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Re:Student Loans a Lot Like the Subprime Mortgage Debacle, W... by rayiner on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @09:57AM (#21762900)
Why is the cost of living relevant when you’re talking about debt levels? The point is simply that our debt levels aren’t that unmanageable, and we could achieve something very close to the Swedish student loan system by simply automatically enrolling people in repayment plans we already have.

Moreover, American cost of living is the same in Sweden as in the US (the GDP per capita in nominal dollars is identical to the figure in purchasing-power-adjusted dollars). You may need a car, but housing is cheaper in most of the country.

As to healthcare, making comparisons is difficult. 2/3 of college graduates have employer subsidized healthcare. For those people, you need to look at the median employee premium portion, which is $2,200/year. (There are also out-of-pocket costs, mostly for drugs, but the US figure of about $1,000 is not much different than the Swedish figure of $800 on that front).

The employee premium paid by the typical college graduate is much less than the extra taxes that same person would pay in Sweden. The median college graduate earns $51,000 in the US to start. The median employee premium of $2,200 is 4.4% of that. The tax differential is almost certainly higher than that. (In Sweden, all of that is taxed at 30% county tax, no federal. In the US, the first $12,000 is tax free, and the rest is taxed at 10-12% federal, plus maybe 4-5% state and local, plus 7.65% FICA).

Re:Student Loans a Lot Like the Subprime Mortgage Debacle, W... by sykick on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @10:50AM (#21763541)
You wrote: The point is simply that our debt levels aren’t that unmanageable,...

The cost of living is important as this and income level determines the affordability of debt. Just comparing income level and debt level between the two countries is not a deep enough analysis in order to determine if your proposed fix would work.

You are also ignoring the fact that a large number of people who go to college never graduate. These people are completely absent from your analysis of the problem. You are focusing only on the set of college graduates of both countries. I suspect that the rate of college completion for those who enroll at least one semester is much higher in Sweden than in the U.S.

According to your post 1/3 of U.S. college graduates don't have employer subsidized healthcare. This is a huge percentage and you are ignoring them in your analysis of relative debt burden.

Taxes are higher as a percent in Sweden than in the U.S. but in the U.S. at a moment's notice you can get screwed financially really bad in ways that you can't in Sweden. An ambulance ride in the U.S. costs much more than in Sweden and yearly out of pocket expenses for healthcare is much higher. The necessity of a car causes most people in the U.S. to have auto loans and unplanned maintenance costs can send people over the financial precipice.

I suggest that merely looking at the numbers you have does not give a clear picture of the relative situation in both countries.