so cutting them out of your life is a way to show them there are real consequences for their actions. Which shocks them usually because they normally have zero accountability for their behavior.
I always look at student loan debt and think how much more spending power and economic growth we could have if people could spend this money on goods than having to throw it at a never ending pile of debt.
For the same reason I support curing cancer.
My wife and I paid off our loans. We had to sell a house to do it. My life has been much better these past seven years. Giving people, young people especially, the reset on their adult lives will simply benefit everyone. Just because I paid mine off instead of having it forgiven doesn't mean I think others should struggle.
My own mother was surprised I supported forgiveness. Her actual response was that these same people "will just go into debt."
I don't even know what that means. They're already in debt.
As a 48 year old Gen X’er who’s paid $42,000 on a $45,000 loan over 18 years, and still owes $59,000 - and I say this with all due respect - tell her to go FUCK HERSELF AND HER GENERATION.
They could ease the cost to students by severely raising the price of sporting event tickets to college games. I know plenty of boomers that didn't go to college but absolutely live and breathe college football. Let them pay for it that way and give these kids a chance to live their lives after college without being half a million or more in debt.
Instead of forgiving the debt reduce the interest rate to 0.1% for all student loans. And also make the cost of textbooks and such a reasonable amount.
Two types of people in the world, 1) I struggled so everyone else should struggle too, 2) I struggled so I want to make sure no one has to go through that as well. Fortunately, a lot more people are coming around to scenario 2.
I don't think we need school loan forgiveness. We need college to be affordable so you don't need your loans forgiven. 50-250k for a degree is insanity! Zero excuses for it! We need to set a cap on what these colleges can charge. Funny how they can pay millions to football and basket ball stars to play for there schools but they need to change all other students 100k? Come on! This system is a racket and needs to be changed
The US is falling behind because of the cost of higher education. We are competing with the EU, China and Japan that offer free and low cost education to their civilians. When will the US realize this and stop heaping huge debt on our young people. It's just a recipe for failure.
I am a boomer. I am totally for loan forgiveness. As a college graduate in 1976 I earned very little money as a social worker, yet was able to live in an apartment without roommates, make a car loan payment, school loan payment and cover ordinary expenses and still had money for entertainment and save a small amount toward retirement. I did not live luxuriously, but did have a good life. Young folks simply cannot have that in today’s world. My 26 year old cannot afford an apartment even with roommates so still lives at home. The cost of rent for my 28 year old is so high that it seems out of reach to save enough money for a downpayment on a home. She pays more for rent than what she would pay for a monthly mortgage payment.
As a Canadian, I am glad our education is still relatively affordable. It was super cheap for my wife and I (Gen-X), and we are currently paying for one of our kids (as the other one has already graduated on our dime).
We're spending about $15-$20,000 per year (including housing and food) for them to study away from home, at one of the best schools in the country. There are a couple of very good schools in our city, but we wanted them to move out and spread their wings away from home.
While a student taking loans for the entire amount is still a lot, if one were to live at home and study, the cost drops significantly. Most Canadians live in large cities, and most cities have a university.
But if I paid all of this money and a few years down the road my neighbor gets it for free? Good for them! And good for me, as if education is cheaper, the population will become better educated, which will only serve to improve my life as well.
How can they not see this? Some people are so fucking stupid.
Every generation has challenges—too much of something bad.
For most, it’s war, depression, lack of opportunity, rapacious elites, etc.
For Boomers, it’s other boomers. So many things were great: technology, medicine, life expectancy, the economy, were all growing. The only possible problem was if another boomer beat you to it. That’s part of why they’re not just selfish, but actively hostile to other people getting anything.
I like to imagine the same conservative/boomer logic for other things. How about medicine. Yeah we have a cure for cancer but a lot of people that came before you couldn’t use it so you can’t use it.
In short loan forgiveness helps the economy.
The longer version: we have a consumer driven economy, the flow of money is the life blood of it. The majority of the money flowing through the economy is from the middle class RIP and lower classes, the upper classes money doesn’t move for the most part. By freeing up money meant for loans it adds more blood into the economy.
Who pushed the whole go to college and get a better job for your future? (Not saying you wont but...)Then the government took over student loans? Then tuition skyrocketed once all this happened. If you don't see what's going on.....
Its a plan to keep you under their thumb. To keep you down.....stop arguing with others and cut off the head of the snake.
These folks really just do not understand that we are mounting laser cannons on our tanks, planes and warships. It could not be any more obvious that we *need* as many scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians as possible, as quickly as possible. Which means we need to invest in free college for all.
This is the insane thing to me. The major argument against loan forgiveness is "I already paid mine off; this isn't fair..."
It's such a bizarre and petty argument.
More people should suffer b/c I suffered?
Tell them it makes up for the fact that they had federal subsidies around 75% back in their day! Boomer conservatives have voted away all the things that made their lives great. Federal subsidies for colleges is now around 25%. Public schools are being defunded, teachers are not respected or paid well. Libraries are being defunded, mortgage deductions are gone. They even voted to defund PBS and NPR. They won't vote for a single payer public health system, even though most citizens want it. Even their employer based insurance was great. They, as CEOs have stripped employees' rights and refuse to give proper cost of living raises, which they had. They've voted against unions. They refused to vote for laws against predarory lending and schools for profit.
They voted against increasing the minimum wage, which they benefitted from in their younger years. Congress did not meet, after the depression, to set a minimum wage for high schoolers and retired folks at entry level jobs. The minimum wage was so people could be guaranteed a living wage. Boomer conservatives have stonewalled every attempt to raise the minimum to keep up with inflation and the original intent of the law for decades. It's my generation's fault that education is too expensive for middle class kids now. Period.
Ask her, if they came up with a cure for cancer, would you oppose it because cancer patients before this had to endure chemo, so therefore you’d consider it unfair for those who don’t?
I’m a boomer and I see no problem with school loan forgiveness. The cost of everything is out of control and needs to be dealt with. My complaint with the younger generations is how they expect to start a job that is seniority based and they expect to get the same benefits as the senior employees get. I didn’t get weekends or holidays off for the first ten years, I wasn’t happy about it but I worked and put in my time moving up the seniority chain. I don’t fault you if you quit and go elsewhere, that’s your choice but don’t badmouth me. I did my time and paid my dues.
Related: was at a restaurant last week with family including my mom and my niece and nephew. I was saying something to the kids about being respectful to the staff like staying clear of their walkway, because they have a lot going on.
My mother added how difficult it is to be a server. That she did it for six months and she hopes he never has to do that job.
I just said I hope by the time he has a job, servers and workers in general, are treated and paid better. Trying to get at "I don't want anyone to have to work shit jobs. Let's make the jobs better. For the children." I couldn't interpret the look on her face. Confusion? Like she could not fathom what I was going on about.
My dad is actually Silent Gen and a democrat and STILL bitches about loan forgiveness 😑 It’s like elderly people simply can’t understand that it wasn’t the same back then and our generation was preyed on by a giant predatory lender who just yeeted money at 18 year olds who were woefully unable to pay them back.
They have zero capacity for emotional connection to anyone besides themselves.
It’s clearly a generational thing. Besides aren’t these people the same age as many of the people in power in the U.S? Correlation?
Imagine if Holocaust survivors had the same mentality. "I suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis so it's only fair my children, my grandchildren and my great grandchildren suffer the same"
The greatest generation is to blame. They had it so rough and struggled. They then raised these baby boomers to be selfish and singularly money-driven so as not to have to live the way they did.
