Should student debt be forgiven?

Last Wednesday President Joe Biden announced new steps to address student loan debt, which includes forgiving up to $20,000 for millions of borrowers and extending the payment freeze one final time until the end of the year.
Borrowers who hold loans with the Department of Education and make less than $125,000 a year are eligible for up to $20,000 in student loan forgiveness if they received Pell Grants, which are given to students from low- and middle-income families. Individuals who make less than $125,000 a year but did not receive Pell Grants are eligible for $10,000 in loan forgiveness.
Reaction was swift, both from those in favor of the program, and those vehemently against it. Isn’t that the case with anything a president does these days?
The obvious arguments against it are that the person borrowed the money, so they should pay it back, that people who go to trade schools aren’t seeing any relief, and that millions of people who took out loans already paid theirs back and won’t see any money. All valid arguments.
The arguments for the forgiveness are more of the for-the-greater-good sort, as the cost of higher education has skyrocketed, and people are graduating college absolutely buried in debt with little hope of escaping it. And, we need people to go to college. There are professions that simply require higher education. Should education cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? No. It shouldn’t.
There are people in the Chronicle office who went to college, racked up debt and paid it back. Do they get any money back? Rhetorical question. The answer is no. There are also people in this office who have home payments, car payments, etc. Can we have someone else pay those off for us? If our mortgage identifies as a student loan, can we get some relief from it? Should random taxpayers have to pay for something they receive no benefit from?
Oh wait, we already do.
Your tax money is already going to things you don’t want it to go to. We subsidize banks. Giant corporations are given massive tax cuts, or are subsidized. Big Oil gets subsidies, as do defense contractors (endless wars), agriulture, aerospace, and on and on and on. What if we don’t want our tax money going to Ukraine or any of the other dozens and dozens of countries our money gets shipped off to?
How many people reading this benefitted from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) during the pandemic? That was money from the government you didn’t have to pay back, and it benefitted only you and your employees. If you want to be really disgusted, go take a look at how many millionaires and politicians received hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, from PPP. Did you give back your stimulus money?
We just can’t get too worked up about this debt forgiveness. Our government wastes billions of dollars on all sorts of things it probably shouldn’t, and you can chalk this up as yet another one of those programs.
Its spends money on a lot dumber things. This is par for the course.

User login