This isn't a magic button you can press to costlessly improve some people's lives. It's pure wealth redistribution with recipients disproportionately in the upper middle class.

Do you have a citation to back this up?

I admit my knowledge is anecdotal, but I know somebody in their 20s, who went to college, and is in debt that would be cancelled. This person was the first in their family to go to college, and was unable to find a job in their field. Most of this persons peers are in a similar situation with respect to debt and being unable to find jobs in their field. The jobs these people have are entry-level tech support, bar-tending / waiting tables, starbucks, etc. None of them are upper middle class.

This analysis breaks out share of debt by family income and student earning quintiles: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/06/28/who-owes-...

Their sources are also linked from that post.

Going by student earnings, the top 40% of earners owe almost 60% of the debt. Going by family incomes has about the same distribution. None of the lower three quintiles are breaking ~15% of borrowing.

This is absolutely a gift to the wealthy.

> > the top 40% of earners owe almost 60% of the debt.

> This is absolutely a gift to the wealthy.

I think you need to look up the definition of "absolute". You left out 60% of your whole.

hyperbole notwithstanding, the greatest share of the debt is owed by the minority who has the greatest ability to pay. That's the salient point. The lower earning majority has lower debt on a per-capita and aggregated basis.

This is certainly a benefit disproportionately for high earners from wealthy backgrounds.

God forbid the rich get richer.

Meanwhile, the 60% of people you didn't mention - the ones with only 40% of debt owed - are in a crisis.

You are saying that we must deny those people assistance, because we would also end up helping others who aren't in crisis, and doing so is unpalatable.

So where is the solution for the people in crisis?

God forbid that the rich be asked to pay anything at all for this incredible and unnecessary gift the people give them? What would make more sense would be targeted debt relief indexed on familial wealth, student earnings, and the institution's median outcome for the given degree program.

Is there any room for accountability, or is the indiscriminate dumping of money out of a helicopter the only solution we're allowed to consider?

Go right ahead and consider, and even promote, another option.

That's not what I have been seeing here. What I have been seeing is promotion of doing nothing at all, simply because the option being presented isn't perfect.

Those people are right.

The data does not support the idea that student debt should be a top priority for anyone trying to maximize the impact of raining dollars onto the public. I'm presenting data not for the purpose of showing that there's a better way to distribute loan relief, but to show how incredible it is to claim this is motivated by desire to give relief to needy people (and therefore given top priority)

It's decidedly not the needy who'd receive the most relief from this policy.

> It's decidedly not the needy who'd receive the most relief from this policy.

That was never the claim. Student loan forgiveness is not universal basic income, medicare, food stamps, etc. It is not designed to overcome poverty. That's a totally separate problem that needs attention.

Are you saying you expect every tax dollar to go to the poor first? Clearly you aren't basing your expectations on the status quo: We spend $700 billion on defense, and $350 billion on welfare (not including medicaid).

Just because there are more important problems to solve does not mean we should ignore this one.

Yes, because there are more important problems to solve does mean we should ignore this one. That's literally the point of prioritizing - budgeting is based on recognizing that there are limits to reality - limits to how much money we can invent or tax without destroying our economy. You seem to think that we should get this for free, but it has to come from somewhere, and we're already facing an extraordinarily expensive pandemic, plus the West seems to keep burning and getting more expensive every year, hurricane season is doing more damage every year, we have more and more places where we can't maintain infrastructure, and, well, the list could go on.

My claim is that "people have student debt" is not one of societies issues. That some people have debt may be, but the question there is, who these people are and whether their educations are performing for them, not simply that the debt exists.

Focusing on the debt is a red herring that conveniently rewards elites and others who are doing just fine. Focusing on whether universities are actually doing what they claim on the box is the real issue -- again conveniently elided by a blanket debt forgiveness program.

Focusing on the benefit to elites is a red herring that conveniently ignores the poor/middle-class, who are in need.

Focusing on universities is a closely related, but separate issue. It does need to be tackled, but that does not change the existing situation of the current victims.

My entire point is that student loan forgiveness shouldn't be discounted out-of-hand simply because it doesn't fix everything or that it benefits some people you don't want to benefit.

