- cross-posted to:
- lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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I mean I sold 4 years of my life to the military to not have to take loans out, so I get the gut reaction
The main cause of the student loan issue is the commodification of education. Everyone wanted to go to college and at first it was optional but then as more people did it it became a requirement, then they realized they can charge more and more for education that is worse and worse because a good chunk of people dont actually want to learn / be there. They’re just there for the paper that’ll let them get jobs and not be unemployed, or even just to say that they went.
I look around and people are playing damn Pokémon Showdown in class, there was that one scandal of an influencer girl who was the daughter of someone important that bought her admission to Stanford(?) and would stream literally about how she didn’t care about education she just wanted the college experience.
Hot take: Not everyone should be going to college, High School should just prepare people better. Even if we forgive all loans right now it doesn’t fix the issue. Instead of your problem it will just be your kids’ problem
Trades are a good option, but how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers?
how long before plumbing drones are crawling through the sewers
That would be lit
What makes you think they aren’t already?
While I agree in theory, I’m not really sure there’s much that can be done in practice. The genie is out of the bottle here: jobs want the paper, so people get the paper, leading to jobs expecting people to have the paper. An employer is unlikely to deliberately “lower their standards” (in their view) if the pool of potential employees with a degree is large enough for their needs already. Since you can’t legislate that employers are not allowed to require a degree, and you can’t expect people to not get a degree and sacrifice their own potential future to break that cycle, we’re kind of at an impasse.
That’s why the only way forward that anyone’s figured out so far is government funded higher education.
Edit:typos
I agree, but there is things we can move towards, but some are more… radical solutions.
I think the Swiss do something where after a certain point in the education pipeline (Age 16?) they decide either university or vocational school.
I think the ratio is 20-80.
If the decision is made for you (via being evaluated by the institutions in charge of the students) it definitely would be filled with bribes and scandals where the rich try to subvert it.
But if that wasn’t a problem I think it would definitely help university degrees “matter” again and it would be more feasible to make free for those who pursue it.
Again this requires a whole restructuring-- and would not see results for atleast a generation-- and red-lining would potentially have very visible effects on this depending on how its done.
There is a lot that can be done in practice. One, employers are asking for degrees because they can. If you lower the number of graduates and they can’t get them without higher pay, they will stop. Two, you could put a price on the degree, e.g. higher minimum wage for positions requiring a degree to make employers pay for the extra education.
So the higher minimum wage is already a thing in some countries (e.g. Germany, where degrees are also mostly free) and there is still the trend of many more ppl. studying.
In general, our world is getting more complicated and we live longer. So i dont really see the problem of more education?
More education is a balance of costs and benefits. There is no harm in even a supermarket cashier having a collage degree. God knows our democracies could use more educated voters. But in many professions, it is not worth the cost. The same knowledge could be gained by a few months of on the job training. If employers are really willing to pay more for those degrees like in Germany than that is fine. But I am pretty sure in some places, people are asking for degrees not because they are needed (worth the cost), but because people with degrees are available cheaply.
After all, if the degrees were worth their price to employers, and the employers paid for them adequately, student loans wouldn’t be an issue.
It also reinforces the class system. ‘elite’ employers won’t even look at you if you don’t come from an ivy or a top 5/10 school.
and there are fewer and fewer of these ‘elite’ jobs to go around, hence the paranoia among the upper middle classes that their children will have zero future if they don’t get into an ivy.
He beat cancer by doing it the good old-fashioned hard way.
Everyone who has toiled & suffered for decades to pay off their student loans the good old-fashioned hard way, are livid that some younger people have gotten their student loans forgiven.
I get it, I just wanted to spell it out because it’s an interesting comic.
It is a false equivalent. People do not choose to have cancer, yet some people choose poorly and take loans they cannot repay. This is on them.
Well ya gotta acknowledge that kids are brainwashed and hounded from childhood that they should probably oughta plan on going to college, so when they get to that age they think that’s what they have to do and they don’t know anything about debt & loans, because public school education purposely omits teaching kids about money & finances, should be a crime to make 18-year-olds incur hundred$ of thou$and$ in debt that will take them 50 years to pay off.
