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Norway28674 Posts
On January 19 2022 18:23 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2022 17:06 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 06:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 19 2022 05:49 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 05:35 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 05:13 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:56 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 04:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:26 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 02:46 Liquid`Drone wrote:
My university in Norway was mostly free ($50 per semester tuition fee, couple hundred $ per semester for books), 40% of my student loans were turned into scholarships (happens automatically when you pass your subjects), but I still accumulated more than $35k in student loans. (I still needed a place to stay, food to eat, and beer to drink.) Today, as a teacher, because I have a master's degree and three subjects I can teach, my salary is significantly higher than the salary of other teachers who spent fewer years in university. (Something like 30% higher than someone with 4 instead of 7 years of education.) Among people with the same profession, there's a fairly direct correlation between people with more student loans and higher salaries.
If Norwegian student loans were erased tomorrow, it would to a greater degree benefit myself and others with longer education and higher pay, and it would hardly benefit poor people at all. Furthermore, I could have gotten by with less student loans. However, that would have meant I'd either have to work more or party less or eat less tasty food or engage less in relative luxury when I was a student.
While I understand that salaries in the US are less explicitly defined in relation to your level of education, that I guess a larger % of student loans are entirely necessary because they pay for tuition and that consequently the points I'm making for Norway aren't equally valid for the US, is there really no relationship between a) frugality and student loans and b) future pay and student loans?
If there is no such relationship, that literally nobody foregoes getting student loans because they don't want to incur the debt, and that nobody gets more student loans because they expect to earn a higher future salary because of it, then sure. Just erase all the debt, clearly it was incurred for everyone across the board regardless of choices they made and without granting any benefit. But if not getting student loans was a legitimate option for some people who got student loans and if some people get more student loans because that will enable them to get higher pay in the future, blanket student loan forgiveness strikes me as a rather poor method of redistribution.
Targeted student loan forgiveness (percentages of certain types of loans) or interest exemption is a different beast altogether, I can easily get behind both of those. Part of the issue here is that you are comparing 2 incredibly different countries with wildly different systems. As an example, 40% of people with student loans don't actually have a degree to show for it. Lots of people have lifelong debt without any benefit whatsoever. You have cited interest rates of Norway's loan system before. Imagine if it was (on average) 6% instead of that. There are a variety of other factors too, but those are some of the major ones. The discussion is not what would happen in Norway. The situations are wildly different and the societies the systems are a part of are also very different. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but someone without a degree in Norway has a lower chance of filing for bankruptcy from medical debt than someone in the US. I've never heard of a Norwegian person filing for bankruptcy from medical debt, that's not really a concept we have. Anyway, I agree that the countries and systems are very different and can't be directly compared, which is why I'm asking about stuff like 'to what degree does the size of your student loan influence your future pay' (because in Norway they're definitely related). Again, if they're not related, and if higher priced college/university is basically a scam, that's a more convincing argument in favor of blanket student loan forgiveness. But if people with $80k loans make 50% more than people with $20k loans, then erasing the entire debt for both those groups of people will be way more beneficial towards people who make more money. If people with $30k loans make more than people with 0 loan because they figured they couldn't afford college, then erasing the entire debt again favors the wealthier group. There are some careers where you of course make more money (STEM, Finance, Law, all the fields you associate with high pay) but it is not a generalized thing. Teachers generally have very poor pay in the US. And the reason I brought up 40% of people with debt not even having a degree was to show that even if we ignore the poor financial performance of a wide range of degrees, 40% of people with student debt don't even have a degree. They didn't finish.
