And yet we forgave PPP loans which was $742 billion forgiven vs $400 billion for student loan forgiveness.

This is, in essence, transferring the debt from people who own businesses to people who - on average - do not own businesses. The _actual_ most regressive invisible tax hike we have ever had but sure. . . yay.

I got 87k in PPP loans. It was forgiven, but it all went to my employees.

That's a good thing.

That’s awesome to hear and is absolutely a good thing!

Sadly we’ve also heard a lot of stories of complete misuse and outright fraudulent use of PPP loans. I’m paying for those unless the government gets that money back (after spending hundreds of thousands in legal fees). Whereas as far as I know student loans can’t be misused, at least not to the extent that many PPP loans were.

> It was forgiven, but it all went to my employees.

Isn't getting their labour for free (well, paid for by the taxpayer) pretty much the same as company owners just being handed that 87k? It's money the company didn't have to spend on wages. Were your employees not able to work? (Not intended as criticism - more of an observation. I don't know the real situation etc).

If the economy and the ability for my employees to work we're the same, then indeed it would have been bonus money for me.

However because of covid cash flow issues, I would have had to fire half of my employees without the loan and the payback. That would have sucked for all of us.

Frankly, as I see it, the PPP program was better than the alternatives as my employees didn't wind up on unemploymet.

In one way the PPP is a bad idea as it doesn't let the market correct itself as well as it might - perhaps my company is too fragile. However, we then to not like to see people starving and losing their homes. Clutters up the sidewalks.

The system doesn’t work if we need to keep subsidizing everyone

For example, FEMA subsidizes flood insurance so people can live in flood prone areas.

Of course, with climate change, this will cost even more to the taxpayer.

yes

This is hilariously slanted.

Heaven forbid a country invest in the education of its people. What a terrible no good idea, we should definitely be putting that money into pumping business or other interests.

If you want to invest in education then negotiate deals with universities as a government, don’t be handing blank checks to institutions that are charging $60K/year for tuition that’s somehow offered for 1/10th the price at similar institutions. This is pouring one bucket of water on a house fire but that bucket of water was someone’s only drinking water. It doesn’t solve the problem at all but now you’ve also pissed off a bunch of other people.

I'd wager most people on both sides of the political isle would be in favor of more financial accountability from universities.

This is the thing that gets me.

We collectively invest in a large number of things that may not directly benefit us. My tax dollars fund programs that primarily benefit people that need the money due to choices I personally never would have made.

But that’s the point of a social system.

The moment that collective investment is about education or healthcare, people seem to apply an entirely different ruleset.

That isn't what this is though is it? This is people voluntarily taking loans to fund their education and now getting that paid off with other peoples money. With that logic, when are they paying my mortgage or credit card bills off which are also voluntary debt?

I an all for investing in education. This is not that.

If we want to argue about tax dollars being stolen then the massive bank bailouts and decade of QE by the fed are massively, _massively_ more of a problem and cost. Stop bailing out bad business decisions with my money and then we can talk about not spending it on stuff like paying off education loans.

Half a trillion dollars is not insignificant.

If you look back up, nobody said it was.

Yeah, the parent did. It's in the same order of magnitude.

"need" would be the key word here, do college graduates need the money? If a program is regressive, it means it's transferring money from people who need the money to people who either don't need the money or need it less. That doesn't exactly benefit people who need the money either.

We should invest in education where we need it. This is STEM majors and those without degrees subsidizing liberal arts majors that got worthless degrees.

The investment was loaning the money to them in the first place. If they can't pay it back, it was a bad investment.

You must have assumed I was against it - I am not sure why.

I am just pointing out that there is no forgiveness, the education expenses incurred by college graduates is now being paid by blue collar workers, and its the most regressive tax we have ever had. That doesn't mean I am against it.

I just want folks to know that the person paying your college off is a guy who wishes he could have gone to college.

Complete nonsense, there's no tax increase for anyone to fund this work. We're buying like 10 less missile systems from Raytheon on a tab of defense spending 100k items long to fund stuff like this. It's a complete nonissue and you're just trying to make some bizarre emotional appeal.

it's called Pell Grants and it doesn't involve subsidizing universities for providing useless degrees at ridiculously inflated prices

People need to invest in themselves instead of begging for freebies. There's no reason why I should be paying for someone's pointless and useless education.

This is an awful strawman argument, has emotions frothing from it instead of logic and reasoning. It is like the "But, it is for the children" arguments, it enshrines a sort of false moral superiority upon itself which cannot be reasoned about. Because how could you be against...education?

I think most people could consider it a one time personal 10k tax deduction.

That is a pretty big assertion to make: that on average, most of the tax collection over the entire US is paid by non-college graduates.

I guess I will do the napkin math: 39% of Americans graduated college [2]

Income of mid-career is 111,000 (college) vs 43,000 (HS) [2]

Lifetime increase in earnings is estimated 800,000, paying taxes the whole time.

So I think the commenter calling this a one time tax deduction is closer to reality than a "regressive tax". Probably less regressive than the 401Ks many college grads have vs HS.

[1] https://money.com/wage-gap-college-high-school-grads/ [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-many-of-us-are-college-grad...

That’s not the assertion they made. They’re average person paying tax didn’t graduate college, which is different from saying that most of the tax revenue is collected from non-college graduates.

I think revenue matters since we have a progressive tax rate.