I am once again reminded: Humanity is fucking ugly. I’m starting to get nihilists.
I mean I wouldn’t want it to not exist but if I just nearly died of chemo + cancer I’d be a little mad if they found an EASIER way to cure cancer…
That would actually kind of be funny in retrospect. Like, if you survived it, and it was the most horrible, painful year of your life, and then the day the doctor gave you the all-clear, the FDA released a drug that takes care of it in seven days with minimum side effects.
Like any time anybody said anything to me, I would be whipping out my cancer photos and then using that to explain that the universe hates me, and so therefore I am absolved of all sin.
Cancer survivor here. Nothing would make me more happy to see a simple cure for what almost killed me, the sooner the better. Even if it was just after I finished chemo; perhaps even especially right after it to be honest. Remember that there’s always the 5-year time where the danger of the cancer coming back is constantly lingering (especially during the first 12 months). Even if you just finished chemo, that new drug means you won’t have to go through chemo again for that cancer no matter what happens from now on. Nothing, and I mean abso-fucking-lutely nothing, would’ve given me more peace of mind at that time.
I paid off my student loans at the beginning of this month. it took me 16 years and like $65,000, right? If someone else comes in behind me, goes through the same shit that I went through, and then gets their loan forgiven or paid off in a couple of years?
Then I’m happy for them. Good for them, their life is gonna be so much easier without that burden over their head, and happier people means I get to live in a happier society, which means that I get to be happier too.
are you happy for them if they had the ability to pay off their loans and refused to do so so they could travel, eat out, and buy luxury goods? should their luxury lifestyle subsidized by the government?
Because i’ve met plenty of people who have done that instead of pay back their loans. not everyone involved in this is some noble actor who is struggling… many are just assholes who refuse to pay their debts w/ the expectation that is someone else’s job. not that different than kids who go to school and party and then end up dropping out. should their loans be forgiven too?
I paid down my debts too. I lived cheap and prioritized paying them back early and haven’t had any debt for almost 10 years now. at one point I was paying 30-40% of my income to my debt but I knocked down almost 40K in loans in 5 years by doing that and paying down the high interest debt ASAP. I really little empathy for people who have student loans who are traveling, partying, and spending 40% of their paycheck on luxuries while they make minimum or no payment son their debts because they expect someone else to pay it back for them.
Honestly, why would you even care?
In America student loans cannot be discharged unless you have a fatal disease or you die, and sometimes not even death causes your student loans to go away.
If they would rather sacrifice their late 30s and 40s to paying off debt the hard way that they could have paid off the easy way in their 20s, then what does it matter to you?
They’re going to actually pay more back because the interest is going to keep accruing on their debts for all of those years.
You’ve saved yourself a lot of money, you’ve opened the door for yourself to have a higher quality retirement or possibly even an earlier retirement because you’re being financially smart and that’s good on you.
Why would you take the thing that is good on you and make it a bad on somebody else?
‘I don’t want my tax dollars paying for people who are irresponsible with their debt.’
“Honestly, why would you even care?”
Why would they care how their tax money is spent? Is that a serious question?
for some people there is no morality or moral hazard. or apparently it only applies above a certain economic class.
and yet these people rail against the immorality of billionaires and how they shouldn’t exist because they exploit people and the government.
but if you make 50K and you exploit the government and other people… well then there is nothing wrong with that!
Yes, it is. And the reason why we have taxes in the first place is because we are a society. And the key thing that makes a society a society is that the people that have a strength use that strength to help the people that do not have that strength.
That is the social contract. The helping of other people is why we pay taxes.
That help comes in many forms. That help pays for police departments so that the victims of criminals have defenders to either stop the crime from happening or to capture and punish the person that committed the crime.
That pays for fire departments, for hospitals, for roads, for public services, for parks, for electricity lines to be installed, for data lines, for the internet. It pays for social programs, and it pays the salaries of the people that put the work in to make all of these things happen.
If instead of, a couple of extra bombers for our military every year, that money was used to alleviate the financial burden of student loans that were taken on by people who tried to get training to do a job, to earn more money, to then themselves pay more taxes, to contribute more to society, I’m perfectly fine with that outcome.
