Student Loan Forgiveness Was a Misguided Initiative Anyway

Whenever the government opts to simply distribute funds, it's bound cause issues, and understandably so, for numerous reasons. It's not their money, after all. It's our money. And how ever it gets spent needs to at the very least, make sense.

The student loan forgiveness program never did.

If you benefited from the program, it's easy to see why you might support it. But at the end of the day, the bottom line is clear: if it's debt, and it's elective debt like college loans, then the responsibility to repay it should fall on the one who incurred it.

While the program was a key initiative touted by the Biden administration, polls consistently showed it was extremely unpopular—not to mention it wasn't actually constitutional.

When the government is already burdened with its own enormous debts, and is literally hemorrhaging money, how can we, as Americans, support what is essentially frivolous spending of our tax dollars? It makes no sense.

We know the why of course, although the left would never admit to it. They called it a "crisis." They were trying to buy votes from a needed sector of society. It's really that simple.

It's dead in the water now, as was recently announced. Well, of course it is. They don't need the votes anymore. Well, that and the Biden administration knows the program won't see the light of day under the Trump administration anyway.

Nor should it. Because again, it made no sense to do it in the first place.

I think there were a good many people who thought about it and wondered, where else could the money be spent if we could assume we actually had it to spend? What other areas may have offered better opportunities to provide relief, not to just one sector of society, but the masses?

Maybe we could have suspended the federal gas tax to help reduce the cost of gas and diesel. Maybe we could have offered an automatic energy credit to help with the burden of higher energy bills, especially during winter months.

Or better yet, perhaps we could have looked to aid our aging public by raising social security benefits, suspending income taxes on those benefits, or if we wanted to forgive debts, maybe we could have forgiven medical debts incurred by seniors.

The point is that while just giving money away alone rarely makes sense, if it was to be given away, at least one could better digest the notion of doing it at all if what it was given away for made at least some sense.

Set aside, if you will, that many people had to be left scratching their heads a bit at the whole idea of student loan forgiveness. I mean, aren't college grads supposed to be the smartest of the smart? They couldn't figure out how to manage and repay the debt? And wasn't the whole sell of the college education to make more money than non-college grads? But they couldn't repay the debt even with the supposed higher wages? And non-college grads would now have to pay college tuition through taxes on lower wages?

Beyond just giving money away, perhaps what would be better to do is to address why college costs as much as it does, and why the promise is not delivering the goods, but rather saddling students with debt they can't repay in the first place.

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© 2024 Jim Bauer

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We Should Be Asking Questions, Not Just Forgiving Student Loans

I realize full well that the student loan forgiveness controversy is a bit old news. Of course I disagree with it as well as find it unlawful. But it does make me wonder about another side to the whole thing that perhaps requires further examination, despite the whole idea of it being entirely ridiculous anyway.

Why does anyone feel forgiving student loans is necessary and just?

Of course, the argument is that students who have gone well beyond their college days are suffering massive financial setbacks trying to pay them back, with many graduates requiring decades to do it, and enduring massive interest payments to boot.

First of all, cry me a river. College, for anyone who may have wondered about it, is optional. No one is required to go through continued education.

This is where someone will come in and say to me, "But in order to get into a high paying and meaningful career, and succeed in life, one is almost required to have a degree."

The argument is always, unless you want to be stuck flipping burgers or cleaning toilets and live in abject poverty, you must go to school so you can get something better. Granted, those are generally someone else's words. Not mine. I know full well that's far from the case in the real world.

Many people do jobs that don't require a college degree that also happen to pay extremely well, and many people make a very good living doing things that they didn't have to "suffer" through student loans to do it.

At the same time, I also fully recognize that certain professions do require a college degree, and if someone has interest in those professions, then by all means. Go to college and pursue that. 

The thing that grabs my attention, and that I think should grab anyone's attention is, yeah. But wait a minute. Isn't that the whole selling point of the college degree? That you will get this nice degree to put on display and get this great job and achieve a financial life better than anyone who didn't go to college?

I mean, that is the selling point, right? So, how come it isn't true? 

What if we tackled the issue with another question rather than just decide we should forgive loans and deem them to be unfair? What if we asked, "Are colleges falsely advertising and duping their consumers?" 

Moreover, maybe we should examine, when it comes to compensation, do salaries match the value of the goods and services offered to obtain them? Should the value be commensurate and demonstrable? If you are going to sell me something and sell me on the value, shouldn't your product have to at least support the value it supposedly offers?

I think what we need to do is go back to the colleges and dig a bit deeper into them about what their business practices are. Because clearly the people they've sold these degrees to aren't getting the promise they paid for, right?

They're not getting ahead like the colleges told them they would. Instead, they are suffering, saddled with debt they cannot repay stuck in jobs that don't support the degree they paid for.

Now, I am no legal expert. But that sounds like false advertising to me. 

I also think some of the way these loans are structured need to also be examined. Too many of them allow students to add things in like housing and living expenses. Should that be something allowed to be added in? More college students should be encouraged to work while they attend school in order to not only pay for their education but pay for living while they are doing it.

Just like the rest of us, by the way. If we want things, well...we have to work for them, right? A place to live, a car to drive, food to eat. Instilling a J. Wellington Wimpy mentality onto our kids, "I will kindly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," is no way to foster future financial literacy.

All in all, I just think we're looking at this the wrong way. Sure, college is expensive. But why is it so expensive? And why is it that the cost doesn't live up to the promises sold? And why is no one pointing some of these questions at the colleges themselves? 

The colleges are essentially selling bills of goods like no other business would ever legally get away with, and instead of holding the colleges to account to answer for it, we're simply allowing them to continue doing it, and holding the taxpayers responsible to cover the bill.

If you are wanting me to flip the bill for your product, you better tell me first why the people who received the goods can't afford to pay for what they got.

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