We have a guy (and a chunk of one of the two major parties) who wants to bail out/forgive student debt.
We have another guy (and a big chunk of the other major party) who is absolutely fine with what (these days) appears to be a continually recurring nightmare of death and attacks using what are (to them) scared items (guns).
We have a guy and a party that seems to be in favor of democracy.
We have another guy and a party that seems to believe that authoritarianism is the way.
This is apparently a REALLY tough call for some people. It's amazing.
Love your work, always, but, on student loans, hate to say it, but, you're out of touch. I went to school the past 5 years (and I am 60) with (much younger) community college nursing students, and they were almost to a person, working 1 or 2 jobs single moms (or dads), with kids to support, working 24-7 - from millenials starved out the housing market to up and coming poor kids trying to get into the middle class working like crazy, trying to cope with skyrocketing apartment prices, food prices. And they are doing nurse tech jobs which are EXHAUSTING - and working their butts off to become nurses - another EXHAUSTING job. Many of my fellow students were working full time as nurse techs, doing their college work on the side, barely able to pay rent and take care of their kids, while paying tuition. IMHO, from what I have seen, y'all are a tad insensitive to this massive demographic of folks who (unlike me, in the 1960s-1980s received massive support for college education - remember the GI bill? and tons of federal aid? And reasonable prices for college tuition?) have been hung out to dry by society, the economy, Reagan, the neo liberals and everyone and everything else that's going on, and could use a break, right now, because it is very very hard to be a young person in America, right now - just saying.
I wonder what happens to the credit scores for college debt holders when the gov pays a good chunk of it off for them? They get a score bump on top of Uncle Sam's bailout?
Yes, you are cranky today. A lot of what's going on politically is bullshit. I'm absolutely convinced that it's he who has the biggest check, or she, will win. Getting elected is about finance and marketing which Fatty Orangeface understands. The other secret is to speak the audience's language and since most voters are functionally illiterate all it takes is noise and money.
If you don't want debt alleviation for fiscal or practical reasons, that's an argument to be had. (I disagree, but w/e.)
Basing it on public opinion, though, is not a great sell because the goldfish attention span of the public means the whole thing will be lost and gone within a week of happening. (Except for the people who got their debt cut.)
Basing pretty much anything at all on what the GOP is going to say about it? Screw them. This is the crew that turned pandemic mitigation measures into "Muh freedom to spread infection". This is the crew that took no evidence of any sort of substantial fraud (and the few examples we have of any fraud typically being Republicans trying to 'outcheat the cheaters' as it were) into a Trump was robbed narrative.
In terms of what the GOP will say, it doesn't matter. The ACA, a program that facilitated people getting private insurance, was deemed Marxism.
Biden said that if we pulled together and got vaccinated, we could enjoy the 4th of July in 2021. Republicans turned this into "BIDEN IS TELLING US WHEN WE CAN GATHER WITH OUR FAMILIES TO CELEBRATE OUR FREEDOM!"
There is no message that the MAGA noise machine won't twist, or they'll just invent some peach tree dishes to zap the bloodmouthed carnists for eating meat storyline.
I agree that forgiving student loan debt would be a big mistake for Biden, and I say that as someone who didn't finish paying mine off til I was in my 40s. However, I keep hearing Charlie and others refer to "rich kids with student loans." Rich kids don't get student loans; they don't need them. Kids with student loans are by and large middle class and working class students (my parents were a teacher and a Legal Aid paralegal).
Biden is forgiving student loans for the individuals who were caught up in the predatory and deceptive practices of the now defunct Corinthian College. The government forced them out of business 6-7 years ago. Corinthian College was nothing more than a diploma mill, clown college. Hence if you a had a pulse and a Pell grant you were admitted. They took advantage of minority students who didn't have the basic education, comprehension or support to understand what they were signing and were left with worthless degrees you could wipe your ass with, if they even graduated at all.
I sometimes wonder if progressives would welcome a Republican electoral blowout that purged vulnerable centrists from the Democrats and left progressives with a stronger hand internally. The progressive caucus now amounts to about half of Congressional Democrats, so perhaps they find it tempting to prioritize expanding that percentage over stopping Trumpism. The historical precedents for this kind of thinking are not encouraging.