It’s kind of concerning that you’re not seeing the bigger picture.
I’m sure other people in your life have explained this exact same scenario to you. I don’t believe that I am unveiling new knowledge or a new viewpoint.
Why would you not want your tax money to go to help people?
What is it about that scenario that galls you?
And the key thing that makes a society a society is that the people that have a strength use that strength to help the people that do not have that strength.
And this is exactly why taxpayers without college educations shouldn’t be subsidizing those who do. The lion’s share of the “strength” is in the latter category.
You write “help people”, but you specifically want to help the (educational) demographic of people who least need it, statistically.
I never can quite understand the concept of casting aspersions on a person you’re having a debate with.
Accusing me of being educationally elitist does not serve your side of the conversation.
It only increases the divide between us, and it makes me not like you as a person.
If your goal is to be disliked, you’re very, very close to your goal.
But if your goal is instead to argue, which is what my assumption was, that people who make financially bad decisions regarding their education should suffer the consequences of those decisions… Well, I mean, it’s not like I was going to like you for your stance anyway, but at least you wouldn’t be attacking me for no reason.
Accusing me of being educationally elitist
This accusation exists only in your mind. I pointed out that, in advocating for student loan forgiveness, you are advocating for a financial incentive that is going solely to the demographic of people who are the least impoverished, on average.
And that is a simple, plain, objective fact, not an accusation on any moral axis, or “casting aspersions”. I didn’t say a single word about you as a person, you pulled that literally out of thin air. Not appreciated.
because we want to help the right people. i want to help an immigrant mom who gets a degree to be a nurse.
i don’t want to help some entitled kid who got an art degree and refuses to get a job because it’s not cool for their ‘brand’ to have a job. If the loan forgiveness was contingent on this person getting a productive job then it would be different.
Incentives need to be structured and targeted to be effective. Throwing money arbitrarily at a problem and hoping for the best is not effective.
Well yes, I also agree, like anybody that’s just saying “throw away $1.6 trillion so that everyone can sing “Tra-la-La” all the way to the bank” should be put into a straight jacket and not listened to until they are heavily medicated.
But at the same time, I feel like the current system is too rigid, and too unforgiving, and too based in capitalism to actually be something that our society should continue using as-is.
I believe there should be changes in the interest structure of our student loan debts so that compound interest is not a portion of them, and that they should be charged in such a way that making 120 appropriate payments equals the debt is paid even if there is a small balance remaining.
I believe there should be release valves for the people who are so financially oppressed by the burden of their student loans that they cannot function at their optimum in society, and that using that release valve should be akin to declaring bankruptcy, it should have massive consequences that ultimately are lesser than the consequences of continuing to struggle to pay onerous student loan debt.
And finally, I believe that implementing these social resources, this restructuring of the way we handle student loans, would make America a happier place for the people like me and you who have paid off our student loans, or are successfully paying off our student loans.
We would have fewer, sad, upset, miserable people to interact with because of the student loan debt crisis, and that happier society would be our reward for the small percentage of our taxes that go towards covering over the mistakes of others. Not a blank slate, not us going into debt to help assholes, just making the world a better place for people that made stupid mistakes.
I’m a bit confused. If they choose to pay “the hard way” in their 40s but get the payments discharged by the government, they get both an easier 20s, 30s, and 40s then you, and would then be actively competing with you for other cost item, like housing. I’m all for forgiveness honestly, but your argument doesn’t seem entirely honest.
I mean, I’m arguing under this supposition that actual complete student loan forgiveness will not happen in America in our lifetimes.
Even well-meaning people are radically opposed to it because they feel like it’s giving some random person a one up in life that they did not get and their own greed and world viewpoints won’t allow them to support that.
A very small select group of people that provide a crucial good for society do get that, and people are still mad about it, like underpaid teachers who work in the teaching field for ten years, and pay their student loans for ten years, and owe more on the student loans after ten years of paying it in a job they’re underpaid for, that they worked their asses off to get, and had to fight tooth and nail to keep, and we still have asshole politicians who work their asses off night and day to trying to find a way to prevent them from getting their student loans forgiven.
