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I can completely understand the distaste with which the forgiveness is seen by many people, and I'm not certain that it is ideal. However, the fact that we allow young people to take on debt that is not dischargeable by bankruptcy is unconscionable to me. This is abhorrent, and essentially every religion forbids it.
And this is the true crux of the issue. The entire problem of the student loan program is built on the twin perverse incentives of the loans being non-dischargeable and guaranteed by the government. This has allowed state schools to balloon beyond their original missions and expand into administrative behemoths. It's created an industry of for-profit universities whose customers pay nothing out of pocket but are burdened with non-dischargeable debt in the hopes of improving their lot in life. It's put a millstone around the necks of young people and become one more thing people need to do before having children -- finish college, get a job, pay off loans, buy a house. I also believe it has been the essential driver of wokeism. It's been used to create and fund environments where ideas are sheltered from contact with reality and need to produce no cash value beyond seeming like a good place for students to cash their government checks. It simply cannot continue like this.
Yes, and that's why loan forgiveness is an incredibly bad idea, because it will make sure the individual incentives are still completely screwed up,
and will mean this will get worse, and will be repeated every single time the blue tribe gets the presidency.
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Plus, states often restrict supply. I have one collaborator at a smaller public uni that is trying to add another PhD program, but the bigger public unis in the state have been able to throw up all sorts of barriers, forcing them to try to show that there is sufficient "need" for such a program (which is essentially impossible to do); really, they're just preventing competition in self-interested fashion. "Best I can do is subsidize demand and restrict supply," is the meme that keeps on giving.
Double plus is that universities are basically the only industry in which the government basically mandates that they're able to nearly perfectly price discriminate, allowing them to capture the vast majority of the surplus. Can you imagine literally any other industry in which the federal government says, "Well, in order to engage in this commerce, individuals need to provide extremely detailed personal and family financial information to the supplier, so that the supplier can optimally tailor an individual price as close as possible to the individual's willingness to pay"? For literally any other industry, this would be absolutely unthinkable... an obscene corruption scandal.
I was thinking of price discrimination just yesterday; before a certain American department store made their prices universal and non-negotiable, retail cashiers were expected to haggle with their customers. If this had continued into the socialism era, we might have seen cashiers giving lower prices to the low class and demanding much higher prices for daily goods to the suit-and-tie class.
Woolworth?
Wanamaker’s.
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