Us old codgers who see what we are looking at have seen this all before... borrowing for a war... Nixon and Arthur Burns goosing the money supply and the inflation that followed... deregulating the savings and loan industry... the Reagan tax bill creating the limited partnership sucker trap... the tech bubble of the 90's... the housing debacle... zirps... crypto... pet rocks... all part of making America great again... and again and again and again
Charlie, you can have literally anyone you want on your podcast; why do you never invite any of the "woke leftists" you're worried are running the Biden presidency?
While I agree with the larger point about how 'niche' student loan forgiveness is generally, some specificity would be useful here, at least about the specific college loan forgiveness Biden currently enacted. It's for those students who enrolled in a particular university that engaged in shady practices. From CNN "The Department of Education has found that Corinthian Colleges misled prospective students about the ability to transfer credits and falsified its job placement rate. In 2013, Vice President Kamala Harris -- who was California's attorney general at the time -- sued Corinthian Colleges, alleging the school was engaging in deceptive and false advertising and recruitment...ultimately resulted in Corinthian selling most of its campuses in 2014 and closing the remaining ones in 2015"
So it was more like restitution, rather than giving a break to students for loans taken out going to NYU. Of course, as James Carville would say, if you're explaining, you're losing.
Sure seems a bit almost like a plot to suck gulls into a private scam system. And pass laws saying that debt was so special it can't be eliminated in bankruptcy court. And do some corporate socialism to guarantee loans to the fraudsters. Almost as if all those private for profit degree mills might not have sprung up if the owners actually might have had to carry the cost of loaning money to people who couldn't pay it off.
Good morning Charlie, There’s not much to add about Trump’s MAGA gang other than for all to acknowledge that these violent thugs suborn sedition, violate constitutional rights wherever they find them, and work diligently to ensure that fair elections, and rightful transfer of power do not happen. And now on to student loan forgiveness with the focus on the American cost of college and graduate education. One word describes it OBSCENE! Cost of higher education is multiple times higher here than in comparably advanced countries. Why? It’s a give away to the banks who issue the loans at outrageous interest rates before transferring the loan to the federal government. Krony Capitalism at its worst! It’s easy to agree that a highly educated population benefits our country. Ergo, higher education should be available to all at reasonable pricing. It’s is sad that even community colleges are charging an arm and a leg and the tuition, room and board at mediocre private colleges eclipses $100 K per year while their AD is paid a cool $4 Mil per year - Syracuse University. Again, obscene! And the buffed out gyms that far outshine commercial gyms, the indoor climbing walls, the gourmet dining halls, the endless pools and hot tubs are tinsel on the teat of this topless dancing whore. My entire first year tuition at one of the finest universities on the continent in 1969, McGill, was 2K! The food sucked, the gym was ancient, but the education was fabulous! We need an urgent trip back to the past, and reset tuitions. My daughter is a tenured, full professor at John Jay and CUNY Graduate center. Most of her undergraduate students are the first in their families to attend college. I think we can all agree this is very good. Never the less, this public school has repeatedly jacked its tuition causing great harm to its disadvantaged students who must take out usurious loans. Thank you Andy Cuomo. Kathy Hochul has not made things better but perhaps worse. Our unregulated, krony capitalism is the proximate cause of our lurch to fascism.
There seems to be a real disconnect in the comments section about student loan debt forgiveness, especially from you older folks, so I'll try to explain to you why us Millennials, with degrees or without them think it's a pretty nice idea, and why we generally think the economic attitudes of all the older Boomers are a big problem.
1) We have been dealing with strong inflation most of our working lives. In most major cities/urban areas, the increase in housing costs and health insurance has dwarfed wage increases for most of our careers. In housing in particular, there is a real shortage of affordable housing almost everywhere, which means even for people who can afford it, it can be hard to find something to buy period. Or at least something under $600,000.
2) The wage gap between college grads and non-college grads continues to grow, pushing more and more people into college to keep up with cost of living.
3) The wage gap within college grads continues to grow. Highly-paid college professions (finance, lawyers, doctors, etc.) and making more and more while lower-paid professions (teaching) are flat or losing money. This deters college grads from taking those jobs, and combined with 1), you are effectively losing money every year teaching.