And those assholes are elected by other assholes who are electing them specifically because they’re the kind of assholes that would try to make sure that the teachers that trained their children how to be educated adults remain in poverty.
That being said, I do reiterate that if all student loans were forgiven, even though I literally this year alone paid $32,000 of my own money towards my student loans to finish paying them off, because you know your boy be ballin’ like that, then I will not be mad or sad or upset that somebody else got a one up in life.
Instead, I will join in the celebration with all of my other peeps who now have that tiny couple of hundred extra dollars a month to spend on more important things like uber eats and facials and massages.
because if you fuck yourself over I shouldn’t have to bail you out. your personal choices are not my responsibility. go ahead and party in your 20s and let your debt accrue to 200K. but don’t whine about how unfair your life is when you are living paycheck to paycheck at 40 and have nothing for retirement. you did that to yourself and life is not ‘unfair and cruel’ because you made bad choices.
this is like you getting drunk crashing you car, and demanding someone else pay for the damages, because ‘it’s not your fault’. It is your fault entirely, and nobody else’s. But by a lot of lemmy logic it’s the fault of the alcohol company, the bar owner, and etc. as if they were suppose to prevent you from doing all of that.
personal responsibility exists. college students are not hapless victims of a cruel system. they are making choices and now they are crying that they should not have to face the consequences of the choices. I wanted to go to grad school at my dream school, but it turns out i’d have 60K in debt from going there, so I went to a place where they gave me a scholarship, even if it wasn’t what I ‘truly’ wanted.
But plenty of people make the other choice, and go to schools and get degrees they can’t afford. And further, they do nothing responsible/productive with that degree. I had a friend I stopped interacting with who got a comp sci degree from a top uni, had lots of debt, but now works part time in a bicycle shop for 15/hr and refuses to pay back loans and keeps ranting about how the govt should pay off their debt for them. I stopped interacting with this person once I realized what pathetic joke of a human being they. And they love ranting about how everyone is privledged and should pay more tax and they are so poor and helpless and they have financially abused many people with this routine. They are just a lazy entitled jerk who is throwing away their life because it’s cool be a bicycle hipster and ‘uncool’ to work a computer programming job.
Why in the hell would anyone think this person deserves loan forgiveness? They do not. They should use their degree, get a good job, and pay back their loans themselves.
If this person however, got a degree teaching computer science and was doing something productive to society should they qualify for a partial loan forgiveness, totally.
your mistake is you assume all people are well intention ed an good actors. many are not. many human beings are exploiters, abusers, cheats, and generally shitty people who are seeking to exploit everyone/everything they can for personal gain at the loss of other people. lemmy assumes that all such people are billionaires or something… there are plenty of them who are poor who are like this as well.
I feel like that’s an incredibly harsh analogy, and I don’t really think it’s appropriate.
It implies, relating your analogy back to student loans, that people who are incredibly intelligent and capable and good with technology chose to take a $200,000 PhD in underwater basket weaving and then they don’t want to pay their student loans.
I would say a more apt analogy would be if an orchard owner didn’t take proper care of their orchard and then their neighbors came over and helped them dig out all of the stumps so that they could plant new seeds.
i’m not implying anything dude. there are lots and lots of people in the real world who do stupid crap like that. for real. I have know dozen and dozens of them over the past 20 years.
but you seem to assume all people are fundamentally good by default. they are not. there is a significant percentage of people who you would hire for your orchard, and kill your trees, and then sue you for firing them. why would you want to reward these people?
FWIW I have worked with community non profits much of my adult life. A good 1/3 of the people involved, both providers and clients, are immoral shitheads. I’m not talking analogies here, I’m talking the real world. You have to setup litmus tests, waiting periods, and lots of other mechanisms to prevent those people from getting/access resources, and rooting them out even when they do. a significant part of the job, sadly. One of the reasons many ‘assistance’ programs are so fucking onerous w/ paper work and waiting periods is because so many bad actors seek to exploit them to the detriment of those who actually need the assistance.
and those systems break down when shitty people come in and hoover up all the resources and exploit the generosity of others. and most of those shitty people… don’t need help. they just seek a method to avoid hard work.
