In any case, 22m people benefiting is far more people than the top 1% who benefited in March 2020. But compare the relative outrage.

Where's all the hate for government assistance for the stock market? That's pretty much the definition of "people who do not need assistance".

In this case, the colleges running the scam (charging astronomical prices for worthless paper credentials, and the administrators feeding at this trough) are the biggest winners.

Even the counselors and advisors are part of this pipeline of moral hazard if you think about it. What is their purpose, and are they fulfilling it? Does bailing out their bad advice change anything?

In the case of bailout/forgiveness, there is the perception that every taxpayer...those who paid their debts for college or those that didn't even go to college, are paying for other's mistakes. So on one hand, the disinterest is on account of the issue not being seen as affecting some people while the bailout brings them into it.

i.e. the anger is "now you're making it my problem, to fix your problem."

In any case, to your point about punishing the colleges, I think is absolutely necessary. It's just that bailing out the debtors does not do that whatsoever, in fact in ingrains the moral hazard and keeps the colleges money train flowing (maybe, unless the government has some common sense to know they have to address the other end of the pipeline).

Even your response to my comment focused only on student debt relief, though I also asked about stock market relief. Every taxpayer - those who were still paying college loans, those who paid off their college loans, and those who never went to college - paid for that in higher inflation and asset prices. And unlike student debt relief, every non-taxpayer also paid for it!

that's how society works though. I didn't have kids and my taxes still go to help support childhood nutrition and education programs, etc. I don't get a choice about funding the military, etc. Societally these are things that we have determined are important and deserve funding.

Everyone benefits from having a highly educated populace, not least because of the prolific lack of critical thinking the public displays in the political sphere. Want less "jewish space lasers" nonsense? Build a society with a good tertiary education pipeline that doesn't leave people horribly in debt, and increase the amount of the populace that has access. In many ways we are suffering the pain of that 80s/90s/00s neoliberal consensus on reduced education funding and privatization right now, this is what you get with 30 years of public secondary education being terrible and tertiary education being too expensive for a large portion of the population to access.

But people really just think about me, me, me. MY taxes. And this is the society you get with that.

I always found this to be a non-compelling answer. Society can mean any number of things and changes all the time. You can say the same thing about anything you want.

Obviously "Society" had decided that individuals were responsible for the college debt that they took on until this last year, and then it changed. Never mind the fact that neither society at large or their elected representatives voted on it, just a single individual via executive action.

If you strip away the appeal to "society", it is just an argument that more redistribution is better than less.

Try looking at it this way.

If I am already struggling with someone is robbing me, I would still try to fight if someone new wants to start robbing me too.

Just because there is a real and significant problem with existing corporate bailouts, that doesn't mean that other new bailouts should be encouraged as long they aren't as big.

They can be, but they aren't.

> part of fighting bailouts is preventing new ones

Curious that only one type of bailout is ever fought though.

There are several people in this very thread saying they oppose both, but you seem to refuse to believe them.

That said, congressional bailouts are usually legal, and therefore hard to challenge.

One major problem is that congress prone to make legislative decisions based on corporate interests opposed to their other constituents. This is a hard problem to solve, but many people still care about it and try.

It is an election issue for many, primarily fiscal conservatives from either side of of the isle.

Another challenge is that fiscal conservatives are generally ostracized from either party. Parties draw votes along culture war.

At the end of the day, most people who object to student bailouts also object to corporate bailouts. If we could solve only one, I think most people would pick the latter, recognizing it is a bigger problem.

Not at all, I said the same thing upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438985

hence, people can be upset at two things. I guess we have come full circle.

IMO the real problem is that we just created a new entitlement program out of thin air. And unlike the other programs that have more broad appeal, this one is just for a small portion of the citizenry. And nobody is having a serious conversation about how we're going to fund it going forward.

22m applicants doesn't sound like a "small portion" to me. It'll benefit them and their families - those who are supporting them, as well as those they support.

> IMO the real problem is that we just created a new entitlement program out of thin air.

Would it sound better if you called it a "tax break" or "tax credit"? What's the difference?

And it's certainly way more than the number that benefited from propping up the stock market in 2020.

I agree I don't think it's fair to "hate" on the college-indebted, but I can also see an element of unfairness to debt relief and can understand why someone like that bartender would not be so happy about it.

And yet all the propaganda directs hate towards "blue-haired baristas/bartenders with worthless degrees in women's studies". I don't think it's as simple as "blue collar" vs "white collar". People who took loans to go to trade schools should also be eligible.

And all 3 of those people's tax dollars are going to pay for their bosses' stock portfolios.

It's called Moral Hazard. A lot of us learned this in 2007/2008. For me I had a friend in 2005/2006 that would go to Toll Brothers developments with 2 friends because they only "allowed" you to buy 3 houses per person. So together they'd buy 9 houses, sit on them for 6 months and flip them making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I thought he was insane and that it was inevitable to blow up spectacularly. Which it did. Which the government almost completely bailed him out of and there were almost no consequences, financial or otherwise.