What is the moral issue surrounding the government forgiving loans? I have heard plenty of people bluster about it, but not quite a real reason why.
Most of the reasoning I have heard centers around the issue of financial responsibility and the promise of repayment, as if somehow everyone is so in control of their lives that they can absolutely promise that they will have the money to start paying back loans four years and six months in the future.
I am all for repaying my loans. I would pay off every red penny as fast as I could if someone would take a chance on me and hire me. I plan on it, actually, though my plans are forestalled in the catch 22 of employment.
However, while we are on the subject of forgiving student loans to stimulate th Economy, here is the way I look at it:
It is a moral issue with homeborrowers (you really can't call them homeowners until the house is actually paid off) because a homeborrower has material to show for his borrowing practices. You can't forgive mortgages because this would in fact be handing out houses to everyone, something that is not feasable for the same reason that the government cannot promise us a car in every lot. Besides, homeborrowers and homeowners have been getting tax incentives for years.
Credit card debt is so easily gained that it is a moral issue to forgive this debt. To forgive this debt would have to mean that the people who gained forgiveness would never be able to use a credit card again. that is possible considering there are many ways to extend credit and pay for bills and goods without the use of credit. Societally, there is no real reason to have one.
Student loans are waged against the person themselves. If a person is not able to repay, it is often not the fault of the borrower, but the fault of society. The person, for each month late or default, is receiving black marks that make it impossible to become employed, and also to receive licenses or clearances that are required in certain sectors.
Banks are being handed blank checks with limited accountability to the tune of 700 billion or more annually. Very quickly, I want to see you all research the collective student debt, including both public and private loans for state schools and private schools, regardless of major or advancement, for all students in the past 20 years that studied within the US and remained within the US for employment. I need to know that number, but I bet it will not even come close to equaling the more than 1.4 trillion dollars fed to the banks over the last three years.
We all know that we can't succeed in the modern workforce without a higher education degree, and this site is part of the proof that we have allowed colleges and bankers to practically enslave an entire generation of people.
So, to the federal government, I have a proposal. You have an underclass of citizens that are fully qualified to take jobs in the skilled workforce, but are prevented from doing so because of bad credit. This was started in part because of Regan-era removal of federal money to colleges, and in part because of banking practices and corporate greed combined with a higher education culture that values its administrators and sports programs over its students and professors.
The modern workforce is nothing like the workforce of the last forty years. The time has passed when a student could graduate from the college of their choice with the reasonable expectation of the information received being relevant for the rest of his or her life. With information doubling exponentially, students graduating today have an employable window of two years at maximum before the knowledge they earned becomes obsolete.
The current government plan talks about ten year windows and twenty year windows, but these amounts of time are completely ridiculous when considering that a person might be spending their entire first decade of independent life as an adult citizen gaining the education necessary to compete in the workforce. ten year and twenty year windows mean that a person will be only potentially a decade from retirement age with only ten to twenty years of working experience after graduation. It also means that unless a person finds a job, that person will have wasted their time in American Education. We do not want our education to be seen as a waste of time on the international stage do we?
So, you feel the need to pay the banks. Why not give a good reason to pay them? Use student loan holders as a middleman to complete your policies of hog trough bank coddling. We know very well that you have the entire loan records of every student that has borrowed money to go to college in this country. This includes federal and private loans, some of which are owned by the same banks, and also are coincidently the same banks that are in deep financial trouble right now.
I know some people would cite the people who have already paid off their loans as a moral issue against those who haven't, but increasingly I am starting to believe that the only ones who did were able to get other assistance, or had rich benefactors, or were out of college before the cost started skyrocketing and lending practices really started to get predatory back (as far as I can recall) in about 1995-ish.
My whole question on this is that if a higher education has become a necessity in modern society, and in the face of the fact that the whole reason that student debt was made possible was due to the need for education combined with governmental lack of oversight and predatory practices, why is it morally wrong to expect the government to pay it off, at least for those of us who did graduate?