4) Not everyone who has student loan debt graduated, for a variety of reasons. The lowest-hanging fruit for loan forgiveness are the predatory for-profits that went bankrupt.
5) "But it would just be a handout". Well, so is:
- the mortgage interest deduction
- the local property tax deduction
- the first $250,000 income tax exemption on the sale of your home
All those policies drive up cost of living for all of us. And I say that as a homeowner.
6) Student loan deduction is the only real cost of living reduction a lot of people will experience anytime soon. At least until the current housing bubble pops, if it ever does.
7) You'll probably notice a lot of problems I've described are a lot bigger than student loans, and you're absolutely right. But we're not going to find solutions for them at the national level, are we?
Would like to add 8) many of us feel like there's a straw sticking out of our backs that our elders use for handouts they like, while going nuts about the immorality of any they don't. The out-of-control national debt is almost entirely related to Social Security and Medicare, with military spending making up the rest of the problem. I am not going to get those. They're for baby boomers and the green xers who are lucky enough to get in before the bottom drops out. It might behoove people to look at the social spending they get, consider the spending they've spend decades cutting, and ask themselves if they *really* want to live in a country where we don't do handouts.
It's weird and inconceivable to me that people seriously think the argument, "Hey, I had to suffer through this shit so you should have to suffer through worse shit" is a good argument.
Shouldn't normal human beings want to make things better for those who come after us? Shouldn't that be our default position?
But Viagra has been covered by insurance since it's inception. Before the ACA, female contraception was never covered even though Viagra was. And now, women have to rely on their employer's religious or non-religious beliefs to determine whether their contraception is covered. No such religious itemizing for Viagra, though.
Sorry, I do get your point, but this has been a soapbox issue for me for decades.
We have a guy (and a chunk of one of the two major parties) who wants to bail out/forgive student debt.
We have another guy (and a big chunk of the other major party) who is absolutely fine with what (these days) appears to be a continually recurring nightmare of death and attacks using what are (to them) scared items (guns).
We have a guy and a party that seems to be in favor of democracy.
We have another guy and a party that seems to believe that authoritarianism is the way.
This is apparently a REALLY tough call for some people. It's amazing.
Love your work, always, but, on student loans, hate to say it, but, you're out of touch. I went to school the past 5 years (and I am 60) with (much younger) community college nursing students, and they were almost to a person, working 1 or 2 jobs single moms (or dads), with kids to support, working 24-7 - from millenials starved out the housing market to up and coming poor kids trying to get into the middle class working like crazy, trying to cope with skyrocketing apartment prices, food prices. And they are doing nurse tech jobs which are EXHAUSTING - and working their butts off to become nurses - another EXHAUSTING job. Many of my fellow students were working full time as nurse techs, doing their college work on the side, barely able to pay rent and take care of their kids, while paying tuition. IMHO, from what I have seen, y'all are a tad insensitive to this massive demographic of folks who (unlike me, in the 1960s-1980s received massive support for college education - remember the GI bill? and tons of federal aid? And reasonable prices for college tuition?) have been hung out to dry by society, the economy, Reagan, the neo liberals and everyone and everything else that's going on, and could use a break, right now, because it is very very hard to be a young person in America, right now - just saying.
I wonder what happens to the credit scores for college debt holders when the gov pays a good chunk of it off for them? They get a score bump on top of Uncle Sam's bailout?
Yes, you are cranky today. A lot of what's going on politically is bullshit. I'm absolutely convinced that it's he who has the biggest check, or she, will win. Getting elected is about finance and marketing which Fatty Orangeface understands. The other secret is to speak the audience's language and since most voters are functionally illiterate all it takes is noise and money.
If you don't want debt alleviation for fiscal or practical reasons, that's an argument to be had. (I disagree, but w/e.)
Basing it on public opinion, though, is not a great sell because the goldfish attention span of the public means the whole thing will be lost and gone within a week of happening. (Except for the people who got their debt cut.)
Basing pretty much anything at all on what the GOP is going to say about it? Screw them. This is the crew that turned pandemic mitigation measures into "Muh freedom to spread infection". This is the crew that took no evidence of any sort of substantial fraud (and the few examples we have of any fraud typically being Republicans trying to 'outcheat the cheaters' as it were) into a Trump was robbed narrative.
