What Toxic People Get Wrong When They Start Raging About Student Loans
Why don't we hold billionaires to the same standard of paying back the money they owe?
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Did you ever consider the high cost of denying our children the right to an education? Education is an investment in our future. If you claim to believe in the value of human life but you're anti-education, then you're a raging hypocrite.
Every technological advancement that makes your life easier is the consequence of education. Every lifesaving medication is the result of education. Every moment you spend with your children when you don't have to worry about starvation or disease or war or abuse is because of education.
Have you thanked education lately?
Have you taken the time to recognize the cruelty of the awful people who try to strip our children of the right to an education?
Education is a human right.
If you are not educated, you cannot be free.
Consider the hostility of all these faceless profiles that come out in a bot swarm whenever anyone talks about student loan forgiveness.
“Well, if they weren't going to pay the money back, they shouldn't have signed on the dotted line.”
Except, in what other arena do we hold anyone to that standard? Billionaires use bankruptcy as a form of debt forgiveness all the time. The president has recently pardoned a bunch of predators who were required to pay back money they had stolen from working class people.
Making student loans exempt from bankruptcy is cruelty by design. It’s class warfare. They want to clip your wings before you ever even learn to fly.
Billionaires wriggle out of their financial obligations all the time. That's how you become a billionaire. Where are the swarms of hostile people screaming and yelling about how people have a moral obligation to pay their dues when it comes to them? Why is the argument always so one sided?
These tough guys pick on students, but not predators.
How can we collectively be so tolerant of this awful system? Think of all the gifted kids who might create inventions that greatly appease the collective suffering of human kind who are not allowed to get an education.
What is wrong with us?
Instead, we dump all our effort into covering up the crimes of some nepo baby billionaire who uses his power to abuse and exploit.
Somehow, the “moral majority” of the US is fine with the billionaire escaping accountability, but they're incensed about the idea of helping out a child.
Also, poor people are not able to use bankruptcy the same way billionaires can. I know people who have gone bankrupt. It's been tough for them. They lost everything. For people without wealth and power, bankruptcy isn't a tool you can use to erase debt.
But the nepo baby billionaires have armies of lawyers and the law is just a joke to them anyway. For us, what they do would be fraud. For them, it's just “good practice.”
“That makes me smart.”
No, it makes you a crook.
Billionaires get their debt canceled all the time. It's not in service to humanity, it's in service to oppression.
Then you've got these hostile people who deride “worthless” degrees. “Well, you should have studied something useful instead of communications or English.”
Did you ever stop and consider how disrespectful it is to say something like that? Normally, these comments come from people who lacked the discipline and drive to get an education themselves. That's why they have endless hours to harass people online with their asinine beliefs.
Any degree is valuable. Anyone who earns any degree has demonstrated a level of drive and initiative that's worthy of our respect. They aren't drowning in student debt because the degree is worthless. They're drowning because the debt is predatory.
These kids pay back their loan over and over and over again until they die.
The whole United States seems to be organized to prevent anyone from achieving a higher education. Costs are always on the rise. Wages always stagnate. The struggle just to afford food and a living space is more than many people can manage. We're all a few months of bad luck away from being out on the street.
That's how oppressive labor systems work. That's why conservatives are against the idea of a four day work week. They want us so busy that we don't even have time to stop and reflect on the level of exploitation they're forcing upon the rest of us.
They're forcing that upon our kids.
They want to keep us down in the cave. We never get to come up to look at the sun ourselves. Instead, they make routine trips to the surface and we have to rely on their second hand reports on what's going on up there.
“Oh, it's nothing but riots and invasions and drugs, it's awful! You don't want to see that. It's horrible up there. You're much better off down here.”
Kids who try to better their situation get hit by predatory loans. Again, the bot swarms come out of nowhere to say, “Well, if those college kids were so smart, they should never have signed up for a loan with such high interest rates.”
These are KIDS we're talking about. We're talking about CHILDREN! Not every 18 year old has a parent with enough financial awareness to warn them against taking out a predatory loan.
Those parents have also been stuck down in the cave with those kids. They've been lied to. We have a responsibility to our fellow human beings to help them RISE, not help hold them down.
Shame on all the horrible people out there who contribute to demonizing and attacking our bright young kids, while they disregard the entitled billionaire class that defaults on what's owed every day of the year, and ten times as much on tax day.
