Wanting the government to help people is free

A real shitty sleight of hand we do in this country goes like this: We tell kids they have to go to college to succeed. You'll never "make it" if you don't we say. You'll have to work menial jobs forever etc. Kids being dumb believe this because why wouldn't they. Their parents and their school counselors and society in general all reinforce this message.

These are the kids fortunate enough to even be ushered into this predatory game mind you. For poorer kids it's like welp good luck out there asshole! Then those kids go on to work minimum wage jobs and people sneer that they should've gone to college instead. When they ask for a living wage people say that working at McDonald's is supposed to be for teenagers (who are saving for college by the way) and anyone else still doing it as an adult deserves it as a punishment for not hustling hard enough so they could have earned the privilege of taking out a huge loan when they were younger.

So the lucky teens who worked after school at McDonald’s the right way or come from families that live a few levels further up from the yawning chasm of pain and so can go to college in the first place take out massive loans that they don't fully grasp. Did you have any concept of what $100,000 was when you were 17-18? I certainly didn't. I don't think I even knew what $10,000 actually meant. I figured you just got a job and you paid it off gradually and it was basically no problem. A pain in the ass maybe but an achievable task.

I certainly had no idea how quickly the interest on those loans starts compounding did you?

For the record I've been paying between $3-500 a month every month for almost 25 years now. I still owe a little under $20,000. The only reason I was ever able to get it down that low is that I started having a little bit of success with this newsletter a couple years ago. Perhaps if they want to get ahead everyone should start a rambling and maudlin newsletter about how much they want to die? Simple as.

I wrote about this sort of thing in here before but since I've been talking about it again on Twitter I've gotten a lot of similar stories.

Some newer responses:

I was led to believe you can pay off your loans in 10 years. 18 years later, and I still have 13 years to go to pay mine off at current pace.

First-generation college grad from a relatively cheap state school and my balance is now 41k after a starting principal of 34k. I've been paying for 14 years.

Was told to go to the best college I could. I did. Paid $700 a month for most of my 20’s. Worked two jobs. Still owe $80k 12 years later.

I went to college on loans (as an out of stater at a public), and I have been paying them diligently ever since. I still owe over $80k and I’m almost sixteen years out from undergrad. This is a broken system.

I took out around $48k in student loans to go to college. I’ve paid probably $30k since I graduated in 2016. Right now, I owe $50k.

It was 100% my decision to take out a stupid loan. However, everyone who I trusted or was in a position to influence me insisted that I had to do it or I’d grow up to be a loser. Joke’s on them, btw. I still grew up to be a loser.

I've been paying for 21 years. 300 a month for 21 years and I still owe 20K out of 55.

I had the same situation but had the foresight to win a bunch of money on a game show. Really. That's it. The only reason I don't have student loan debt is because I know what a dugong is.

Read this heartbreaking thread by the way:

Perhaps contrast it with this one:

I love to make my old mother labor to pay off my loans while I go on TV to yell about how poor black people and immigrants are stealing from old people like my mother.

Personally I want my aging parents to putz around in their fucked up South Shore townie garden with like 15 Ocean State Job Lot statues then go to bed watching Family Feud covered in dog hair rather than have to labor until they die but maybe I'm just normal.

Meanwhile these loan companies aren't simply content to take the already extraordinary deal they've been given by the government they're still scraping on the margins too. In every way they can think of they are fucking us legally or otherwise.

They illegally cheated many struggling borrowers out of their rights to lower repayments

Make them relinquish the ball

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

“For years, Navient, formerly part of Sallie Mae, created obstacles to repayment by providing bad information, processing payments incorrectly, and failing to act when borrowers complained,” the CFPB alleged. “Through shortcuts and deception, the company also illegally cheated many struggling borrowers out of their rights to lower repayments, which caused them to pay much more than they had to for their loans.”

