• escapesamsara@discuss.online
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    1 year ago

    Right and that’s a great thought, we should do that; just like we should nationalize healthcare and immediately eliminate private health insurers and PBMs and all the other dozen middle men that make health care more than 10 times as expensive in the US than abroad. But massive sweeping reforms are massively unpopular amongst the wealthy, and the wealthy through use of undemocratic systems of control like the Senate and Electoral college can wield supermajority control of the government despite only having support of 20% of the people – so it’s not happening until wider reform happens, and during that time tens of millions of people are being crushed by a trolly.

    To really push this metaphor it’s ‘do we invent planes so people can stop being tied to train tracks, or do we stop the trolley.’

    It’s not an either or situation, it’s not a zero sum game, we can do both, but we absolutely should do one regardless of our choice to do the other.

    • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My issues with it is we’re going to have to keep doing it every other year as new debt gets created. Does it happen on a schedule or do we do a little forgiveness here, then wait until people are in crushing pain again in 5-10 years and try to do it again… how many massive student loan forgiveness programs can we do before we fix the actual problem.

      Was this even a problem created by the wealthy? This seems like a monkey paw situation, where the government was like, “we want everyone to be able to get a degree. We’ll back the loan so no one gets rejected… tell us how great we are.” Then time passes and people get $80k loans to get degrees in shit that will never get them a job which will allow them to pay it back. Now the government is like, “we’ll forgive the loans… maybe… someday… if we can… just vote for us again… we promise we’ll totally do it next year…” They tried something, it didn’t work, undo it. This shouldn’t be hard. Like applying the scientific method to government.

        • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          What? That’s not what’s happening. They are doing student loan forgiveness, for only some of the current loans. Nothing is become free under the current plan. People are still going to take out massive loans, they are still going to go into massive debt, and they will still be crippled. Which is why this is a stupid plan.

          If school is free, they wouldn’t need to take out loans, correct. However, we’d still want to get the costs under control so it’s not the government writing a blank check to the colleges, funded by tax dollars, instead of students writing blank checks with debt dollars. The current government can’t afford to make this free, the budget is upside down as it is… there is a $1.5T deficit for 2023. Somehow we’re going to pay for college too? The deficit is out of control; we can’t just say the government is going to pay for all this new stuff when they can’t even afford the current stuff. I’m all for providing stuff like healthcare and college, but we have to get the house in order first. Doing it when things are in their current state would be a disaster.