In terms of what the GOP will say, it doesn't matter. The ACA, a program that facilitated people getting private insurance, was deemed Marxism.
Biden said that if we pulled together and got vaccinated, we could enjoy the 4th of July in 2021. Republicans turned this into "BIDEN IS TELLING US WHEN WE CAN GATHER WITH OUR FAMILIES TO CELEBRATE OUR FREEDOM!"
There is no message that the MAGA noise machine won't twist, or they'll just invent some peach tree dishes to zap the bloodmouthed carnists for eating meat storyline.
I agree that forgiving student loan debt would be a big mistake for Biden, and I say that as someone who didn't finish paying mine off til I was in my 40s. However, I keep hearing Charlie and others refer to "rich kids with student loans." Rich kids don't get student loans; they don't need them. Kids with student loans are by and large middle class and working class students (my parents were a teacher and a Legal Aid paralegal).
Biden is forgiving student loans for the individuals who were caught up in the predatory and deceptive practices of the now defunct Corinthian College. The government forced them out of business 6-7 years ago. Corinthian College was nothing more than a diploma mill, clown college. Hence if you a had a pulse and a Pell grant you were admitted. They took advantage of minority students who didn't have the basic education, comprehension or support to understand what they were signing and were left with worthless degrees you could wipe your ass with, if they even graduated at all.
I sometimes wonder if progressives would welcome a Republican electoral blowout that purged vulnerable centrists from the Democrats and left progressives with a stronger hand internally. The progressive caucus now amounts to about half of Congressional Democrats, so perhaps they find it tempting to prioritize expanding that percentage over stopping Trumpism. The historical precedents for this kind of thinking are not encouraging.
Us old codgers who see what we are looking at have seen this all before... borrowing for a war... Nixon and Arthur Burns goosing the money supply and the inflation that followed... deregulating the savings and loan industry... the Reagan tax bill creating the limited partnership sucker trap... the tech bubble of the 90's... the housing debacle... zirps... crypto... pet rocks... all part of making America great again... and again and again and again
From the 2 June online edition of NYT:
A Disturbing New Pattern in Mass Shootings: Young Assailants
By Glenn Thrush and Matt Richtel
Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 2018 were by people who were 21 or younger, a shift from earlier decades.
If there ever was a good reason not to support an age limit for a deadly firearm, there is no more.
Charlie, you can have literally anyone you want on your podcast; why do you never invite any of the "woke leftists" you're worried are running the Biden presidency?
Charlie just wants the D's to be like the R's used to be. Anything else is just woke.
Because they'd sound too reasonable in person. I'd pay cash money if he brought in Ta-Nehisi Coates or Ibram X Kendi.
While I agree with the larger point about how 'niche' student loan forgiveness is generally, some specificity would be useful here, at least about the specific college loan forgiveness Biden currently enacted. It's for those students who enrolled in a particular university that engaged in shady practices. From CNN "The Department of Education has found that Corinthian Colleges misled prospective students about the ability to transfer credits and falsified its job placement rate. In 2013, Vice President Kamala Harris -- who was California's attorney general at the time -- sued Corinthian Colleges, alleging the school was engaging in deceptive and false advertising and recruitment...ultimately resulted in Corinthian selling most of its campuses in 2014 and closing the remaining ones in 2015"
So it was more like restitution, rather than giving a break to students for loans taken out going to NYU. Of course, as James Carville would say, if you're explaining, you're losing.
Sure seems a bit almost like a plot to suck gulls into a private scam system. And pass laws saying that debt was so special it can't be eliminated in bankruptcy court. And do some corporate socialism to guarantee loans to the fraudsters. Almost as if all those private for profit degree mills might not have sprung up if the owners actually might have had to carry the cost of loaning money to people who couldn't pay it off.
"that debt was so special it can't be eliminated in bankruptcy court". Yep, the created a perverse incentive on the part of diploma mills.