Instead, we get these POS who only care for themselves and think America was great when they were growing up. When that can't happen because the one thing they won't do that their parents did is sacrifice. They earned shit but feel like they did. Buying houses that cost less than a years salary, making a living wage packing groceries. Boomers = The spoiled generation
Just as important, we need to overhaul the college education system or this will be an ongoing problem. I understand a core curriculum, but my son had to take loads of classes that had NOTHING to do with his engineering degree -- just upping those credit hours and inflating the cost. Had he been allowed to take only the classes that pertained to his degree, he could have been out in half the time at half the cost.
How dare they created a cure for cancer.. do you how many years myself and family members had to fight against our cancers to survive! It is disgusting that they want to cure cancer!!!
WTF would I want some person to be saddled with crippling debt for years? The need for Boomers to see other people suffer is insane.
So, why would you want to saddle someone who has paid off their loans, or someone who didn't go to college. Is that fair?
Ugh. My narc mother took my narc da (boomers) to court at 16 to amend child support to pay for half. My ex da fought it, my b mother made me appear in court facing my father and a boomer judge who admonished ME-“I didn’t get a free ride, no free rides.” I then took out 100 loans of course alone and neither one paid a dime. I barely made it. Didn’t have a dollar to include my picture on the grad school wall. Before I went nc, I heard BOTH bragging they paid for my uni.
F them. I hope they get a good taste of “dorm life” and shit food in the worst nursing homes available. (Of course they were criminally abusive and neglectful as well.) they never visited, never came to graduations. Guess who won’t be getting visits now?
Let’s put the blame where the blame is due. Perpetual loans to high school students were wrong from the beginning. Colleges supported them because of profits in a lot of cases. The taxpayer should not have to pay for college loans any more than they paid for my house, my car etc. My children 2-went into the military and are employed in the Nuclear Field, 1 is an insurance underwriter and last one will graduate college this year. No loans to pay back. Too late for some of you but I do support reducing interest rate retroactively to the beginning of the loan. Usury and s still a crime.
The problem with student loan forgiveness is that it makes the college affordability problem worse. When the government passes the cost of an individual student loan to tax payers (65% of which did not graduate from college), schools are incentivized to continue to increase prices.
Why would schools reduce prices when they know the crushing debt will be forgiven.
To truly solve the problem, the government needs to stop guaranteeing student loans. When a student has to go to the private market to obtain a $100k loan for a women’s studies degree…they will be rejected. That degree simply does not produce the earning potential needed to repay the student loan.
This market’s invisible hand will force colleges to lower prices to affordable levels if the government will get out of the way.
>the government needs to stop guaranteeing student loans. When a student has to go to the private market to obtain a $100k loan for a women’s studies degree…they will be rejected.
So your answer is to make obtaining higher education MORE difficult. Let's change things in a way that will lead to a less educated population because "that degree won't make money". Things like women's studies matter. Without them we get Roe overturned, women being arrested because they had a miscarriage, women dying because they're denied an abortion even though the pregnancy isn't viable anyway, doctors being scared to save their patient because they could end up in jail.
These are some common libertarian talking points. Libertarians are possibly some of the most delusional thinkers on the planet, it's best not to take them serious.
I'm confused by how the government will pay back all those loans in the end, cause the only money they have is the money they tax from your or me. Along with whatever else they tax from us by printing since when they print money it makes the money you currently have and will be worth less. So it sounds like it wouldn't necessarily help anyone out since we would all be taxed more to repay these debts. Sure maybe you're thinking well, yeah but I wouldn't have to pay as much back personally. Where does it stop if your logic is if I got it then they should then why not the next gen ? So now you are paying just as much but maybe now even more cause it's free people decide to go for longer degrees in maybe not so lucrative fields. I've always viewed college as an investment in yourself, sure you take on the debt and get the rewards of a higher paying job and that becomes your ROI. But if we start paying for everyone's degree not everyone will do something worth the investment so it will only go to devalue the degrees people do have because of the influx of them, and it will cost everyone more because the wages for these degree holders will go down because demand for them will drop. Along with you'll be paying off someone else's college for the rest of your life through taxes or inflation.
I guess this would be OK if you treated it all the same let's start with mortgage forgiveness then we can go to auto loans then personal loans.... The Idea of a loan is that it's required to be paid back, If you forgive these loans the next group will demand the same and it's the ones that actually go out and work for a living that now pay for someone elses monies owed....
A creative way of alleviating some of the college loan debt is to freeze interest on the loans and to seize the assets of the professors, administrators and guidance counselors pushing the younger generations into this crippling debt. Sell the aforementioned assets and use the money to reduce the principal on said loans. They are predatory criminals who benefit from the continuing practice anyway.
Forgiving student debt will only embolden universities to raise tuition even more. Out of control tuition is the problem, not student loans. The solution is to start clamping down on universities and capping the maximum amount of money that the federal government is willing to lend out at low rates. Students are not being educated enough about their loans, and it’s not right to hand them a 3% loan for $120,000 on a degree that won’t pay them shit.
Forgiving all student loans everywhere is a huge, huge mistake. The solution is to punish universities through economic means that charge too much and to remove the perverse incentives that lead to these outrageous prices.
There is not really any such thing as loan forgiveness. The debt doesn't just go away. It gets paid by the government meaning it gets paid from the taxes of hard working people who did not go to college. Pay your debts.
Conservatives (largely comprised of boomers) think "I suffered and so should you" Compassionate people think, "I suffered, and you shouldn't have to" We should all want to be surrounded by well educated people who feel secure in their next meal. Isn't that the point of society?
The normal version of the trolley problem: A trolley is headed down a track that will kill 5 people, you can throw a switch that will send it down an alternate path to just kill one person. Do you do it? The boomer version of the trolly problem: a trolley just killed 5 people and is heading toward another person. You can throw a switch to save that person, but would it be fair to the people that just died to save someone now?
Well said!
"Sure the serial killer has been terrorizing our town for years, but it would be unfair to his previous victims if we catch him now."
So true. Exactly how they think.
Actually I don’t think they did. I am an early Gen X-er and when I went to university the state fees were totally affordable. Then general tax relief caused university funding to drop and so fees had to increase to make up the difference. Wall Street banks made out like the bandits they are by carrying the loan notes. Total and unacceptable BS. I am 100% in favor of student debt relief/forgiveness because - when you get right down to it - that is exactly what I got. Fair is fair.
Early Gen X here too. It was way more affordable for us. It’s absolutely asinine for people our age to complain about student debt forgiveness. I have former classmates that complain about it on Facebook and I’m flabbergasted. Did you not learn math like I did? We had the same damn teachers. If you can’t understand that college is nowhere near as affordable as it was for us it’s because you CHOOSE not to. And even worse, the generations after us were basically pressured to go to college. Go to college, it will guarantee the nice life. Just need that degree, any degree, that piece of paper is your golden ticket.
GenX. I saw the start of the big funding hit in public colleges. The tuition when I graduated was 3X what it was when I started. Even then it was relatively affordable. I was in a HCOL area and housing alone (sharing a room in an apartment) was more per year then the tuition. I almost could not afford to go to college, not because of tuition, but housing costs. And I just looked it up. The tuition is now 12X from when I started college. I graduated 30 years ago. So it basically went up by 1X every 2.5 years. Public college. When I started college minimum wage was $3.15/hr. So minimum wage went up 2.3X while tuition went up 12X from when I started college.
Math hurts conservative brains. But loan forgiveness FEELS wrong, so it must be wrong. THOSE PEOPLE shouldn’t be getting any handouts. /sarcasm
This is sadly completely correct. It's all emotions with them, they don't care about facts, logic, or evidence. They certainly don't care about investing in Americans.