Eh, you can’t let the bastards drag you down.
I know there’s a lot of bastards out there. I’m related to half of them. Like, I know how it is.
That doesn’t mean that I have to abandon my optimism, or to intentionally choose to see the evil in people.
These resources would not be handed out carte blanche, and I am not the person who is arguing for them to be handed out carte blanche.
I am saying that we should change the way the interest is counted so that there is no interest being charged on the interest that has been charged.
Doing that one thing would change the debt structure of student loans so that when people make consistent payments over a decade, it will almost always, in and of itself, completely pay off their student loans, and that would be the money they borrowed, plus the interest on the money that was borrowed.
It would give people who are struggling a light at the end of the tunnel that they can strive towards and that they can know for a fact will not be taken away from them, and that is powerful.
I would also argue that student loans should be able to be discharged through bankruptcy with maybe a moderate justification adjudicated by a judge, so that for the people at the very bottom of the scale who are most oppressed by their bad choices, they can wreck their credit and completely and totally wipe the slate clean and be able to start over.
Do you disagree with either of those two premises?
Nailed it
That mindset sure is a great way to make sure nothing ever gets better for anyone.
Congratulations.
nothing will get better until college enrollments start to plummet. then you will see price adjustments.
I don’t feel like the comparison works, because we don’t know a clear cure for cancer right now, but loan forgiveness is something we can technically do just fine (it’s entirely human made after all)
I don’t think you can feel unfairness about something not happening that, to our current knowledge, is not possible. You can feel a bit unfairness if something that might as well have helped you, won’t be done for you… For no clear reason.
False equivalent. People do not choose to have cancer, but some people chose poorly and took out loans they could not afford; that is on them.
What a horrible, uninformed and ignorant hot take.
Is it? I went to a state college to take advantage of in state tuition, commuted because gas for my Geo Metro 2-seater was cheaper than a dorm room, etc to cut my costs down to where I wouldn’t need to put myself in debt and got a small scholarship/grant (that in turn came with an in-state work commitment that shaped my choices after graduation). Other people my age made other choices related to college that landed them in massive amounts of debt that I avoided.
If I had known that I could borrow as much as I wanted and expect someone else to pay it off instead of being stuck holding responsibility for my debts, I likely would have made different substantially less frugal and less restrictive choices.
Tell, you what, nix an equivalent amount of my debts, and we’ll call it a deal. You don’t mind paying off my mortgage, right? Just because you didn’t take out a mortgage doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be responsible for mine, right?
I honestly have no problem with that. I think housing is actually more critical than student loan forgiveness. A debt driven payment to every American under a certain income threshold would go a long way towards repairing the dwindling middle class, and 99% of that money would go towards big businesses anyway.
That said, your individual experience is based on your socioeconomic upbringing and yours alone. You had opportunities others did not, even if they don’t feel like opportunities to you. Student loans were sold on a lie to every American high school age child, that the money would work itself out after college. Something no reasonable adult could actually believe to be true but no high school age child had the worldly awareness to doubt.
You buy a house knowing what your monthly payments are going to be. You buy a house on credit you spent a decade or more building. Multiple people have to sign off on you being able to repay that debt and even those are thrown around like candy. Giving 100,000 dollars to a teenager with no credit history who’s probably never had a job is irresponsible and crazy. It should fall on the debtors to write that money off because they were crazy ignorant or stupid to expect it to be repaid in the first place.
To be clear, I don’t just want debt forgiveness. I want the college lending system rewritten entirely. I want debt forgiveness to those that need it even if that means my debts aren’t wiped out.
To be extra clear, I should not have been given that loan, 90% of the literal children signing for those loans should not be able to access them. But there is no other path to college for almost all of those kids, because college has become so unreasonably expensive.
I admit I kinda feel this way about Ozempic after having to fight for years to finally get into better shape.
Thing is once they stop the pounds come back unless they change their behavior. If all they do is take the shots, they’re likely signing up for an expensive long-term roller-coaster of weight loss and gain and emotions.