Why should not finishing mean you don't have to pay, though? I assume it's not that 40% were arbitrarily kicked out or failed for reasons entirely outside their own control.Again, some of the sums seem exorbitant, the interest rate strikes me as absurd, education should be free or close to free, and I think the US is in dire need of serious redistribution of resources. BUT, I'm still seeing people making the decision to get expensive education and I think I'm seeing that in quite some cases, the more expensive education results in higher paying jobs. None of this is convincing me that non-targeted student debt relief is a particularly good method to achieve the redistribution of wealth that I acknowledge is important. I'm not saying "so they shouldn't have to pay". I am pointing out why the situation is very bad right now and a lot of people are suffering under debt they have no hope of ever paying off. Assigning guilt to matters of financial policy doesn't usually make sense. It is ethical to pay for addicts to get off of drugs, despite the long number of mistakes they have made in life. This is because not only is it good to help people, but society also benefits from having a contributing member of society who stops harming society. Asking ourselves if someone suffering "deserves" to be saved is not always the right approach. In a general sense, I would say the financial sector has been allowed (through capitalism) to exploit the working class to an extent that the ship is beginning to sink. 6% interest student loans are an example of this exploitation. The US government should not feel ethical collecting 6% interest on student loans. The entire loan system in the US is designed to exploit. The US government participating in this is criminal. The US government has guilt to atone for. This is a situation largely created by them. Freezing downpayments and interest sounds like a viable solution without having to cancel the loans. That's more of a weaker kick of the can down the road than a solution. At least canceling student debt actually solves the problem of having student debt for millions of people. Granted neither solve the larger fundamental problems of the exploitative and oppressive system which the schools are indoctrinating people to be "productive" in. Yeah, it's not a solution, but I don't see blanket debt forgiveness as one either, so I prefer kicking the can down the road while finding a proper solution rather than going with one I perceive as bad.  Again, targeted student debt cancelling has merit, the main problem with that is finding a system that accurately targets it. Something like cancel $20k for everyone is something I could get by - even though the physicians with $230k debt but $250k yearly salaries don't need them, it's not that big of a deal, either, however it's a big deal for the ones with $30k debt if it's reduced to $10k. But like, I actually do believe in the principle of 'if you borrow money you should repay it'. The big issue I have is with the interest rates, making people have to pay $180k when they borrowed $100k. That's totally fucked. They're both kicking the can while finding a proper solution, one immediately solves the problem of having student loan debt for millions of people and the other doesn't. I think divorcing "if you borrow money you should repay it" from the capitalist dogma that generates the demand for borrowing student loans in the first place is irresponsible. Without that capitalist dogma anyone would struggle to rationalize student loans as they exist in the US at all. As far as I'm concerned, anyone in the US with student loan debt (or medical debt for that matter) got scammed by greedy capitalists and incompetent (at best) government. That makes the notion said debtors should "pay what they borrowed" or whatever horribly misguided.
I mean if you do think it's a scam (but again, I'm not convinced of this unless one can demonstrate that there's no relationship between amount of debt and future pay) then it's logically consistent to want to erase it all, same if you want a socialist revolution (but I don't). I'm more of a reformist, favoring amending the system over destroy and rebuild. Essentially I get where you're coming from but I don't agree with that direction. Might be a combination of naivete and/or my own attachment to my own privilege but that's where I am.
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On January 19 2022 20:39 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2022 18:23 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 19 2022 17:06 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 06:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On January 19 2022 05:49 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 05:35 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 05:13 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:56 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 04:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:26 Mohdoo wrote:
[quote]
Part of the issue here is that you are comparing 2 incredibly different countries with wildly different systems. As an example, 40% of people with student loans don't actually have a degree to show for it. Lots of people have lifelong debt without any benefit whatsoever.
You have cited interest rates of Norway's loan system before. Imagine if it was (on average) 6% instead of that. There are a variety of other factors too, but those are some of the major ones. The discussion is not what would happen in Norway. The situations are wildly different and the societies the systems are a part of are also very different.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but someone without a degree in Norway has a lower chance of filing for bankruptcy from medical debt than someone in the US. I've never heard of a Norwegian person filing for bankruptcy from medical debt, that's not really a concept we have. Anyway, I agree that the countries and systems are very different and can't be directly compared, which is why I'm asking about stuff like 'to what degree does the size of your student loan influence your future pay' (because in Norway they're definitely related). Again, if they're not related, and if higher priced college/university is basically a scam, that's a more convincing argument in favor of blanket student loan forgiveness. But if people with $80k loans make 50% more than people with $20k loans, then erasing the entire debt for both those groups of people will be way more beneficial towards people who make more money. If people with $30k loans make more than people with 0 loan because they figured they couldn't afford college, then erasing the entire debt again favors the wealthier group. There are some careers where you of course make more money (STEM, Finance, Law, all the fields you associate with high pay) but it is not a generalized thing. Teachers generally have very poor pay in the US. And the reason I brought up 40% of people with debt not even having a degree was to show that even if we ignore the poor financial performance of a wide range of degrees, 40% of people with student debt don't even have a degree. They didn't finish.