Taxes are paid on income, not on people.

> transferring the debt from people who graduated college

One correction: Student loan debt is incurred regardless of whether the debtors graduated and received a degree.

Is this so different from the PPP loans that were forgiven?

Main frustration with PPP is that gov did not prosecute fraudsters aggressively enough. The basis if the programs are very different.

How is it similar? Businesses that employ people and generate tax revenue vs someone with a gender studies degree that will never add value to anything or anyone but the institution that charged them $150k for the degree.

Probably different accounting treatment. I believe the student loan program is run by issuing treasuries, so the subsidies are the main expense.

Are you comparing loans given to businesses to stay afloat during a government mandated shutdown of an unprecedented scale where those businesses were forbidden by the government to do business, to the free will of students taking a loan understanding very well the consequences of their decision?

Much of the PPP loans taken were fraudulent, wasteful, unnecessary and inflationary. Businesses who had no need for them took them and had their best quarters and year. The market sloshed around and shot up with all this 'free' money.

We're willing to spend all this money unnecessarily on businesses but when it comes to supporting students all of a sudden - its too much and we have to draw the line!

I'd much rather see individuals paid directly than go through businesses and hope they are benevolent enough to use it on their employees.

There is overwhelming evidence that most of those were loans were fraudulent so yeah, it’s not any different, that was bullshit too.

> This is, in essence, transferring the debt from people who graduated college to people who - on average - did not go to college.

That would only be true if everyone paid the same amount of taxes. We don't. College graduates pay significantly more taxes than non-college graduates.

This is largely a wealth transfer from the haves-college graduates to the have-nots college graduates. I'm not sure how you've missed the mark so wildly.

Plenty of people have student loan debt and never graduated college.

This FiveThirtyEight article [0] from 2016 explains your point about debt and graduation a bit more, and gives a nice summary of the typical degrees sought by college students in the US.

[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/

> This is, in essence, transferring the debt from people who graduated college to people who - on average - did not go to college.

There's an easy solution to fix this - tax the rich or super-rich more.

Yes-but the catch is you gotta define “rich” the way Europeans do: about 1.5x the median income. So around $110,000 in the US.

It's truly something when I come to this website and folks are arguing against the government providing assistance to folks burdened by inescapable debt where making payments for decades and paying taxes can land you with even more debt than you started with because of the interest rates. What's supposed to happen? We just throw our hands up and say that the system is inextricably broken and there's nothing to be done?

And if this is a tax hike, then where has the 5-15% APR on many of those loans been going this whole time?

The government isnt providing assistance.

This is transferring debt people willingly took on to get a college degree, to people who did not go to college.

Look, I am not trying to be rude and I am trying to be gentle when I ask this: Where do you think the 'assistance' the government is going to provide comes from?

This transfers the debt to the top income earners who pay federal income tax into the general fund. The bottom 60% of Americans, 100 million households, pay no federal income tax.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/18/61percent-of-americans-paid-...

> Look, I am not trying to be rude and I am trying to be gentle when I ask this: Where do you think the 'assistance' the government is going to provide comes from?

The wealthy and high earners? I pay substantial federal income tax, and I’m not too bent out of shape about this. I’m more concerned about waste going forward, not financial relief for my fellow citizen. The need for this debt would’ve never existed if state and federal funding for higher education had not slowly been withdrawn leaving students primarily to shoulder the cost burden (although I’m mindful of unchecked college spending and the need for cost controls due to the inelastic demand).

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...

Whats your opinion on mortgage relief for people struggling with too much debt?

Credit card companies can be predatory targeting the people least likely to understand what they are doing, what is your opinion of credit card company debt relief?

Where does your line stop?

In all of these cases, we are transferring debt from someone who willingly took it on, to the public - and this debt will be paid at least partially by people who are low income immigrants, people slightly above the poverty line, and construction workers.

Lets at least be honest: "I like this but it means janitors / construction workers / hard working immigrants pay for the college of people who didnt."

You are focusing on "BUT NOT THE MAJORITY"...

Employers don’t require a mortgage or a credit card for you to get a job that pays wages above the poverty line. They do require a degree with no economic exposure to that requirement.

> Lets at least be honest: "I like this but it means janitors / construction workers / hard working immigrants pay for the college of people who didnt."

Only if they have a federal income tax burden. That’s honesty, not the moral hazard you’re attempting to invoke.

Money went from the government's big pool of money to a thing the government decided was a good idea. That's literally how all government spending works. We can collectively decide through our system of democracy that education is a good thing and that the single largest source of unsecured debt is probably worth addressing and not have the argument of "but it doesn't affect that group of people." If you want to get incensed about uneven distribution of wealth, get angry that the tax rate for the highest earners is the lowest it's ever been (and no, debt forgiveness doesn't benefit them).

It's also naive to think that relieving debt from the middle class won't benefit the economy in some way. America's middle class goes to college. It's hard to argue that consumers having more money to spend won't drive economic growth.

What is your stance on "canceling" mortgage and credit card debt?

Like college debt, it was taken on willingly and its hard to argue that consumers having more money to spend won't drive economic growth.

Those kinds of debt can be escaped. Sell your home and buy a new one. Declare bankruptcy.

Student loan debt is taken on by literal children with no credit with the promise of a good job and cannot be escaped under really any circumstances. Saying "well you just shouldn't have gone to college" is blaming kids for decisions their parents ultimately made.