Behavioural change is the crucial part of getting in shape, Ozempic is helpful for those who already did change their behaviour but still can’t lose weight. Your fight is never wasted, you’re significantly more healthy and fitter than those solely rely on Ozempic and never do the work, and that should be worth it.
Do we all think loan forgiveness is the cure for student loans?
Not at all, but loan forgiveness wasn’t mentioned in the comic. It’s just putting a bandaid on a capitalized educational system that should not be for making money but rather a societal investment into our betterment. Id keep my loans I have left and vote for free education any day of the week if we had the option. (Of course I wouldn’t say no to both) But I think some people were trying to use loan forgiveness to breach the doors of free education.
I’m somewhat torn on this:
Yes, I totally agree that federal loans should be forgiven even if someone pays theirs off.
Private loans though? Not so much. That’s basically the same as a mortgage from a bank. Or a car loan even. That money ultimately ends up in the borrower’s possession after the school balance is paid. That? I am not so willing to share the cost of.
I, somewhat, feel you. My hang up is federal loans are often s pittance
Maybe my FAFSA has the wrong code(at this point, for my oldest). Maybe I should have lied about my assets? I haven’t done my research, but it did not seem like my lack of home or non-beater factor in
Debt itself has a history of forgiveness. Western Societies could benefit from being more forgiving imo. 30% apr loans should absolutely be illegal, but thats a lot of credit debt today.
30% apr loans should absolutely be illegal
Are you talking of a specific instance? Because, we do have anti-usery laws.
We also have anti trust laws, but yet we have tech monopoliies and an FCC thats done nothing for a decade
My first car loan had a 26% interest rate. Over that 36 month loan I would have literally paid over twice the total value of the loan if I didn’t refinance it after 6 months.
I learned a lot through the mistakes I made that day and have endeavored to not repeat any of those mistakes (and so far I haven’t!)
What happened to all that student loan vote-for-me-again (or so it felt for a European, IMO) relief stuff in the end?
It’s next to the Epstein’s files.
The Supreme Court put a stop to it in 2023. Biden v. Nebraska, one of the many recent 6-3 decisions.
After first establishing that at least Missouri had Article III standing to challenge the debt forgiveness program, Roberts held that the statutory grant of authority to the Secretary of Education to “waive or modify” loan terms could not be extended to the student loan forgiveness program, and that debt cancellation of this scale required clear congressional authorization and fell under the major questions doctrine.
If only those same six judges were as willing to (properly, IMO) limit Presidential authority now that their guy is in office…
I totally agree with this. If someone is opposed to student loan forgiveness because they had to pay theirs off, that person sucks. But if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too, and not as part of opposition, then I am sympathetic.
What if Im against it because “fuck you, you took out the loan knowing full well what it meant”?
I would argue that people didn’t know what it meant, or were in a position where they could not refuse the loan.
Kids grow up being taught that they had to have a college education to have a good job, and that a good job is necessary to have a good life. Parents and counselors reinforce this, so they have no reasonable means believe otherwise.
Employers DO require college education more and more. Not all, true, but the competition for those jobs is higher, so expect lower pay and greater difficulties in getting hired. Often that pay is not even enough to make rent. For the rest, the number of people who have a degree is in increasing, so the competition for those jobs is increasing as well, with the same decrease in pay.
So out of the gate, children are put in a situation where, from everything they can see and are told, they need a degree. But most can’t afford one. Therefore, they are placed in a position where they must take a loan with no guarantee that the degree will get them a job that pays well enough for them to pay back loan.
So it’s a bit more than “you took a loan, you pay for it.” It better described as “you were cooreced into taking this loan on false pretences presented to you by all of society.” Society should take responsibility for that.
if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too
I think every one of them assumes they will never get a cent of that money back. They do live in America, after all, the land of “fuck you; got mine.”
Change the legislation to give every living person back every cent they ever paid towards student loans, and many opinions would change.
The Republican party would still be completely against it though, so we’d still have millions of boot lickers out there arguing to hurt their own financial situation in order to please their superiors.
