What Are Your Thoughts on Student Loan Forgiveness?

[Eric the Green]

(09-06-2022, 02:42 PM)sbarrera Wrote: We were recently driving through central PA, which is mountainous and rural. Lost of signs supporting Doug Mastriano, the MAGA candidate for governor. Then we stopped for a visit at Bucknell University, a small liberal arts college in a little town called Lewisburg. Signs for Mastriano's opponent, Democrat Josh Shapiro, started showing up. But it was also evident how much more money was being invested in this town than in the surrounding countryside. I mean, it was really nice there, but once you left the University area, everything was run down and decaying. It made sense of the MAGA support visible in the countryside.

All of this is just to get to my point, which is that inflation of higher education costs is responsible both for the wealth discrepancy which I noticed on this road trip, and the pile up of student debt, some of which is being "forgiven," or rather covered by taxpayers. It occurred to me that all we're doing with student loan forgiveness is helping to subsidize fancy Universities like Bucknell.

That being said, I support the plan because it helps the borrowers who have struggled to make their degrees pay off. But obviously it's just going to sustain the problem of higher education price inflation.

I agree. The colleges that charge too much should not have to be paid by taxpayers. The excess amount of loans should just be cancelled. Also the high interest rates charged by insurance companies.

I wonder how colleges are able to make those towns wealthy. Are teachers really well-paid? Or is it that those towns support government services to their people, because they are smart and well-informed enough not to swallow neoliberal slogans?

The irony about places like middle PA (or West Virginia, or Alabama, or any other red-voting area) is that they have voted for their own condition, and they vote to perpetuate it. College towns in red areas are like islands of sanity in a sea of ignorance.

I don't think you can pick out one experience in PA that you had, and then forget that what is responsible for wealth discrepancy is neoliberal policies.





And what Hanauer only alludes to in this video, but which is also true, is that neoliberals are using prejudice (e.g. religious right, anti-immigrant, anti-civil rights. anti-welfare) to stoke support for their politicians in rural parochial all-white areas of the USA.