[Discussion] Election 2020

Seems like the board is set. Let’s see how this goes.

My wife burned through a small trust fund that her dad set up for her when she was little in order to pay for college. She lived at home and worked a part time job, paid cash for her books. No loan. No debt. Got her BA.

We were lucky to have that college fund!!!

I do not support eradicating student debt. It's unfair to expect taxpayers -- the majority of whom do not have post-secondary educations -- to fund the living expenses and school debt of those who have higher earning potential than they do. It's unfair to those who have already paid off their debt. It will encourage kids to take loans they don't need while in school because it'll just be eliminated when they graduate.

In Canada, we have friendly repayment terms. If after graduating, your income is too low relative to your debt then the government will pay -- not defer, pay -- the interest on your loan to prevent your debt from accumulating and give you a reasonable monthly payment on your principal. I qualified for this program for a year after graduating and it helped a lot. There's other approaches than straight-out debt forgiveness.

The solution is free tuition, income support for low-income students, and financial support for those who don't get the income they expect after graduating. The solution is not a blank cheque.

Far too little, far too late Mr. Kelly

(CNN)Former White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, has told friends that President Donald Trump "is the most flawed person" he's ever known.

"The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though it's more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life," the retired Marine general has told friends, CNN has learned.

So Kelly is voting for Biden, right?

Djinn wrote:

I do not support eradicating student debt. It's unfair to expect taxpayers -- the majority of whom do not have post-secondary educations -- to fund the living expenses and school debt of those who have higher earning potential than they do. It's unfair to those who have already paid off their debt. It will encourage kids to take loans they don't need while in school because it'll just be eliminated when they graduate.

In Canada, we have friendly repayment terms. If after graduating, your income is too low relative to your debt then the government will pay -- not defer, pay -- the interest on your loan to prevent your debt from accumulating and give you a reasonable monthly payment on your principal. I qualified for this program for a year after graduating and it helped a lot. There's other approaches than straight-out debt forgiveness.

The solution is free tuition, income support for low-income students, and financial support for those who don't get the income they expect after graduating. The solution is not a blank cheque.

Well, here in America, we do not have those things nor would they be likely to work based on America tends to treat loans, debt, and the like.

What we did have for "critical areas" such as teaching, nursing, EMS, et cetera, was the promise of student loan forgiveness after 10 years of qualifying payments.

What we have found is that the Dept. of Ed. has created a system so byzantine that less than 1% of those who should qualify have been able to have their loans forgiven.

And in a country where we pissed away 26 BILLION dollars of precious taxpayer money on three "stealth" ships that are so expensive to operate we can't even justify buying cannon rounds for them, let alone putting them in an operational status, I think we could probably find a way to allocate some of that ship money to people who have done some damn work for this country.

Edit:

Oh and the reason this matters to the 2020 election is because Betsy DeVos is the current Sec. of Education.

Someone should check on Pence. Today's the day he gets booted off the ticket and replaced by JFK Jr. who's totally not dead and totally a big fan of Trump.

OG_slinger wrote:

Someone should check on Pence. Today's the day he gets booted off the ticket and replaced by JFK Jr. who's totally not dead and totally a big fan of Trump.

Is that a Q thing?

Reaper81 wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

Someone should check on Pence. Today's the day he gets booted off the ticket and replaced by JFK Jr. who's totally not dead and totally a big fan of Trump.

Is that a Q thing?

it's a Q thing. They believe this guy is jfk jr.

IMAGE(https://leadstories.com/assets_c/2019/09/xScreenshot,P20,P2871,P29-thumb-900x772-3061437.png.pagespeed.ic.B7s8-JOCAI.jpg)

Dan Rather@DanRather 2m

It’s tempting to use the analogy of rats fleeing a sinking ship to describe the growing number of Republican elected officials starting to speak out against Donald Trump. But that's really not fair to rats, who tend not to be complicit in driving ships to the bottom of the sea.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

They believe this guy is jfk jr.

Do they think the plane crash burnt off his face requiring a completely different looking face to be surgically grafted on?

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/kXo49SR.jpg)

It's unfair to those who have already paid off their debt

Yikes. If we did not change things to make future lives better the world would be an even sorrier place then it is now.

I guess if we ever get better healthcare we should vote NO because that would not be fair to people who had to pay hospital bills in the past?

karmajay wrote:
It's unfair to those who have already paid off their debt

Yikes. If we did not change things to make future lives better the world would be an even sorrier place then it is now.

I guess if we ever get better healthcare we should vote NO because that would not be fair to people who had to pay hospital bills in the past?

I was going to say.

“Because previous generations had to be slaves, you too have to be a slave.”

“Because previous generations couldn’t vote, you also shouldn’t get to vote.”

karmajay wrote:
It's unfair to those who have already paid off their debt

Yikes. If we did not change things to make future lives better the world would be an even sorrier place then it is now.

I guess if we ever get better healthcare we should vote NO because that would not be fair to people who had to pay hospital bills in the past?

Nice job ignoring the bulk of my argument to focus on one minor inconsequential point so you can get your zingers in, guys. Can you actually refute any of my arguments for being opposed to eradicating student debt or not?

Djinn wrote:
karmajay wrote:
It's unfair to those who have already paid off their debt

Yikes. If we did not change things to make future lives better the world would be an even sorrier place then it is now.

I guess if we ever get better healthcare we should vote NO because that would not be fair to people who had to pay hospital bills in the past?

Nice job ignoring the bulk of my argument to focus on one minor inconsequential point so you can get your zingers in, guys. Can you actually refute any of my arguments for being opposed to eradicating student debt or not?