Good morning Charlie, There’s not much to add about Trump’s MAGA gang other than for all to acknowledge that these violent thugs suborn sedition, violate constitutional rights wherever they find them, and work diligently to ensure that fair elections, and rightful transfer of power do not happen. And now on to student loan forgiveness with the focus on the American cost of college and graduate education. One word describes it OBSCENE! Cost of higher education is multiple times higher here than in comparably advanced countries. Why? It’s a give away to the banks who issue the loans at outrageous interest rates before transferring the loan to the federal government. Krony Capitalism at its worst! It’s easy to agree that a highly educated population benefits our country. Ergo, higher education should be available to all at reasonable pricing. It’s is sad that even community colleges are charging an arm and a leg and the tuition, room and board at mediocre private colleges eclipses $100 K per year while their AD is paid a cool $4 Mil per year - Syracuse University. Again, obscene! And the buffed out gyms that far outshine commercial gyms, the indoor climbing walls, the gourmet dining halls, the endless pools and hot tubs are tinsel on the teat of this topless dancing whore. My entire first year tuition at one of the finest universities on the continent in 1969, McGill, was 2K! The food sucked, the gym was ancient, but the education was fabulous! We need an urgent trip back to the past, and reset tuitions. My daughter is a tenured, full professor at John Jay and CUNY Graduate center. Most of her undergraduate students are the first in their families to attend college. I think we can all agree this is very good. Never the less, this public school has repeatedly jacked its tuition causing great harm to its disadvantaged students who must take out usurious loans. Thank you Andy Cuomo. Kathy Hochul has not made things better but perhaps worse. Our unregulated, krony capitalism is the proximate cause of our lurch to fascism.
There seems to be a real disconnect in the comments section about student loan debt forgiveness, especially from you older folks, so I'll try to explain to you why us Millennials, with degrees or without them think it's a pretty nice idea, and why we generally think the economic attitudes of all the older Boomers are a big problem.
1) We have been dealing with strong inflation most of our working lives. In most major cities/urban areas, the increase in housing costs and health insurance has dwarfed wage increases for most of our careers. In housing in particular, there is a real shortage of affordable housing almost everywhere, which means even for people who can afford it, it can be hard to find something to buy period. Or at least something under $600,000.
2) The wage gap between college grads and non-college grads continues to grow, pushing more and more people into college to keep up with cost of living.
3) The wage gap within college grads continues to grow. Highly-paid college professions (finance, lawyers, doctors, etc.) and making more and more while lower-paid professions (teaching) are flat or losing money. This deters college grads from taking those jobs, and combined with 1), you are effectively losing money every year teaching.
4) Not everyone who has student loan debt graduated, for a variety of reasons. The lowest-hanging fruit for loan forgiveness are the predatory for-profits that went bankrupt.
5) "But it would just be a handout". Well, so is:
- the mortgage interest deduction
- the local property tax deduction
- the first $250,000 income tax exemption on the sale of your home
All those policies drive up cost of living for all of us. And I say that as a homeowner.
6) Student loan deduction is the only real cost of living reduction a lot of people will experience anytime soon. At least until the current housing bubble pops, if it ever does.
7) You'll probably notice a lot of problems I've described are a lot bigger than student loans, and you're absolutely right. But we're not going to find solutions for them at the national level, are we?
Would like to add 8) many of us feel like there's a straw sticking out of our backs that our elders use for handouts they like, while going nuts about the immorality of any they don't. The out-of-control national debt is almost entirely related to Social Security and Medicare, with military spending making up the rest of the problem. I am not going to get those. They're for baby boomers and the green xers who are lucky enough to get in before the bottom drops out. It might behoove people to look at the social spending they get, consider the spending they've spend decades cutting, and ask themselves if they *really* want to live in a country where we don't do handouts.
It's weird and inconceivable to me that people seriously think the argument, "Hey, I had to suffer through this shit so you should have to suffer through worse shit" is a good argument.
Shouldn't normal human beings want to make things better for those who come after us? Shouldn't that be our default position?
It should indeed.
At the least, Tax the living crap out of ammunition. Make buying 100 rounds really really painful. At least the price of Viagra.
But Viagra has been covered by insurance since it's inception. Before the ACA, female contraception was never covered even though Viagra was. And now, women have to rely on their employer's religious or non-religious beliefs to determine whether their contraception is covered. No such religious itemizing for Viagra, though.
Sorry, I do get your point, but this has been a soapbox issue for me for decades.
Apparently but it sort of ignores the intent of the post I made. Make buying ammo profoundly expensive.
Chris Rock has good stand-up about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZrFVtmRXrw