They don't understand how different the state of primary education in the US is. Two school districts within 20 miles of each other are wildly different.
I suspect that many students with less family wealth tend to take on less student loan debt, even if they would be accepted to the same college education opportunities. I would call this “financial responsibility,” and I would consider a blanket student debt forgiveness to be quite unfair to them.
The last thing these people want is meritocracy, because it forces them into competition with poorer people for the most prestigious and high status jobs.
If not having to worry about graduating with a crippling debt load is a privilege everybody has rather than a privileged elite, then the competition that privileged elite faces is greater.
>I suspect that many students with less family wealth tend to take on less student loan debt, even if they would be accepted to the same college education opportunities. I would call this “financial responsibility,”
Then you are also using "financial responsibility" as a euphemism for rich.
I am saying the opposite. The financially responsible ones I was talking about are the less wealthy people who choose to take on less debt because it would be a huge risk.
Just to be clear: 1) college debt is enormous 2) on balance it is worth the risk given future earning potential 3) it's not clear to the average person let alone the average 18 year old whether the gamble is correct.
It's treating the "right to untaxed unearned income entitlements" like interest, dividends and rent as intrinsically more fair ("financially responsible") than free education that bothers me.
While we're on the topic of fairness...what about those people who will not go to college or send their kids there? Is it fair that they're forced to pay for other people's education?
This us vs them reductionism is seen in the early days of any communist system (the mass killings come a bit later)
This isn't us vs them - this is us vs... us. Everyone should want to allow people to access education.
Emphasis mine
At some point in the past, a person (possibly an ancestor) took risks to create wealth. Part of the motivation is to later have an easy retirement or to support one's children. You'd kill that motivation, causing people to avoid the risks which would no longer create wealth, and thus prevent things like start-ups.
Why?
"Financially responsible" has become a euphemism for "rich and assumed to be responsible".
I know a bunch of people who are not particularly responsible with their money (splurging) but they are beneficiaries of a lot of unearned income (interest, dividends, rent) and I have yet to hear a coherent argument for why this unearned income shouldn't be taken away and used to fund the kind of education that improves the overall wellbeing of society.
This is the point where somebody tells me that those people don't have enough money to fund this kind of thing (bullshit), or that Bernie won't target them he'll target you (bullshit) or that if you tax them they'll just run away to Panama (there was a study that demonstrated that when their taxes are jacked up they didn't even run away from New York to New Jersey).