Canceling Student Debt, It's A Matter of Perspecive - 8/25/2022

If you have student debt, chances are you support student debt cancellation. Duh.

It's all a matter of how you look at it, a matter of perspective. I realize that.

I saw a post from a woman I follow on Twitter. She's a Mets fan. She posts in a little collection of Mets fans whose stuff I see regularly. In her comment she seemed to be genuinely perplexed that people couldn't see how canceling this debt would benefit her and many, many others like her. I didn't know anything about her, so I looked at her page this morning to see where she was coming from. It's clear she's a grade school teacher. It's a matter of perspective.

I read a post from another person. He asked, "If your credit card company chairman announced that he was canceling a part of your balance, would you say that's unfair to the other card holders?" My response was, "If the President of my credit card company called me and said “We know you’ve made your payments on time, so are increasing your debt by $10,000 because we are forgiving your next door neighbor’s $10,000 debt,” I think I just might levy an objection. It’s a matter of perspective."

Before I go further, let me offer that there are things that President Biden could have done that would have made me support this initiative. 

One: means test debt forgiveness recipients. Don't forgive debt to people who made plenty but spent their money on lots of other stuff who somehow can't find the money to pay off their student loans. 

Two: discriminate by degree. What fields of study lead to essential jobs in the community which don't pay a salary commensurate with the community's need for their services. Teachers, for example. Engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc., make enough to pay their loans. That Liberal Arts degree may make for a well rounded individual, but there's no appreciable need in the community for Liberal Artists.

Three: Make a public service payback provision. You're a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or liberal artist who doesn't qualify under provisions One and Two above? You can be paid back if you commit to community service in your chosen field or as a generalist of some sort. Figure out an hourly rate, per field of study, and require 1/2 hour to cancel one hour's worth of debt. For example, someone owes $20,000, and the occupational field related to their degree pays $50 an hour on average in their community. That comes out to 400 hours, times 50 to get to $20,000. In my scenario, 1/2 of the 400 hours would cancel the debt: 200 hours. That comment I made on Twitter applies here: if they're going to increase my debt by $10,000 in order to forgive my neighbor's $10,000, I'll feel better about it if for the next two years he'll be washing my car once a month, cutting my lawn every two weeks, and trimming my hedges once a month.

Four: make colleges and universities pay a portion of the debt out of their endowments. Let's face it. These institutions jacked up their tuition costs commensurate with the amount of money that was made available to students in the form of federally guaranteed loans and grants. The colleges and universities are a huge part of this problem. Not only did they jack up prices to claim this additional available money (same as auto manufacturers and EV rebates are doing right now), but I fully expect them to jack prices up again to claim this debt forgiveness windfall as best they can if they can.

Of course, none of what would make this acceptable to me is in there. It's not because this is a pure vote grab in an election year when Democrats are scared to death of November because our President is inept, has dementia, and is of their party. Lacking any of One through Four, above, I'm against it. But I don't matter. I'm not one of the votes he's buying, anyway.