That’s what I was doing. In order to progress as a society, sometimes later generations might be luckier and have it easier than previous generations. Period. The end. There’s nothing unfair about it. That’s how “progress” works.

Isn't having easier debt repayment still making future lives better? Does it have to be either entirely eradicating all debt or nothing? While I understand people with debt want it gone, Djinn's suggestion is one that is probably more realistic to implement as a next step considering the current state of this country.

I'm not super thrilled with the implementation of the ACA and very strongly support a socialized health care system, but I'm still thankful we got it. It's still much better than the nothing we had before.

I support wiping college debts, giving folks that have been taken for significant rides by an often unfair, and out of balance with income, system.

So, Djinn, I appreciate you detailing Canada’s social supports for working college graduates. Those sound awesome. If the US had programs resembling those, we’d likely not need to have this discussion becoming yet another “I didn’t get that, why should you? BOOOOOOTSTRAAAAAPS” topic.

Example: “ From 1982 to 2018, college costs at UT grew by 1430%, while median income grew by 213%, and minimum wage grew by 116%.” (2020, News Channel, 10 source

This info graphic shows the stark difference between US citizens’ purchasing power and college tuition. https://affordableschools.net/tuitio...

Zoso1701 wrote:

Example: “ From 1982 to 2018, college costs at UT grew by 1430%, while median income grew by 213%, and minimum wage grew by 116%. ”

I think this is another issue that needs to be addressed, and not just for those who have debt.

DSGamer wrote:

That’s what I was doing. In order to progress as a society, sometimes later generations might be luckier and have it easier than previous generations. Period. The end. There’s nothing unfair about it. That’s how “progress” works.

Fair enough, I'll concede that point. Fairness for those who came before shouldn't factor into new policies. However, that doesn't change my argument that total college debt forgiveness is a bad policy.

The solution is free tuition, income support for low-income students, and financial support for those who don't get the income they expect after graduating. The solution is not a blank cheque.
Djinn wrote:

The solution is free tuition, income support for low-income students, and financial support for those who don't get the income they expect after graduating. The solution is not a blank cheque.

I mostly agree with that in principle.
But sometimes you might have let a problem get so far out of hand, that you cant just solve it merely for upcoming students (free tuition etc.), but also need to get back and solve it for those already suffering from how things were before.
Though, at least in the type of welfare system used in the US, a solution could be to only help those who are really struggling with their debt, rather than wiping all debt (personally I am more in favor of giving everyone the same welfare benefits, like in UBI, since it is much less of an administrative burden to figure out who qualifies, and the "unnecessary welfare" given to people who dont need it, can be brought back in their taxes anyway).

bekkilyn wrote:
Zoso1701 wrote:

Example: “ From 1982 to 2018, college costs at UT grew by 1430%, while median income grew by 213%, and minimum wage grew by 116%. ”

I think this is another issue that needs to be addressed, and not just for those who have debt.

You aren’t kidding, Bekk. *insert Psych “you know that’s right” gif here.

During the primaries, Warren's proposal was partial forgiveness based on income and the size of your loan. I don't remember the numbers, but something like that could also be a good idea. It's the idea of total debt forgiveness than I dislike. Sure, the minimum wage worker with a 5-figure debt needs support now, but the professional making good money with their degree should pay back their loan.

I'm in the general area where I don't mind others getting a break even I had to pay my stuff off, with a large helping of being aware that my parents helped me A LOT. I do have a problem overly helping someone who really needed a degree from Middlebury college and took out massive loans for that. But that goes to the larger issue of another US problem at least partially caused by the weird split between state issues and federal issues with an additional helping of private institutions regarding costa, loans, and value.

The problem is that once you start adding means testing to determine eligibility to a program, political opponents to that program (at least in the US) start attacking the requirements to get them changed until almost no one is eligible. This is a constant issue with social programs in this country.

Ratf*ckery.

(CNN)A Michigan appeals court ruled Friday that absentee ballots must be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day to count, blocking a ruling that had extended the deadline.

And that ratf*ckery extends into pure malice and inhumanity.

The state's Republican-controlled Legislature had brought the appeal, arguing that the coronavirus pandemic and ongoing US Postal Service slowdowns weren't compelling enough reasonsto extend the absentee ballot deadline or to ease restrictions on third-party ballot collection.

Instead of means testing you could just set a per-year limit on how much would be forgiven, say that the average tuition cost for public colleges for the years the were enrolled.

Edit; Pocket post!

Means testing is the backdoor through which you get policies like drug testing SNAP recipients.

I’m 50 years old. I did a tiny bit of community college before deciding to take a well paid manual labor job with excellent benefits. I am eligible to retire with my full pension in less than 6 months.

If college was made free in the next few months, and I took my pension and went back to school, would that be unfair to other 50 year old folks who took massive student loans to pay for four year college right out of high school? Would that supposed unfairness be made better if student loan forgiveness was put in place?

I’m for free public college. I’m for student loan forgiveness. These things along with free medical care will never happen in the US and the reasons for that are entirely petty and cruel.

I don't have an issue with free or low cost college (which is what state schools USED to offer) but reading Rawk's post made me think of something that will also need to be addressed, and that is the extreme pressure for EVERYONE to go to college, whether they are suited to academics or not, whether they really want to go or not, whether they are ready for it right after high school or not, etc.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with labor jobs, skilled trades, various sorts of self-employment, military, etc. that people can do and even make a whole lot of money in them, but so many people who might have considered these things are pressured into college even when it's entirely the wrong thing for them.

I don't at all believe everyone needs to go to college, though I do believe that everyone who truly WANTS to go to college should have the opportunity without having to put their first baby up for sale in the underground market.