Maybe a hundred times as much.
Maybe a million...
In addition to skipping out on loans they agreed to pay, billionaires get free money all the time. They get taxpayer funded bail outs when their incompetence threatens economic collapse. For some reason, the taxpayers have to keep them going so they can continue to exploit us. Billionaires get subsidies. They get PPP loans. They get grants. The government is literally out there giving free money to billionaires hand over fist.
But if you suggest that we give a couple grand to the brilliant kid who just won the science fair with his proposal for free energy, the bearded drunks you can find at the local bar every Wednesday morning (and every other day of the week) start screaming, “America is not a socialist country!”
Yeah, American doesn't believe in investing in our young people. It doesn't believe in rewarding people who are doing good work. It doesn't believe in recognizing the value of an education.
Instead, we're all expected to hunker down in darkness while the very worst dregs of humanity get to live the high life at our expense.
I don't know if the alternative is “socialism” but what we have now fucking sucks.
These jerks who spent their high school years being disruptive at the back of the room, cheer at the idea of anchoring down the smart kids with predatory loans. I suppose the bullies see that as a way that they can remain relevant even though they're too lazy to ever get up and crack open a book. They remind me of the billionaire class, but your useless local drunks and bullies aren't heirs to the stolen fortune of all the crimes of history.
They'll never be billionaires, so they become faceless keyboard warriors fighting to ensure all our children are left behind.
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Fucking THANK YOU. Jesus christ. This is why I don’t argue with people over the internet. Also, as someone who is trapped by student loan debt, big ol’ fuck you to Linda McMahon, who is a classless and tasteless loser who is only good at exploiting people, just like her monster of a husband.
Here’s a story to consider: my partner is a psychologist who has spent a good part of her career caring for our various social crises, notably at-risk girls and domestic violence support. Because of her commitment and service, she recently qualified for a State program meant to pay off her student debt. Facing a desperate shortage of qualified health care professionals, our State adopted an incentive program to retain our best.
She once asked me why, as professionals in our 50s, we can’t vacation in Europe each summer like the professionals of the generations before ours. I asked her how much her student loan payments had been for the last 20 years: $1200 a month. That’s the money those people saved to spend on summers in Europe, I told her.
There’s the difference. Even for the accomplished and productive among us today, a good deal of our income goes to service our educational debt. After all our hard work, nothing is left to bettor ourselves.
Now here’s the part that suggests an even worse problem: the State pledged to pay off her loans over three $50,000 disbursements. Yeah, it’s still that much after 20 years at $1200 a month. The principle has barely diminished. But with State relief she can continue to serve her community and maybe start saving to finally visit Europe.
The student loan servicer denies the payments. They simply won’t accept payments from the State on her behalf. Why? One guess might be plain incompetence: no one she speaks to seems to know how to arrange a third party payment. Meanwhile I can send a check from my account to her credit card servicer, no problem— just write the account number on it somewhere—but somehow her student loan servicer won’t accept a similar payment from a State agency on her behalf. How hard can it be to solve that problem?
Maybe they just don’t want to. Because each day they don’t post a 50k principle payment is another day they add hundreds in interest. And there’s the rub.
When I took out my own student loans I was 18 and hardly understood what it meant to sign such a commitment. I was a child. But I was assured my education was the most important thing, and that our goverment, our financial institutions, and our society were investing in me. Investing in us, and our collective future.
We were lied to and we were conned. They didn’t lie to us about the importance of a higher education; they lied to us that they cared about it. What they really cared about was creating income streams for themselves that a bunch of idealistic kids would never question, and could never revoke. Income streams immune to risk, as the government would underwrite any defaults. And then the government covered its own bet by decreeing student debts could not be relieved through bankruptcy. And so we became free money paid to the banks for the rest of our careers. We wre lied to and we were conned. Our government failed us by outsourcing our values to commercial entities that always meant to just steal from us.
It’s simple: my partner earned assistance to satisfy her debt while her debtors do everything they can to make sure she continues to send them $1200 a month forever. They don’t want to invest in us; they want to get rich off of us. Some version of my partner’s story is at the root of most all our stories of struggle to pay our loans. It’s just a mean fantasy that we are generations of con artists and crooks. It was con artists and crooks that set this trap.