It never ceases to amaze me how people on the center-right routinely are in favor of all manner of tax cuts for the rich, but the moment that the rest of the population is poised to get even a sliver of the economic pie, they start whining about why it is a terrible thing.
Right now there is a right-leaning chorus of, “its not fair that some people are getting student loan forgiveness, while other people didn’t get anything.” And, of course, the media is joining in on this because they feed at the corporate trough. In other words, if there is not something in it for the wealthy or corporations, it must be questionable.
Before I say another word, let me provide some background on my educational history. First, I worked 10 hours and day, 6 days a week in a steel mill for over 10 years before I got interested in computers. By then, I had a wife, a mortgage, and a small child to take care of. Still, I decided to go to college to learn computer science and work toward finding some better work opportunities. I was a non-traditional student and I got through college as quickly as I could by taking 20+ hours a semester while paying for everything with credit cards. I received my associate’s degree in computer science with a 4.0 GPA in little over one year and a few years after being hired for my first computer science job, my employer paid for me to get my bachelor's degree.
So, there is a good bit of hardship there and based on what I have been hearing, I suppose that I should be angry that some other students are now receiving government assistance when I got none. But am I angry about that? HELL NO!
Here are some of the reasons why...
I ran up around around $24K on my credit cards back in the early 1990s to pay for school, but that money was also used to pay for everything else that my family needed (including a modest mortgage). Although the debt I took on seemed like a lot of money at the time, the cost of getting a higher education (and basically surviving) has since skyrocketed.
So, college is much more expensive now than it was back in my day. But guess what… there is also a lot more competition for the highest paying jobs and the salaries for many professions have not kept pace with the cost of getting a degree. This means paying back those high dollar student loans can be very difficult if not impossible.
To make matters worse, just about the only thing that you cannot declare bankruptcy for is student loans. Yep, that’s right… people like Donald Trump can cheat the people that worked for him simply by declaring bankruptcy AS A BUSINESS PLAN, but college students must pay their student loans off without ever having bankruptcy as an option. Now that is a truly capitalist policy for the wealthy if there ever was one!
My wife and I learned the hard way about how important it is to get an education and how expensive it can be if you do not plan ahead for it. So, we made sure that our children all understood the importance of making good grades in high school. We also paid extra money for them to take the ACT test several times to help them maximize their test scores to get the best scholarship possible. All three of my kids attended a state university and all received significant academic scholarships. Two of my kids graduated with no debt at all while the 3rd is a freshman who currently has a full ride (if he can keep it!). Without the scholarships, the projected cost for each of my kids to attend one of these state universities for 4 years was around $85K. Some people think that I should be angry that there are kids who are getting student loan forgiveness when my kids didn’t get the same money. But honestly, that is just ridiculous!
There are really people (and some media outlets including CNN and MSNBC) out there saying things like, “Some people feel it’s not fair that they have to pay for other kid’s college educations and they feel that they are being cheated since they did not attend college!” To that I say, well if fairness in all things is what we are trying to achieve, I guess we still have a lot of work to do!
For example, since 2000 there have been numerous enormous tax cuts given to corporations and the wealthy that were not equally applied to the rest of us. Where was the media crying out that we were all being cheated? They were nowhere to be found. This is just more proof that they are in the bag for corporations.
And, of course, there are conservadems <gag> like Tim Ryan, Catherine Cortez Masto, and Michael Bennet who are all giving cover to republicans on this issue based at least in part on this “unfairness” idea. In truth, they are really opposing policies like this one that helps the middle class simply because they are in swing districts and they think average people won’t like that some other average people are getting a little help. WTAF?
In my view, any democrat who stands with republicans against policies that help average people should be precluded from ever being the presidential nominee for the Democratic party. I can be happy enough if they win their respective districts or senate races, but these people should never be allowed to be the standard bearer for our party.
I really hope that most Americans can see this student loan forgiveness policy for what it is and just be happy that--for once--the non-rich in this country may actually get a few crumbs from the pie. We should all be happy for the people who will receive this relief and consider this policy to be a start to reforming our government to be more like the way that it should be whereby we might all be able to benefit from government policies at times.