Plus - forgiving student loan debt, or, worse, Free College for All, would only incentivize colleges making college more expensive. College is already too expensive - it's literally ten times more expensive than it was 50 years ago, for no greater benefit. We need to find solutions that drive down the cost of things that we want people to have, not solutions to help us spend more of our money on them.

Anecdotally, all of my friends who went to college are clearing 90k a year with many over 200k once you include stock options. One friend is a published expert in their field. Out of all my friends who attended college only one didn't get into a profitable field but their degree was in civil planning and their parents are going to buy them a vineyard to run.

But again, just anecdotal.

> Do you have a citation to back this up?

Honestly, the side proposing a large action should also be ready with relevant research.

"Opinions like this are why we can't have nice things in the USA. People look at some subgroup getting a benefit and are encouraged to think "Why should they get this thing when I get nothing? These people don't deserve it""

That is the price of diversity.

Diversity, which is neither bad nor good, has benefits and costs.

My very diverse country invented jazz music and snowboarding and the Internet. We also lack the social trust and cohesion of much less diverse countries like Japan or the Scandinavian countries at whose social welfare programs we marvel.

Personally, I'll take the jazz music and snowboarding even if it means fighting over what should be basic components of the welfare state.

So eliminating poverty would eliminate diversity?

Nonsense.

I'm not sure who you are responding to here - I said nothing like that.

> That is the price of diversity.

> We also lack the social trust and cohesion of much less diverse countries like Japan or the Scandinavian countries at whose social welfare programs we marvel.

> Personally, I'll take the jazz music and snowboarding even if it means fighting over what should be basic components of the welfare state.

So what I took you to be saying is that "jazz music and snowboarding" come from a diversity present because of the lack of social programs like welfare. What "diversity" is that if not that which includes poverty?

What I'm trying to say is that it's ridiculous to assert that "jazz music and snowboarding" come from the lack of a welfare state. Nowhere do you illustrate how we can't have both.

The government’s money all comes from taxes. If the government pays out money to people that aren’t you, it’s as if you had paid them directly and skipped paying taxes. If you wouldn’t want to give someone free money then you similarly shouldn’t want your government to give them that money.

This is true, but misses the main point for how to determine whether the government providing money is better than not: positive externalities.

As an example, we all benefit hugely from the existence of an EMS (911, ambulances, emergency rooms) system, even if most of us don't use it much. That's a positive externality that's worth the government making sure happens, as it wouldn't necessarily happen without government involvement.

Similarly, public schooling (or publicly paid school) provides externalities: a literate society, a basic level of civic and cultural knowledge that people can assume as a baseline, opportunities for social mobility. None of those exist with a voluntary system.

This proposal doesn't seem to pass that test: at least, nobody has proposed positive externalities that come out of this.

Not really true. The government adds coordinated action and scale in situations where individual action is ineffective. Also, there are a lot of issues about which I simply don't have enough knowledge to have an opinion.

Maybe, but in this case we're literally talking about moving tax money directly into people's student loan accounts. I'd say, "yes, really true."

Your logic being that any time we give money or subsidize some group, it must be good?

The logic is that when you give money or subsidize some group, then that is not _necessarily_ bad. Maybe it really is bad, but the fact that it involves giving money to a specific group is not enough to conclude that.

But the true logic of American government and finance is that if something is good you tax and regulate into the ground, until you’re then forced to subsidize it. The often-attributed quote to Reagan sounds globe but it makes a lot of sense.

We should be throwing more responsibility at the system, not money.

> But the true logic of American government...Reagan.

Reaganomics isn't "the true logic of American government". Reagan's administration ended in 1990.

> We should be throwing more responsibility at the system, not money.

That's a false dichotomy. We can do both.

I honestly think that we need to stop thinking about "subsidize some group". The more effort we spend making sure that somebody doesn't get something they don't deserve, the worse off we are. Let's just have a UBI rather than lots of bureaucracy keeping score.

I'm strong pro-UBI, strongly against student-loan forgiveness.

It's one thing to acknowledge automation is going to decrease the job pool. It's another to retroactively break financial contracts for a generation that's already not responsible enough with money, giving a huge amount to a small-interest group and ignore those who need it most (i.e. those who didn't go to college).;

It also strongly incentivizes colleges, which need to die, and disincentivizes colleges reducing prices to what they were a generation ago.

Even though student payments went largely to administrators? That this didn't used to be the case? That students (of every economic class) paid rich white dudes to sit in offices and pretend to run a college?

How is forgiving this loan anything but relief to young people who were essentially stuck either being that low-income group you are so fond of, or paying through the nose?

College used to be so cheap, you could pay your way through it working nights as you attended classes during the day. I have family who did this. In that world, there's no such thing as student loan forgiveness, because it's not a crippling debt.

The root of the problem is that college got 3x as expensive (after accounting for inflation), and not better at educating. Fundamentally, this is an economics problem. And the lesson here is that people need to stop trying to gamble >$100,000 on class indicators.

It's tremendously damaging to the economy if we deny reality and say "Let's keep encouraging 18 year olds to study British Literature for 4-8 years," versus "That's dead, it's all technical now. Sorry, but here are your realistic choices..."

https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college

You don't get out of a loan because you don't like the skin color or wealth class of the receiving party. Should we forgive mortgages because the payments go to bankers?

Many of us did pay off our loans or took less loans then we could have and we did that knowing loans are to be paid back.

Well, that's a good point. The BUI addresses that. The money men have learned to skim off of every transaction, which inevitably ends up with them having all the money. This is a new thing too.

It's very moral and hardworking of us older folks who lived in a different time and paying loans didn't take half a lifetime. But this whole conversation is about how that world is gone, and young people (in America) are behind the 8-ball.

I agree that UBI is a better solution.

Is UBI on the table, though? Are we really looking at the choice between UBI, Student Loan Forgiveness, or both?

All I am seeing is the dream of either, and the reality of neither.

Right-wing conservatives - informed here by Murdoch press - are obsessed with defending the "neither" option, because anything else is evil Socialism.

I think there's more potential to convince the right wing and the center of UBI than student loan forgiveness. Certainly I think we're making a better society if we are able to do so. The problem with the UBI is that a livable UBI is too expensive for us to afford right now - even at 11k, it's much bigger than the entire US federal discretionary budget. A much smaller UBI that grows with time, though, maybe.

> I think there's more potential to convince the right wing and the center of UBI than student loan forgiveness.

> The problem with the UBI is that a livable UBI is too expensive for us to afford right now

Those two statements contradict each other.

Because collection and redistribution of wealth and assets has never worked anywhere in the world, ever. Any plan to dress it up as “debt forgiveness” is easily shredded for its narrow view that it’s a one and done, when this could be like tolls: Once in place they never go away.

You're making a realllyyy strong claim here, and also an unclear one. Redistribution hasn't worked... worked to achieve what end goal? I would be interested to hear what you think wealth redistribution has failed to do, and also to hear one or even two examples of societies that do not redistribute wealth in any meaningful way (I have trouble imagining how that could ever be the case, to be honest).

I think that redistributing wealth is essential to having a functional society (where I define functioning as being moderately stable and in some meaningful way reducing the suffering of those who live within it).

Redistributing wealth is literally what powers civilization :)

And, if you do it right over the long time you create more wealth, more specialization, more complexity...

Now if you overdo it that is really bad... but I look at inequality right now and wonder if I should start up a guillotine shop.

If your premise is true, then the most redistributive governments would be the most civilized.

20th century communism would not provide a lot of evidence in favor of that theory.

> the most redistributive governments would be the most civilized.

They (the mixed economies of the West and, even within that set, those with the most redistribution and strongest social safety nets) are.

> 20th century communism would not provide a lot of evidence in favor of that theory.

20th Century Communist regimes (Leninism and it's descendants) wasn't redistributive on an ongoing basis, it was simply a one-time transfer of effective power over the entire economy from one narrow elite to another, hence why non-Leninist Marxists often referred to it as “state capitalism”.

No, I did not say how much, it is like anything, not too little, not too much.

Communism is way way too much, and ignores fundamental aspects of humanity.