Ok look. I made it very clear what I thought of the 2020 shut down of the world. I think the whole PPP loan was a mess in the making and a bad idea with good intentions. I firmly believe that there are people who got PPP loans who shouldn’t have. And I also will be NOT shocked to learn that there are people who took PPP loans who used them for things they shouldn’t have.
That doesn’t change the fact that loan forgiveness was written into the contract of the PPP loan. You take a PPP loan, you use it to pay your employees instead of laying them off or firing them, your loan is forgiven.
PPP loans are nothing like student loans.
But apparently whoever is running the White House Twitter account isn’t aware of that fact:
I’m not a huge fan of student loan forgiveness. For a variety of reasons.
I did have student loans myself, though not tons thanks to my parents. And I’ll also admit that my parents helped me pay off the loans I did have. I empathize, A LOT, with the folks who are stuck unable to pay their loans. I empathize less with the folks who took those loans to pay for degrees that were extremely unlikely to turn into lucrative jobs. But lets be honest here. Society has decided that in order to be successful you must go to college. Teenagers want to be successful. College tuition has gotten stupid expensive cause they know people will pay it. Its a vicious cycle.
IF we’re going to forgive some portion of unpaid student loans it needs to be part and parcel of fixing the college degree cost system. No, I don’t know the correct way to do that, I’m not generally a fan of the .GOV getting into the middle of things and that holds true here. But without fixing the system thats causing those loans its going to make absolutely no difference in the long term.
And it pisses off the rest of the country who paid theirs, or avoided them completely, which really isn’t useful. Meanwhile farmers are paying astronomical funds to buy the equipment they need to feed everyone. Tradesmen are paying large sums for the specialty trucks they need, or other big equipement. All things needed just to keep the world turning, and all things being ignored.
But stupid social media posts by those, supposedly, in charge of things comparing apples to oranges doesn’t help either.
I see the issue as being two problems, really. First, we give anyone with a pulse virtually as much money as the want for degrees that realistically have no chance of generating enough return to pay them off. Can you think of any other finance plan that would give an 18-year-old thousands and thousands of dollars, unsecured, for something like a German polka degree?
Secondly, this loans-to-everyone policy encourages high tuition prices. If you owned a car dealership, and the government suddenly said they’ll give car loans to anyone who wants them for almost unlimited amounts, what would you do to the prices of your cars? You’d raise them, of course, because you know that customers can freely borrow money to meet your price. Thus, prices go up.
Student loans are a scam, but theyre a scam on the taxpayer not the student.
Thats certainly a large part of it. I keep seeing people saying that if we’re going to forgive student loans then it needs to be paid for by the schools who didn’t produce the successful students they said they would. And you could convince me to go for that (enforcement and tracking would be a bitch though).