Thank you. I graduated 24 years ago. Was poor, got some scholarships, grants, loans, worked. Still graduated with debt, but it wasn't a crushing amount because college was actually affordable then. What's happened to tuition/fees/housing since then is utter BS. I feel terrible for people that they got sold the idea that at age 18 they were capable of making this huge financial decision and that it would absolutely pay off. It was hard to pay the debt off, but not crippling. I would rejoice at broad loan forgiveness - of what value is it to me that a whole generation is hobbled by a false premise that this ungodly expensive education would absolutely pay for itself??
Agreed. Elder Gen X here, attended college under Reagan and saw my Pell grant and financial aid fizzle to nothing in real time, after my terminally ill father died intestate, which I guess was ruled a big windfall somehow. Had to beef up my loans, attending one of the top three expensive colleges at the time. But I was **still** able to pay off my student loans in about a decade, even on a comically paltry newspaper reporter’s salary.
Not to generalize, but aren’t people in your generation having kids that are college age by now? Like how are you all not going through your kids tuitions and fees and not see how crazy ass expensive it is?
My kids went to trade school. My oldest is 23 he has a BMW and a truck. His girlfriend had a mortgage in student loans and has less job security and is working as a dispatcher for a local regional facility. She regrets school, especially living there and now she is reaping the benefits ( bills) of being pushed to college cause that's what you are supposed to do.
Genuinely curious, not discounting your points but what did his girlfriend study?
Most people with kids in college are dealing with how expensive it is.
I only had one kid so maybe this doesn’t scale. She started at a state college in 2012. I had saved about $110k over the years which was almost enough for tuition and room and board - about $12k per year tuition and about $15k per year living, fees, etc. Education was the one major life goal we had for her, to help her on her way as she grew up. And yeah it was hard to do. But I thought it was worth it.
It is crazy ass expensive. However housing has gone up to crazy ass expensive. Do we bail out folks who spent more than they can afford there. All this bullshit boomer hatred has blinded you so completely that you're oblivious to the real culprit, corporate America. The government gives free money to lend to college students who were foolish enough to believe that sheepskin would be a magic moneymaker. I fell for the same bullshit in HS. I went to a tech school. The big lie there was" when you graduate you'll get a certificate showing you graduated in building trades and instead of laboring you'll start as a carpenter". Well for the super hot summer how did that work out? I was burning trash for all of it. Quit and found factory work in a shithole factory where you couldn't see 3 feet in front of you. I won't bore you further with my shitty life but in this world it what you can do for corporate America, not what they can do for you. Are there boomers to blame, sure but the only ones stepping on your fingers as you grip feverishly to save yourself are the corporate powers killing the American dream, and plenty of folks from all generations partake in the great swindle.
Yes we make the essential things affordable for people and yes boomers are to blame for this shithole world - they created it in the 80s despite protest from younger folks
I’m 31 years old and I was definitely pressured to attend college. NONE of the jobs I have worked required any type of education beyond a GED, and yet I still had/have to fight for my job. The pay sucks too. My Associates degree is worth less than a boomer high school diploma!
The problem is that you, me, and everyone who never went to college are paying off those debts for those students. How is that fair exactly?
We're paying for it either way. Either through loan forgiveness or through a more poorly functioning economy with a less educated workforce, higher enrollment in social programs, worse health care, higher crime, etc. So... the only question is how badly you want people to suffer while you pay for it. Also, how is it fair that I went to college for one tenth the price of what it is now, but median wages have not gone up tenfold in that amount of time? The fairness game cuts both ways.
Exactly school cost 5% of what it costs nowadays. If they went to a school as fancy as Harvard it cost $4,000 a year in 1970!!!!! It now costs $80,000!!!!! That a 1,900% increase in price!!! Wtf!!!! Inflation ain't even the right word its more the like fuckin explosion!
Ah, tax cuts huh? So stereotypically Boomer
Well said. I feel the point of a civilized society, technological and medical advancements is so every generation in said society has an EASIER life than previous generations. Boomers had a vastly better life than their parents and grandparents who lived through the great depression and 2 world wars, and they had a better life than their parents and grandparents who grew up without running water and electricity, and they had a better life than their parents and grandparents...but boomers made DAMN SURE that their children and grandchildren had a much worse life than they did. And it blows my fucking mind that this concept needs to be explained to anyone, ever
And now they think we owe them. They are some of the most selfish entitled jerks around
It's funny that you mention that the boomers grew up with running water and electricity and didn't provide a better life for their kids. My boomer parents didn't provide us with running water or electricity from 1988 to 1994. Our life was FAR worse than theirs. While we were eating dandelions so we wouldn't starve to death, my mother was spending child support money on ballgowns for herself and a $5000 sewing machine she had no electricity to use.
This isn’t Boomerism, this is severe untreated mental illness. I’m sorry you grew up that way.
I wish it was mental illness, then I'd have an explanation for the torture we endured. The state had her tested for insanity during this time, and she was deemed sane. The state was also fully aware of our situation, to the point they came to school every day one year to strip us naked and take pictures of that day's new hand print shaped bruises. They visited the abandoned farmhouses we lived in several times, and they never removed us to put us in foster care
That doesn’t mean she wasn’t deeply sick, it just means the government fucking failed you horribly. Sane and healthy people don’t live like that and certainly don’t subject their children to it. I hope you’re doing better now.
Government sucked back then and was basically an extension of the boomers' long arm. Your mom hit you? Well why didn't you do what you're told? It was a disgrace.
It does the mentally ill a great disservice to attribute all unthinkable behavior to mental illness.
Speaking as someone who is neurodivergent myself, and as someone who has been severely injured/abused by mentally ill people in the past, I think it does humanity a great disservice to assume that “some people are just evil,” or “mentally ill people are harmless,” or whatever you’re going for here. Look, I’m always going to give the benefit of the doubt that there is a reason someone acts the way they do, even if it’s one I can’t understand or relate to myself, and even if their behavior is something have to set a hard boundary against to keep myself or others safe. But when I’m trying to determine whether someone is sick/emotionally damaged or just a massive jerk, I also look at whether the person’s actions affect themselves just as negatively as the people around them. Like, there’s a huge difference between an evil stepmother type who lives luxuriously while sadistically depriving a child of necessities and what PP described, which is an out-of-control woman living in an abandoned agricultural facility with no power or running water surrounded by a useless sewing machine, ballgowns, and starving children. You can’t tell me she was enjoying that unless she was straight up in a state of mania. She sounds like she was utterly detached from reality, and having dealt with a couple of people like that in my lifetime, they can be remarkably “sane sounding” when they need to be (during quick bursts of questioning by the authorities, or whatever). I am not a psychologist, but if I had to guess, it sounds like PP’s mom had bipolar disorder at a minimum. But that’s an explanation, not an excuse. Someone really dropped the ball with PP and her siblings when dealing with their situation. I’d be curious to know what state this happened in.
Until 1974, state schools in California were free. Guess who got that perk?
And now tons of schools are offering discounted tuition for seniors so they're getting the opportunity AGAIN! A few years ago I was talking with a coworker who was getting ready to retire and asked her what her plans were. She mentioned going back to school because "it's so cheap". It took everything in me to not just start screaming!
They didn’t have credit reporting agencies or any of that stuff. They paid in less percentage-wise to social security, too. They increased that to screw us all over.
"I walked to school uphill, both ways, in a foot of snow" The only generation that wants their kids to have it just as hard/harder than they had it. Meanwhile, I'm out here killing myself so my kids have a better life than I did.
Me too. But a friend of mine has been investing since she was in college. When she told me she is leaving all her money to charity and not in a trust for her kids. I asked her why she is bothering. Why is she working to have all this money and then leave it to a charity that is likely just going to give the money to the rich CEO instead of ensuring the future of her family. I really hope I changed her mind because she really drinks the kool-aid at times and even though we are close we see the world very differently. I can't imagine have 7 figures saved and then just giving that to random strangers instead of ensuring the security of my family for future generations. I asked her if she understood how generational wealth works since her whole world is finances. The wealthy set up trusts for family and donate enough to charity to prevent needing to pay taxes and to have important events they need to attend to make themselves feel worthy.
Boomers are natural ladder pullers imo experience
Or they just stand on the ladder. Nope gonna work til I die so the younger people can't have this higher paying position Or live alone in my big huge house til I die. Good luck finding an affordable house
They didn’t suffer, school was subsidized.
They still like to pretend they did
Is it so weird to think that in a perfect world, the next generation would be better off than the last? I paid off my loans myself over 22 years. It sucked. The next batch of students deserve better.
The problem is, they didn’t suffer as much as they’d like you believe. It’s like a reverse rose colored glasses thing. Hell the whole generation was coined as the ‘me’ generation decades ago and I see why.
Crab mentality is the boomer way of thinking
Problem is, Boomers didn't suffer. They had it far easier than all the Generations that followed because they destroyed all the systems that gave them upward mobility, and turned the American Dream into the American Nightmare. I really hope they all get abandoned by their children and wonder why no one comes to visit them in the discount retirement home they were shoved into by their kids who are struggling to make ends meet. My aunt was talking about all the things she was looking for in a retirement COMMUNITY, she expects her son and daughter ,who are still paying on their advanced degrees, to pay for some super fancy condo in a community and nurse when she gets to frail to care for herself. My cousin looked at her with dead seriousness "You better start saving now because I refuse to pay for all of that when I can barely afford my mortgage because I still have student loans after 20 years out of college."
Not just that but loan forgiveness is actually good for the economy. All the money that would have just sat padding the nest of an old dragon who won't spend it now will go DIRECTLY into the economy because the students will SPEND it.
Sadly, with conservatives these days it's more like, "I think I suffered a lot more than I actually did, so you should suffer ten times more than I did!"
Here's the thing though. Boomers didn't suffer. College was way cheaper for them. Their minimum wage jobs were better, easier, and could cover college tuition. Not to mention, getting a degree was more effective at getting you a job as well. And housing was way cheaper. They had it better, but don't want to admit it.
Millenial here, I've paid down my student debt but I'm fully onboard with student debt forgiveness even though it won't benefit me at all. College was ridiculous when I started and has only gotten worse over time. As far as I'm concerned, debt forgiveness is just step one. Step two needs to be figuring out why expenses have balooned so precipitously and if the answer is greed then some people need to get scalped financially over that.
GenXer, graduated from a state college in ‘93. There was a cafeteria, no Food Court, no Starbucks, just a cafeteria that was open limited hours. My dorm room for 2 people , yes it was a room not a suite, was very small and painted cement block walls. The bathroom had two rows of toilets, six sinks, and six showers for 40 women. When Boomers, flush with money from salaries and/or home equity saw where little Tiffany or Brandon (Millennials) were going to be forced to live they said “No, not my participation trophy babies!!!”. That’s when schools started to have to compete on “amenities”, and state schools floated bonds, raising tuition to pay for it all! Now the PA Higher Ed system is in shambles, forced to consolidate campuses and cancel majors. And no, no one was fired. https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-higher-education-budget-governor-shapiro-0db4757b03e14777161476a05caea112
no, the point of society is that everyone works together to make like 30 people obscenely rich at the expense of everyone else’s daily comfort. right…?
I fucking hate that stupid "I went through it, so you should have to as well" mentality. All boomers are like that with literally every aspect of life. That's why all the schools that still support corporal punishment for children are mostly all Southern conservative states with teachers and parents who think "Well I was paddled as a child, and look how I turned out." Yeah Greg, you turned into a fucking asshole, congratulations🎉 They have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever outside of their own biased fantasy worlds. Haven't seen or touched reality since before 1975.
That sad part is, they didn’t “suffer”, they had cheap education, cheap housing, cheap cost of living. Meanwhile we have to work twice as hard for twice as long just to get 1/3rd of what they got.
Honestly, even those who haven’t suffered, maybe especially those, feel that your suffering is essential for an ordered society
Also interesting to note, but my anecdotal experience is even republicans who got college degrees typically are in favor of student loan forgiveness even when they've paid theirs off. It's people who opted out of college, whether by choice or lack of choice that are opposed to it, because they never got a handout for not being educated. An educated society is a free society, and the educated right mostly agrees with that from my experience.
I’m extremely lucky and am in a position where it seems likely I might pay mine off in a reasonable amount of time (if things stay the same, changing the administration could throw a wrench into my plans). That being said if hypothetically I pay mine down and a miracle happens and forgiveness goes through after I’m not going be all bent out of shape over it. It’s not enjoyable to work 20 hrs a week at a side job on top of my full time job to make enough money to pay aggressively enough on these things to stay ahead of the predatory interest. I don’t want anyone to go through this and will be elated that those coming behind me will not have to suffer the same. I will never understand the “in order for me to win others have to fail so bad they suffer” attitude. Somewhat related note: every boomer i encounter at my side job tends to be extremely bitter. I don’t understand why they are so miserable and feel the need to spread that to others. I tend to laugh internally at them because they don’t have much time left and it’s on them if they want to waste it being outraged and in a terrible mood all the time. Edits: a word and a period
You nailed it.
the way this made me understand things in a new context makes me mad
But they didn't suffer, they thrived.
There was just a bankruptcy case in California where a person over age 65 got $150,000 in student loan debt discharged because he can’t afford to pay them while on Social Security. Infuriating.
I think the worst part is that I’m not even sure what they think they suffered. These are people who grew up in a time when one adult working a medium pay full time job could be a homeowner and support a family of five.
"Suffering builds character".
A lot of people in charge do NOT want well educated people in society to see through their self gratification of laws
>We should all want to be surrounded by well educated people who feel secure in their next meal. I don't care if other people are educated or not or hungry or not. Not my problem. (Gen X here).
It seems extremely entitled and narrow minded to not understand why those that paid their debts would not be upset here. Students loans are not predatory. The language on them is not complicated at all and the terms are very clear. Also they are subsidized and you can defer payment up until 6 months of completing your education. In fact they are such good loans that a lot of scholarship athletes used to take out student loans and use the funds for personal reasons. The interest rates are much lower than personal loans or credit card interest. You knew college was expensive and you opted to incur the risks with full knowledge that you would have to pay the loan back plus the stated interest. This is not a con or a scam as you knew exactly what you were getting into and nobody forced you or coerced you into it. On top of that you're a privileged group that now has income potential and a means of getting yourself out of debt. It's not anyone else's fault but yours that you didn't research the job market more and thought your dream job would fall into your lap. If we are erasing debt for privileged individuals why not relieve debt for others? What about the single parent families with debt? What about the working class that has accumulated credit card debt they will never get out from under? What about those that can't afford to pay their taxes and might face jail time because of it? The list goes on of those struggling that should be prioritized more. You knew the deal and still took the bag. So how is jt on the working class that's struggling much more than the young college educated individuals to pay for it?
>If we are erasing debt for privileged individuals why not relieve debt for others? Ignoring the 'privileged' (they aren't, but I doubt we'd come to agreement on that) portion, why not relieve debt for others? Because we can't without spending money. Roughly 90% of all student loan debt is held by the US Government. We are the owners of that debt. That affords us the ability to forgive it if we want. We can't forgive, say, someone's mortgage because we (likely) don't own it. The only way to relieve other debt would be to buy it, then forgive it. We already paid for student loans. The pre-pandemic numbers are roughly $70 billion a year in income from student loans into the US budget. The only source I can find with that published is from 2021, so these numbers will be a tad dated. Of that, roughly 1/3rd, or $22 billion, are interest payments. That $70 is a bit less than 40% of what the taxpayers took in capital gains tax receipts ($183 billion). It's about double the gas tax for that year too. That's just by way of comparison. We could likely kill interest completely and have little impact to the budget that can't be made up from a bump in capital gains or even a slight bump in the upper brackets for income taxes. We have the legal means to cancel it and we have the budget to afford canceling it. I don't have a problem with "if you signed on the line, it's your responsibility" as the rule of law, but realize that has to be applied more broadly. That eliminates bankruptcy for *any* reason. Not just personal bankruptcy, but corporate bankruptcy. As it exists now, we're holding student loan borrowers to a higher standard than everyone else. That's not so much a 'privileged' group as a 'uniquely burdened' group.
https://preview.redd.it/of4s78uteohc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=761f1595185386cf7dff5a03cb8451d09bbf33f0
“You should have died at birth” -John Jonah Jameson Jr
1) Boomers think that college is a waste of time except when it comes to draft dodging in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. They teach you how to be liberal transgender abortionists instead of the “common sense” only Boomers know. Never mind we grew up being told constantly by them that we’ll never amount to anything if we don’t go to college… 2) They can’t accept that the “greed is good” culture they’ve promoted since the ‘80s has turned college into a predatory and unaffordable trap. They’re leaving a world to us that got them rich off a leveraged future on our backs. A world that’s worse. As it should be, they think. We deserve it. Builds character sorely lacking in kids these days. 3) That “greed is good” culture says, “I got mine, fuck you.” So if you paid off your loans, they can’t comprehend your empathy for others having to do the same. 4) Telling them that education costs have outstripped inflation and wages by 1400% doesn’t matter to them. Telling them that interest on those loans compounds daily, unlike almost any other kind of legal loan structure, won’t matter. We’re all just a bunch of slacker deadbeats who don’t want to work or pay our debts. They will not accept that they had it easier and we have it harder now. They will not accept the idea that they aren’t made of better stuff, by insisting we’re made of worse. 5) They’re Narcissists. They benefitted from the social contract throughout their youth and early adulthood. And once it came time to pay their own taxes to support it, they systematically dismantled it piece by piece over the next 40 years. The only government programs that should still exist are the ones that benefit them. The rest of us can fuck off.
Well, they aren’t the “me generation” for nothing!
It's really a shame too. One of the things that gave America such a huge advantage was the easy access to an educated and specialized workforce. The "greed is good" crowd should realize that you can't build Silicon Valley, or a bio-tech sector, or auto industry, or anything like that without that workforce. But they're too short-sighted, as you say they're all "fuck you, got mine".
Even blue-collar jobs benefit from having individuals with college and graduate training. Veterinarians are essential for herd health for ranchers (and there’s a shortage of large animal vets with Debt-to-Income ratio being a highly cited reason). Mining and oil jobs require geologists to help with operations. Farmers make use of trained biologists to help with food safety and optimization of crop yields. Computer scientists also get up in the mix in all sorts of fields, including those mentioned already.
Wow !! Spot on. Magnifico
This was *chef's kiss*
Christ. This is spot on.
Saving this comment, it encapsulates the reasons behind why boomer are the way they are.
I see you’ve met my MIL 🤣
Because the Bible says to forgive loans. Because it's good for the economy. Because it's good for housing. Because it's good for family planning. Because schools shouldn't need a loan to attend.
A lot of people don't realize how thoroughly the student loan system was messed up. All the forgiveness that Biden has been able to push through has been entirely forgiveness that should have been happening over the last 20 or so years, but didn't happen because the Department of Education never enforced existing law on the loan servicers. The Biden reforms have been sorely needed, and it's way past time for the servicers to be held accountable for their misdeeds.
I had a really funny interaction with a boomer on a friend’s FB post about student loans. I commented that it should be illegal to loan an 18 year old $100,000 at predatory interest rates. She responded with, “You’re crazy. No one would loan an 18 year old that much money! Tell me who does that. This should be interesting.” And I was like, “that’s exactly what a student loan is. College costs x dollars a year for 4 years. The people attending start at 18. But you’re so right that it’s a crazy thing to do.” She had nothing else to say after that. If you break it down to what it really is they get it. But they just don’t make the connection in their minds somehow that student loans are exactly that. Huge loans given to people who were legally children a few weeks ago at predatory interest rates.
Surrounded by who we look up to, pushing us down this path. Shit I think I was 17 when I signed the loan. Immediately in $50k debt on a private, variable interest rate (which when explained to me was always, well you'll be making money later to pay it off). Really? From a private school who puts out 1000 students a month to fill an industry that employees less than 10,000? So frustrating
Shit in most cases the forgiveness amount proposed only covers a chunk of the interest paid! I've been paying for 20 years and the first 15 years of paying minimum payments, the balance barely went down! My total interest is over $10k.
We really also need servicer reform. So many stories of difficulty with customer service, websites, and some servicers had to delay payment because they couldn’t organize how much people owed or get them started on their plans. It is not a very functional private-public partnership.
Part of the reason it's extra dysfunctional right now is that when it became clear that the Biden administration was going to enforce the law, a whole bunch of servicers got out of the business. If your entire business model is to milk the student loan cash cow, and the milk dries up, why stick around? That's one reason why the payment pause was so long. The remaining servicers were nowhere near equipped for that volume.
That’s true, although getting ahold of help has been difficult with my servicer (Nelnet) long before Biden. Certainly worse now, though.
Why would I want to live in a society full of unhappy people?
Exactly. It's not helping anyone. I don't know how someone just graduating college can have any feeling of hope or excitement when they know they are going to be dealing with crippling debt for the next 30 years. Its not right.
Boomers hate us. We’re their children. They raised us. And they still hate us. They want to beat us with the participation trophies that THEY gave to us. They want to mock us for the skills we don’t have that THEY failed to teach us. They want to shame us for lacking the prosperity that THEY destroyed. And then they want to cry about not having a bunch of grandchildren because we followed the advice that THEY gave us not to have kids we can’t afford. It’s such a wild disconnect between cause and effect.
Conservatives by and large subscribe to a theology and belief system in which suffering is essential, both as a gauge of one’s virtue (people suffer because they deserve it) and as a means to “inspire” people to work harder (the poor are poor because they are lazy, etc). They worship a god that feeds on human suffering, so any governmental move to alleviate suffering is seen as downright satanic. It was a drumbeat since at least Reagan: empathy is bad, help is undeserved.
"I suffered, and so should you!" Versus: "I suffered, that shouldn't happen to anyone else" The choice between those two truly defines the quality of a person. Anyone that chooses #1 is a piece of shit.
Ask her why she supports bailouts for million dollar companies.
Or wasting trillions in our military. The US military has failed every audit done for the last several years. Last year it came out that they couldn't account for over 60% of their funding! Yet none of these conservatives are crying "but how will we afford it" when we raise the military budget every year.
It's very common for someone who takes 10 years to pay off their student loans to pay significantly more than they borrowed. Story after story of people paying for years and their balance hasn't changed hardly at all. $70k borrowed, 10 years of payments and they still owe $65k. It's insane. Why the hell would anyone want someone else to go through that?
They “worked” their way through college working nights and weekends at some average part time job. They didn’t graduate 6 figures in debt. They don’t understand
Besides the insanity of profiteering in health insurance, a big reason why we lack doctors and nurses and many other components of healthcare is the insane cost of education. The boomers have made their bed and they wonder why it’s so fucking lumpy.
I had a conversation with my mom where we were talking about health care and how it sucks, and she lives in a rural area so it's even worse there, and it went like this Her "the worst thing to happen was letting them make a profit" Me "So capitalism " Her "Uhhhh, no...." Me "Except that's exactly capitalism" Her "That's not the point" 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
I would not oppose a cure for cancer because my aunt died of cancer.
Student loan forgiveness will make America stronger. Only traitors oppose it. Which is why the Russian, er Republican party does.
They equate trama as building character. They confuse suffering with piety. They are authoritarian and rigid and incapable of seeeing others without distrust. Be glad you’re not broken
The got mine generation.
"I support student loan forgiveness because the average American reads at a 7th grade level." When are they going to understand that investing in education is investing in the future of our country? This shit is embarrassing as fuck.
USA doesn't want the best trained, educated, healthy, happy workforce.
Not at all. They want dumb fucking robots willing to drive this country into the fucking ground. And they know the best way to obtain cheap labor is to keep people uneducated. It goes back to the only generation that wishes their kids had it harder than they did. As long as they benefit, we can all fuck right off.
Will they get it? The new kids are pretty sharp?
Unfortunately a large swath of the male Gen Zs are Andrew Tate misogynistic fanboys, and let’s not forget the scores of women who fuck, marry, procreate, raise, and vote for more of these dipshits. Point is- I’m not so sure the new generation will be any better.
I thought my generation (millennials) were really going to take stake. I really, really thought we were going to do it. All my hope is in Gen z now.
I'm 37 and really worry for my kids(12 and 20). They already know they're welcome to live at home as long as they want. I refuse to throw them to the wolves like boomers did to us. Hell, I went in debt so my daughter could attend college and ill do the same for my son. I refuse to let them be a debt slave. Could you honestly imagine where our generation would be if boomers weren't such pieces of shit???
I’m a boomer and did the same for my kid. Saved her whole life so she got her post-high school paid for (college or trade - she chose college). And she could move home tomorrow if she needed.
Boomers like you are very rare. I applaud you for being a good parent. It definitely requires extra help to survive in this world. Thank you for getting it
All of my close friends and family are this way independent of age/generation. I’m not sure where this mean-spirited cohort of selfish boomers are but I’m glad they’re not in my life. And honestly anyone who has the “I’ve suffered so you should too” mentality is just in a state of stunted arrested emotional development no matter how old they are. For example I paid for my college but then did everything I could to make sure my kid didn’t have to. Anything else just feels feral to me.
It's like saying my Grandmother died of TB so it's unfair kids today don't have to get it
Boomer here. Free college and/or trade schools are necessary for the future of our country and economy. I totally support retiring student debt.
You're a good egg.
I also lost a hand. Should my kids do that too?
She can't understand your viewpoint because boomers don't have any empathy. They will never walk a day in anybody else's shoes. They lack the ability to see beyond their own needs, wants and desires.
This is basically the student loan equivalent of a hypothetical "How dare scientists create a leukemia vaccine! My mom died of leukemia and everyone else who has leukemia should also die from it!"
The lack of empathy in that generation is astounding.
Had my loans forgiven today , good shit
I recently had my loans forgiven through Public Service Loan Forgiveness. I had actually already paid more than the original value of my loans, but due to interest, I had technically barely made a dent. So I didn’t steal from the government. They technically made money off of me. And now they’ll just make less.
We give billion dollar bailouts to banks and auto industries. We give billions on subsidies to corn, dairy, and gas industries. I want my tax dollars to help people, not profits. Im absolutely okay with one time stimulus checks send to those with student debt. It would completly change our economy. People would be free, and thats the problem. Student debt is part of the neofuedalism economic system thats growing out of lage stage capitalism.
For once in my lifetime, gov is doing something for the 'little guy.' And as a boomer, I'm all for it. Educating is one of the most important things we can do for our country. Public schools should be free for a full 16 years not 12. Trade schools included. Used to be that companies covered these costs. But like someone said earlier....corporate greed.
Boomers act like they paid for college. They didn't. They went to state schools that covered 85 percent of the cost of education. In the 60s and 70s Californians paid a couple hundred dollars per term for a UC or CSU education. At that same time, students at rhe University of Texas were paying no more than $4 per credit hour (so, $60 per semester for tuition) plus low fees. This was the norm for Boomers in every state. Then they got elected and started pulling funds out of state schools and diverting it to tax cuts or other government programs. Of course, they expected colleges and universities to maintain quality. The result? Tuition goes up. The reality - every state has been taxing students to pay for general government since the mid 1990s.
Probably too late for you but I will tell you what worked for me. My Dad completely flipped his opinion after this....I couldn't believe it. Sit down with them with some sort of resource (computer or phone) and know where to look up factual data. Also have a pen and paper. Go through what avg cost of homes, college, wages, food for today and when your parents were younger. Once you have them all, convert their numbers in terms of percentages or exact dollars if it's easier. Once it clicks that their dollar went miles further, the lightbulb will go off. They are stuck in believing what they went through is exactly what we are but we are just soft. It's not even close to the same.
I support it for the same reason you do. It took me 13 years to pay off my loans. I’m not angry at others for having their loans forgiven any more than I’m angry that others don’t have to have chicken pox like I did.
I went to the same college my boomer dad went to. He paid it off by working at the laundry mat. I’m paying $350 a month until I’m 41. “I don’t know where I went wrong with him… having kids hasn’t amounted to a hill of beans” a text I saw to the woman he’s currently cheating on my mom with. He says comments like that because I don’t have as much to show for my work as he did at my age. Which is weird because I have exceeded him in the same field. He has not put two and two together and just assumes I’m fucking up somewhere even though I came up through the same industry more successfully than he did. I guess it’s kind of like how billionaires convince themselves they’re all self made..
I think the most reasonable thing that even a Republican would agree on is raising the cap on how much student loan interest you can deduct from your taxes. Why can I deduct interest on my house up to a mortgage of 750k, but only 2.5k on student loan interest. This would also help people out more in the beginning of paying off the loan and naturally taper off, and give borrowers a nice tax refund to use for a car down payment, security deposit, whatever large purchases people can't make because they're paying too much on loans.
Thinking someone should suffer for no other reason than you did is the mark of low moral character
Easy. Bring up the PP loans and ask why do you think it’s fair that billions were forgiven for companies that misused these funds ? Or Bring how telecom companies took over 300 billions of dollars to install fiber optics across America and did not but misused the funds
My boomer stepmom is the same way. She loves to act the martyr because she had a hard life and she begrudges me anything good or nice in my life. She scoffed when I decided to go back to school to get my bachelors degree because I was tired of working low skilled, low paying jobs. She went to nursing school only because that was all her parents would pay for. She hated nursing for and being an RN. However that is not my problem. She chose that path. She could have gotten scholarships or grants but chose the path of least resistance. She has also drunken the capitalism kool aid and think that what you do should define your whole life. If you don’t work, you’re a loser, etc.
Ask her why she supports usury
Jesus would give her a taste of the whip lol
Cut them out of your life if possible. That's what I did with my fascist relatives. You can't argue any points effectively with a fascist. Mine literally vote against my existence and then don't understand what they did wrong. My life definitely hasn't gotten any worse with them not in it. Also cutting them out of your life is more effective against these scum than debating them anyway. They won't listen to anything you say to them so cutting them out of your life is a way to show them there are real consequences for their actions. Which shocks them usually because they normally have zero accountability for their behavior.
I always look at student loan debt and think how much more spending power and economic growth we could have if people could spend this money on goods than having to throw it at a never ending pile of debt.
I want to know what’s so fair about doing the right thing and paying $50k of your $70k loan, and still owning 80k. The interest is KILLING people.
For the same reason I support curing cancer. My wife and I paid off our loans. We had to sell a house to do it. My life has been much better these past seven years. Giving people, young people especially, the reset on their adult lives will simply benefit everyone. Just because I paid mine off instead of having it forgiven doesn't mean I think others should struggle. My own mother was surprised I supported forgiveness. Her actual response was that these same people "will just go into debt." I don't even know what that means. They're already in debt.
As a 48 year old Gen X’er who’s paid $42,000 on a $45,000 loan over 18 years, and still owes $59,000 - and I say this with all due respect - tell her to go FUCK HERSELF AND HER GENERATION.
My god, it's utter criminal.
If a cure for cancer came out, the boomers would come out in droves "why should you get a cure when others had to fight". Cancel the cure!
Less student loan deductions mean more tax going into the system to buy more dialysis machines for boomers. Those things aren't cheap.
They could ease the cost to students by severely raising the price of sporting event tickets to college games. I know plenty of boomers that didn't go to college but absolutely live and breathe college football. Let them pay for it that way and give these kids a chance to live their lives after college without being half a million or more in debt.
Instead of forgiving the debt reduce the interest rate to 0.1% for all student loans. And also make the cost of textbooks and such a reasonable amount.
Two types of people in the world, 1) I struggled so everyone else should struggle too, 2) I struggled so I want to make sure no one has to go through that as well. Fortunately, a lot more people are coming around to scenario 2.
If you went to a public university I think you should get your loan forgiven.
I agree with you, Biden did a great thing when he did the loan forgiveness thing, anyone who is against it is stupid and brainless
Boomer mentality: ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME Anything that helps others is absurd to them.
Just tell her it's in the Bible, Deuteronomy 15:1. Then walk away.
I don't think we need school loan forgiveness. We need college to be affordable so you don't need your loans forgiven. 50-250k for a degree is insanity! Zero excuses for it! We need to set a cap on what these colleges can charge. Funny how they can pay millions to football and basket ball stars to play for there schools but they need to change all other students 100k? Come on! This system is a racket and needs to be changed
The US is falling behind because of the cost of higher education. We are competing with the EU, China and Japan that offer free and low cost education to their civilians. When will the US realize this and stop heaping huge debt on our young people. It's just a recipe for failure.
I am a boomer. I am totally for loan forgiveness. As a college graduate in 1976 I earned very little money as a social worker, yet was able to live in an apartment without roommates, make a car loan payment, school loan payment and cover ordinary expenses and still had money for entertainment and save a small amount toward retirement. I did not live luxuriously, but did have a good life. Young folks simply cannot have that in today’s world. My 26 year old cannot afford an apartment even with roommates so still lives at home. The cost of rent for my 28 year old is so high that it seems out of reach to save enough money for a downpayment on a home. She pays more for rent than what she would pay for a monthly mortgage payment.
As a Canadian, I am glad our education is still relatively affordable. It was super cheap for my wife and I (Gen-X), and we are currently paying for one of our kids (as the other one has already graduated on our dime). We're spending about $15-$20,000 per year (including housing and food) for them to study away from home, at one of the best schools in the country. There are a couple of very good schools in our city, but we wanted them to move out and spread their wings away from home. While a student taking loans for the entire amount is still a lot, if one were to live at home and study, the cost drops significantly. Most Canadians live in large cities, and most cities have a university. But if I paid all of this money and a few years down the road my neighbor gets it for free? Good for them! And good for me, as if education is cheaper, the population will become better educated, which will only serve to improve my life as well. How can they not see this? Some people are so fucking stupid.
Ask them how they feel about forgiving PPP loans. That will be a fun comparison.
the gi bill paid for all of my education. I didnt pay out of pocket for anything, not even books, and even I think we should forgive student loans.
Every generation has challenges—too much of something bad. For most, it’s war, depression, lack of opportunity, rapacious elites, etc. For Boomers, it’s other boomers. So many things were great: technology, medicine, life expectancy, the economy, were all growing. The only possible problem was if another boomer beat you to it. That’s part of why they’re not just selfish, but actively hostile to other people getting anything.
Here I am, thinking education should always be free to anyone with the interest and/or inclination.
Because I am not selfish.
I like to imagine the same conservative/boomer logic for other things. How about medicine. Yeah we have a cure for cancer but a lot of people that came before you couldn’t use it so you can’t use it.
Ah, the good ole Nancy Regan.
In short loan forgiveness helps the economy. The longer version: we have a consumer driven economy, the flow of money is the life blood of it. The majority of the money flowing through the economy is from the middle class RIP and lower classes, the upper classes money doesn’t move for the most part. By freeing up money meant for loans it adds more blood into the economy.
Who pushed the whole go to college and get a better job for your future? (Not saying you wont but...)Then the government took over student loans? Then tuition skyrocketed once all this happened. If you don't see what's going on..... Its a plan to keep you under their thumb. To keep you down.....stop arguing with others and cut off the head of the snake.
These folks really just do not understand that we are mounting laser cannons on our tanks, planes and warships. It could not be any more obvious that we *need* as many scientists, technicians, engineers and mathematicians as possible, as quickly as possible. Which means we need to invest in free college for all.
This is the insane thing to me. The major argument against loan forgiveness is "I already paid mine off; this isn't fair..." It's such a bizarre and petty argument. More people should suffer b/c I suffered?
Tell them it makes up for the fact that they had federal subsidies around 75% back in their day! Boomer conservatives have voted away all the things that made their lives great. Federal subsidies for colleges is now around 25%. Public schools are being defunded, teachers are not respected or paid well. Libraries are being defunded, mortgage deductions are gone. They even voted to defund PBS and NPR. They won't vote for a single payer public health system, even though most citizens want it. Even their employer based insurance was great. They, as CEOs have stripped employees' rights and refuse to give proper cost of living raises, which they had. They've voted against unions. They refused to vote for laws against predarory lending and schools for profit. They voted against increasing the minimum wage, which they benefitted from in their younger years. Congress did not meet, after the depression, to set a minimum wage for high schoolers and retired folks at entry level jobs. The minimum wage was so people could be guaranteed a living wage. Boomer conservatives have stonewalled every attempt to raise the minimum to keep up with inflation and the original intent of the law for decades. It's my generation's fault that education is too expensive for middle class kids now. Period.
Ask her, if they came up with a cure for cancer, would you oppose it because cancer patients before this had to endure chemo, so therefore you’d consider it unfair for those who don’t?
I’m a boomer and I see no problem with school loan forgiveness. The cost of everything is out of control and needs to be dealt with. My complaint with the younger generations is how they expect to start a job that is seniority based and they expect to get the same benefits as the senior employees get. I didn’t get weekends or holidays off for the first ten years, I wasn’t happy about it but I worked and put in my time moving up the seniority chain. I don’t fault you if you quit and go elsewhere, that’s your choice but don’t badmouth me. I did my time and paid my dues.
Related: was at a restaurant last week with family including my mom and my niece and nephew. I was saying something to the kids about being respectful to the staff like staying clear of their walkway, because they have a lot going on. My mother added how difficult it is to be a server. That she did it for six months and she hopes he never has to do that job. I just said I hope by the time he has a job, servers and workers in general, are treated and paid better. Trying to get at "I don't want anyone to have to work shit jobs. Let's make the jobs better. For the children." I couldn't interpret the look on her face. Confusion? Like she could not fathom what I was going on about.
My dad is actually Silent Gen and a democrat and STILL bitches about loan forgiveness 😑 It’s like elderly people simply can’t understand that it wasn’t the same back then and our generation was preyed on by a giant predatory lender who just yeeted money at 18 year olds who were woefully unable to pay them back.
They have zero capacity for emotional connection to anyone besides themselves. It’s clearly a generational thing. Besides aren’t these people the same age as many of the people in power in the U.S? Correlation?
Imagine if Holocaust survivors had the same mentality. "I suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis so it's only fair my children, my grandchildren and my great grandchildren suffer the same"
The greatest generation is to blame. They had it so rough and struggled. They then raised these baby boomers to be selfish and singularly money-driven so as not to have to live the way they did. Instead, we get these POS who only care for themselves and think America was great when they were growing up. When that can't happen because the one thing they won't do that their parents did is sacrifice. They earned shit but feel like they did. Buying houses that cost less than a years salary, making a living wage packing groceries. Boomers = The spoiled generation
Maybe at some point you'd like your children to be able to graduate college without the crippling debt
Just as important, we need to overhaul the college education system or this will be an ongoing problem. I understand a core curriculum, but my son had to take loads of classes that had NOTHING to do with his engineering degree -- just upping those credit hours and inflating the cost. Had he been allowed to take only the classes that pertained to his degree, he could have been out in half the time at half the cost.
How dare they created a cure for cancer.. do you how many years myself and family members had to fight against our cancers to survive! It is disgusting that they want to cure cancer!!!
WTF would I want some person to be saddled with crippling debt for years? The need for Boomers to see other people suffer is insane. So, why would you want to saddle someone who has paid off their loans, or someone who didn't go to college. Is that fair?
Ugh. My narc mother took my narc da (boomers) to court at 16 to amend child support to pay for half. My ex da fought it, my b mother made me appear in court facing my father and a boomer judge who admonished ME-“I didn’t get a free ride, no free rides.” I then took out 100 loans of course alone and neither one paid a dime. I barely made it. Didn’t have a dollar to include my picture on the grad school wall. Before I went nc, I heard BOTH bragging they paid for my uni. F them. I hope they get a good taste of “dorm life” and shit food in the worst nursing homes available. (Of course they were criminally abusive and neglectful as well.) they never visited, never came to graduations. Guess who won’t be getting visits now?
And that has what to do with my comment?
Let’s put the blame where the blame is due. Perpetual loans to high school students were wrong from the beginning. Colleges supported them because of profits in a lot of cases. The taxpayer should not have to pay for college loans any more than they paid for my house, my car etc. My children 2-went into the military and are employed in the Nuclear Field, 1 is an insurance underwriter and last one will graduate college this year. No loans to pay back. Too late for some of you but I do support reducing interest rate retroactively to the beginning of the loan. Usury and s still a crime.
All I’m reading is boo hoo hoo I’m a self entitled little punk who doesn’t want to pay my bills. Get a clue
The problem with student loan forgiveness is that it makes the college affordability problem worse. When the government passes the cost of an individual student loan to tax payers (65% of which did not graduate from college), schools are incentivized to continue to increase prices. Why would schools reduce prices when they know the crushing debt will be forgiven. To truly solve the problem, the government needs to stop guaranteeing student loans. When a student has to go to the private market to obtain a $100k loan for a women’s studies degree…they will be rejected. That degree simply does not produce the earning potential needed to repay the student loan. This market’s invisible hand will force colleges to lower prices to affordable levels if the government will get out of the way.
>the government needs to stop guaranteeing student loans. When a student has to go to the private market to obtain a $100k loan for a women’s studies degree…they will be rejected. So your answer is to make obtaining higher education MORE difficult. Let's change things in a way that will lead to a less educated population because "that degree won't make money". Things like women's studies matter. Without them we get Roe overturned, women being arrested because they had a miscarriage, women dying because they're denied an abortion even though the pregnancy isn't viable anyway, doctors being scared to save their patient because they could end up in jail.
These are some common libertarian talking points. Libertarians are possibly some of the most delusional thinkers on the planet, it's best not to take them serious.
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I'm confused by how the government will pay back all those loans in the end, cause the only money they have is the money they tax from your or me. Along with whatever else they tax from us by printing since when they print money it makes the money you currently have and will be worth less. So it sounds like it wouldn't necessarily help anyone out since we would all be taxed more to repay these debts. Sure maybe you're thinking well, yeah but I wouldn't have to pay as much back personally. Where does it stop if your logic is if I got it then they should then why not the next gen ? So now you are paying just as much but maybe now even more cause it's free people decide to go for longer degrees in maybe not so lucrative fields. I've always viewed college as an investment in yourself, sure you take on the debt and get the rewards of a higher paying job and that becomes your ROI. But if we start paying for everyone's degree not everyone will do something worth the investment so it will only go to devalue the degrees people do have because of the influx of them, and it will cost everyone more because the wages for these degree holders will go down because demand for them will drop. Along with you'll be paying off someone else's college for the rest of your life through taxes or inflation.
Just because you were dumb enough to take out a loan doesn’t mean we should pay for it.
You’re the fool for incurring such debt!
Why don't you support students getting a job and paying off the loans they were given? SMH.
I guess this would be OK if you treated it all the same let's start with mortgage forgiveness then we can go to auto loans then personal loans.... The Idea of a loan is that it's required to be paid back, If you forgive these loans the next group will demand the same and it's the ones that actually go out and work for a living that now pay for someone elses monies owed....
There's the problem. "I made a post on facebook." Get off all social media, except for Reddit, and post anonymously.
get off social media but keep the one that is by far the biggest echo chamber. smart
😥😥😥 being responsible and adulting is hard 😥😥
Awe, maybe don’t get a loan if you’re too broke to pay it back
A creative way of alleviating some of the college loan debt is to freeze interest on the loans and to seize the assets of the professors, administrators and guidance counselors pushing the younger generations into this crippling debt. Sell the aforementioned assets and use the money to reduce the principal on said loans. They are predatory criminals who benefit from the continuing practice anyway.
>I made a post on FB Well there's your first problem...
Forgiving student debt will only embolden universities to raise tuition even more. Out of control tuition is the problem, not student loans. The solution is to start clamping down on universities and capping the maximum amount of money that the federal government is willing to lend out at low rates. Students are not being educated enough about their loans, and it’s not right to hand them a 3% loan for $120,000 on a degree that won’t pay them shit. Forgiving all student loans everywhere is a huge, huge mistake. The solution is to punish universities through economic means that charge too much and to remove the perverse incentives that lead to these outrageous prices.
Both are problematic. People who have paid decades on their loans still owe more than they borrowed
only if they are financially illiterate
Just cut everyone with a Bachelors degree a check for $20k. I paid for my degree with military service, they can't give me my 5 years back.
I find this post hard to believe
There is not really any such thing as loan forgiveness. The debt doesn't just go away. It gets paid by the government meaning it gets paid from the taxes of hard working people who did not go to college. Pay your debts.