Back to the sleight of hand though. So these kids they come out of college and go to get a job and – whoops! – start getting paid shit or can't find a job in their field and so all the while their debt balloons. Then when they have the temerity to complain about what a raw deal they got with these unpayable loans skyrocketing every day the responsible and sober and money-knowing adults – the very same ones who said go to college or else – will berate them for having made a dumb investment choice with the loan they got pressured into. And this is the real clever fuck you part: those same wise adults will also try to convince the college graduates that they are actually the powerful ones here due to the cultural vibes of their degrees. Doesn't matter if they're broke and underwater. They paint college-goers as some kind of elite class simply because of the hypothetical money-earning power of the degree rather than the actual material circumstances they find themselves in. Let them pay off their student loans with their blue check on Twitter.

This is why you see so much hesitation from Democrats and Republicans alike about the idea of student loan forgiveness. They don't want to be seen as doing anything that might help "the rich." Joe Biden said last year he didn't want to forgive the debts of people who went to "Harvard and Yale and Penn" but that is some slick bullshit too. Rich people don't have to take out loans in the first place. Not even to go to Yale.

Helping the actual rich is fine of course but not the culturally rich.

Never mind that a significant portion of student debt is held by people who went to community college or went to a semester or two and didn't graduate via CNBC.

Borrowers who struggle the most “tend to be more in the category of a student who started at a community college, some unforeseen event occurred in their life, and they didn’t graduate,” Phillip Levine, professor of economics at Wellesley College previously told CNBC Make It. “They made an investment that had no return, they’re stuck with this debt, and getting out of that debt is difficult for them.”

The default rate among borrowers who didn’t complete their degree is three times as high as the rate for borrowers who did earn a diploma.

But ok let us say for argument's sake that forgiving student loan debt – and remember we're only talking about federally held debt not private debt like I have – would help higher earning people more than the poor. Using that as an argument against helping millions of people in this country who are only relatively struggling and not dangling over the precipice would only make sense if anyone was saying do this one thing and then never do anything else to help everyone else. Are you proposing such a thing? I'm certainly not.

There's no reason why we can't do this while also doing many other things helping "salt of the earth real Americans." Who said we can only ask for one thing?

I've written on this in here before but wanting the government to help people is free. You don't have to preemptively circumscribe your demands to appease the reasonableness referee in your mind or to placate a hypothetical political opponent. You are just some guy you can ask for whatever. So many people even or perhaps especially liberals have got a little Matthew Yglesias living inside of them like Kuato from Total Recall that makes them think like a centrist pundit and feel like they're "playing the game" by being sober and removed about the realm of the possible.

MSNBC just destroyed what was left of his kindness

When Chris Matthews says Bernie is a communist that’s going to kill dissidents in Central Park grandad believes him

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Everyone knows about Fox News Brain Cancer but this is one of the worst effects of MSNBC Poisoning. You've got your mother in law or high school friend talking about how some idea they actually support can't work because of how it will play to the voters. As if Joe Biden's electoral prospects were the most important thing in the world to consider before we try to improve society somewhat. We don't have to think like that.

(Obviously a lot of people use this sort of reasonableness pose as cover to protect their social status of being progressive while appealing to the authority of the refs for why progressive things aren't possible.)

Buddy what do you actually want to happen? Just say that.

Do you want to forgive student loans then take it a step further and make college free for everyone going forward? Great let's do that too! Let's make the minimum wage $30.

I wish the center-left would stop beginning negotiations from a starting point where they have already cut their ask in half by bargaining with themselves against themselves.

And again even if we are helping out doctors or lawyers or dentists or whoever with debt forgiveness who cares? I don’t have much love for rich professionals like that either but I also and perhaps naively do believe that many of them would want to do better work helping people if they didn’t come out of the starting gates $3-500k in debt. We need more of them who are free to help unburdened by the pressure of debt to always try to do the most profitable thing.

More than any of that this is what I think: If forgiving student debt was going to be such a handout for the well-off professional class alone then it would have been done by now.

See you next time.

“I’m lonelier than god” is both some real 1995 shit to say and also some 2022 shit to say.