Don’t take out a loan that you cannot afford.
How do you know what loan you can afford before you have any income? How do you expect a 17 year old who’s never lived on their own and only financial experience is maybe a part time job to be able to comprehend money on the scale of 10s of thousands of dollars?
Sure you can try to be smart and look at the BLS data to get an estimate of your income after college, but a ton of minutae gets lost when doing so, such as what you’ll make early on in that position vs after 20 years in that position, regional pay differences, etc. that also assumes you’ll graduate and get a job like you researched in your field but maybe you picked a field that’s about to collapse for reasons outside of your control, maybe the field you picked is already saturated with talent, or is experiencing some other significant shift.
I worked with one person who had gone to university to be a biologist just to graduate right after a significant number of university research positions were closed and laid off, leaving him fighting with folks who have 20+ years of experience for a handful of job openings
Student loans are the one type of loan you can’t simply perform a debt to income calculation to determine if you can afford the loan. There’s a million and one things that can happen between when you accept the loan and when you start paying on it that can greatly impact the affordability. The risk of course grows with the cost of education, but so does the potential reward.
I was saving for college and aware of the costs from the age of 14. That’s why I got a job at 15.
It was pretty easy to understand. They showed me a piece of paper with all the numbers. Basic mathematics.
The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair. But… if you need a job after school that pays a certain amount… well you need to plan for that too.
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position. His lack of research is his own fault. Not anyone else’s. Nobody is owed a job inbiology just because they studied it, and most people who get those jobs go to top programs and are top performers.
Your friend needs to get a job in an office, pushing papers, like vast majority of us. Those are the jobs that are available. Take their bio dataset skills, and join a marketing firm, like the rest of us.
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them. FWIW I have a brother who is in this rut right now. He refuses to get jobs that are ‘below’ him so he has been unemployed for 3 years now. He’s a prideful idiot.
I went to an ivy league school and my first job was pushing papers because it was the first job I could get. And I built up my job skills and my career. I didn’t sit around living at home for months/years whining about how there are ‘no good jobs’. I got to work and started paying off my loans. I have zero empathy for the people who sit around and refuse to work because they feel it is ‘below’ them to work outside of a certain field/industry or income level.
The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair.
We should be building a world where this is not the case! We should be building a world where people can become skilled at something without significant cost and shift careers when they decide they need to. Even better, a world where careers are optional and people just do what they need to to contribute to society and can otherwise enjoy life
Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them.
Remember these are life-changing decisions made by teenagers, a cohort specifically known for making poor decisions and not considering long term ramifications of these decisions. Yes everyone can name someone who made poor decisions in college and is paying the price for them, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build a world that’s less harsh to people who do so!
Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position.
I love the projection here as you make up a story for someone you never met. I met this individual when we both worked at a callcenter making $12/hr. He did everything right, he got his Masters from a good university, he published research while in college, continued to do what independent research he could outside of college, yet because some idiot in power who themselves never graduated college decided to demolish state funded university research with a single stroke of a pen, my colleague was left to fight for whatever scraps he could get after doing everything right. He did everything right and still ended up royally fucked, yet he still continued to do the right thing and eventually found himself finally in a job in his field a decade after graduation. This is not a system that’s setup optimally, this is a system that badly needs to be fixed!
This is som weird metaphor… So some people get voluntary “cancer” in hope theycan fight it and it will benefit them in the long run, and some don’t. While someone will have just the benefits and not the cancer while everyone chips in.
I get that in the long run highly educated people tend to pay more taxes. So makeing education affordable in is a net benefit for everyone. But this analogy is just weird…
I don’t know man, at the end of the day it is unfair, and making fun of that seems inappropriate.
I get that in the long run highly educated people tend to pay more taxes.
Sounds wrong, in general the more you make the less you pay in the Usa, in other countries it probably sounds a bit more plausible.
The US has a progressive income tax, so it is true that people with higher education pay more income tax as a whole. The main difference with other countries is that it has a fairly low percentage cap and an absurdly low capital gains tax. The wealthy paying a low tax rate because of most of their earnings being asset based instead of income based doesn’t change the fact that the people who get paid higher incomes from their jobs that required higher education pay more income tax.
Exactly, it’s like when you look at US median wealth distribution, if you don’t strip off the 0.1% at the top that have over a billion dollars in assets, then it makes everything massively lopsided and skews incredibly higher than reality.
Being told that at the age of 35, your average peers have a net worth of $175,000 is not anywhere near true for most people that’s actually 35 and surrounded by peers.
You just have a couple of money bag multi-billionaires massively counterbalancing the far higher number of people with negative net worth.
Sure that’s how it’s supposed to work but I imagine we’ll find the higher the income the less you pay as a percentage given the plethora of tax evasion schemes available.
It’s highly dependent. Your doctor that makes $250,000 a year probably pays his fair share of $250,000 following the tax codes.
He doesn’t really have the time or interest in finding loopholes in order to save the few thousands of dollars it might save him.
Most likely, he hires a qualified CPA and allows the CPA to manage his tax returns.
The people that are doing the tax dodging are the businesses that make millions a year, and they’re using their business assets in order to decrease the amount of taxes they and their business pays.
They hire accountants and they do everything they can to not pay taxes, wherever the law allows for you to legally not pay them.
My opinion is that the actual solution is not to villainize the businesses for taking advantage of the tax loopholes but rather it is to villainize our politicians who created the tax loopholes as kickbacks for their friends that give them perks in real life.
There have been proposals to fix this, things like the VAT in England, and they are always loudly shouted down by the news corporations who are in the pocket and owned by the businesses that would be most negatively affected by them.
If you think tax evasion is more common in business id say I’m fairly certain you are wrong and it’s statistics will support that.
We simply don’t know because the it’s does not focus in higher earners because they can fight it, us poors can’t.
I mean, I’m pretty sure that petty tax dodging happens even amongst the poorest of people, but if you look at what you would get out of going after the perpetrators, doing things like closing tax loopholes and instituting a VAT, things like that, would do more to solve the problem than auditing every single family that makes under $70,000 a year and finding out where they have made mistakes, accidental or otherwise, in their tax filings.
Instituting a corporate flat tax on any company that has revenues of over $500 million a year would put hundreds of billions of dollars into the federal economy.
With that money, corporations would actually save quite a bit of money because they wouldn’t have to hire so many freaking accountants, and that much income could take care of the $1.6 trillion student loan debt crisis in half a decade.
After that was taken care of, it could all be thrown into Social Security and take care of that looming crisis. It would alleviate so many financial concerns from the country that it’s actually concerning that we are not even beginning to consider doing such a thing.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Also agreed.
Yep. Great comment.
Tax enforcement has costs. Some taxes cost more than others to institution, and tax enforcement makes zero sense for poor people where the cost of enforcement exceeds the revenue.
Which is precisely why the IRS has been so gutted, because a broke IRS has no money to audit rich people who are doing massive, illegal, and blatant tax evasion systematically.
And the media focuses on what people buy with food stamps as if they should only be able to buy beans with them.
the pols own the businesses and/or get donations/kickbacks from them
Nah, our tax structure is all kinds of fucked up and the middle class pays the most in tax. You don’t start getting to skip out on taxes until you make 50x what the average college graduate earns.
100k + is not middle class.
Do you have anything to back that up?
Here’s my link: The salary you need to be considered middle class in every U.S. state—it’s close to $200,000 in 2 of them. In every single state 100k is middle class.
I don’t need my own you just proved my point, 100k is not middle class.
The report, which crunched the numbers for all 50 states, is based on Pew Research’s definition of middle class: two-thirds to double the median household income.
i believe your source even makes note that the American “middle class” is considered working class just about everywhere else.
And in which state is 100k more than double the median income? Did you actually look at the article, or did you hit the second paragraph and assume?
That’s not how most of the world defines middle class because it’s a useless stat that does not reflect societal issues via economics.
I looked at the article.
‘Middle class’ goes beyond income
For many people, being “middle class” goes beyond a certain income level, says Brad Klontz, a certified financial planner and expert in financial psychology and behavioral finance.
Did you?