Why should not finishing mean you don't have to pay, though? I assume it's not that 40% were arbitrarily kicked out or failed for reasons entirely outside their own control.Again, some of the sums seem exorbitant, the interest rate strikes me as absurd, education should be free or close to free, and I think the US is in dire need of serious redistribution of resources. BUT, I'm still seeing people making the decision to get expensive education and I think I'm seeing that in quite some cases, the more expensive education results in higher paying jobs. None of this is convincing me that non-targeted student debt relief is a particularly good method to achieve the redistribution of wealth that I acknowledge is important. I'm not saying "so they shouldn't have to pay". I am pointing out why the situation is very bad right now and a lot of people are suffering under debt they have no hope of ever paying off. Assigning guilt to matters of financial policy doesn't usually make sense. It is ethical to pay for addicts to get off of drugs, despite the long number of mistakes they have made in life. This is because not only is it good to help people, but society also benefits from having a contributing member of society who stops harming society. Asking ourselves if someone suffering "deserves" to be saved is not always the right approach. In a general sense, I would say the financial sector has been allowed (through capitalism) to exploit the working class to an extent that the ship is beginning to sink. 6% interest student loans are an example of this exploitation. The US government should not feel ethical collecting 6% interest on student loans. The entire loan system in the US is designed to exploit. The US government participating in this is criminal. The US government has guilt to atone for. This is a situation largely created by them. Freezing downpayments and interest sounds like a viable solution without having to cancel the loans. That's more of a weaker kick of the can down the road than a solution. At least canceling student debt actually solves the problem of having student debt for millions of people. Granted neither solve the larger fundamental problems of the exploitative and oppressive system which the schools are indoctrinating people to be "productive" in. Yeah, it's not a solution, but I don't see blanket debt forgiveness as one either, so I prefer kicking the can down the road while finding a proper solution rather than going with one I perceive as bad. Again, targeted student debt cancelling has merit, the main problem with that is finding a system that accurately targets it. Something like cancel $20k for everyone is something I could get by - even though the physicians with $230k debt but $250k yearly salaries don't need them, it's not that big of a deal, either, however it's a big deal for the ones with $30k debt if it's reduced to $10k. But like, I actually do believe in the principle of 'if you borrow money you should repay it'. The big issue I have is with the interest rates, making people have to pay $180k when they borrowed $100k. That's totally fucked. They're both kicking the can while finding a proper solution, one immediately solves the problem of having student loan debt for millions of people and the other doesn't. I think divorcing "if you borrow money you should repay it" from the capitalist dogma that generates the demand for borrowing student loans in the first place is irresponsible. Without that capitalist dogma anyone would struggle to rationalize student loans as they exist in the US at all. As far as I'm concerned, anyone in the US with student loan debt (or medical debt for that matter) got scammed by greedy capitalists and incompetent (at best) government. That makes the notion said debtors should "pay what they borrowed" or whatever horribly misguided. I mean if you do think it's a scam (but again, I'm not convinced of this unless one can demonstrate that there's no relationship between amount of debt and future pay) then it's logically consistent to want to erase it all, same if you want a socialist revolution (but I don't). I'm more of a reformist, favoring amending the system over destroy and rebuild. Essentially I get where you're coming from but I don't agree with that direction. Might be a combination of naivete and/or my own attachment to my own privilege but that's where I am.
Yeah, I'm anti-capitalist because it is an inextricably destructive, exploitative, and oppressive system. I understand you to be advocating a social-democrat ("compassionate capitalism") reformist position.
The apparent reason we have conflicting positions is that one is pro-capitalism and one is anti-capitalism. If you don't identify capitalism as an inextricably destructive, exploitative and oppressive system it'd make sense to look there to unpack the disagreement further.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 19 2022 16:54 WombaT wrote:
I still, having only skimmed this and other articles am a tad confused as to how this is effecting aircraft, given 5G’s range. I’m assuming radar data is relayed from ground stations to aircraft and its those being fucked with?
Basically, aircraft use radar to measure their altitude by sending and receiving radio waves over a certain frequency. Turns out that for some airplanes, that frequency is close enough to the frequency of 5G that the altimeter thinks that a stray 5G signal is actually a sign that their altitude is lower than expected or that there's an obstacle around or something. Significantly annoying under the best conditions, downright dangerous in any reduced visibility scenarios.
More generally, a lot of groups that use radio have basically been asked to step aside and yield their frequency range for the glory of 5G. Satellites are one example; the US government had a lot of comsats have to replace their old satellites so that 5G could broadcast over the same range (an effort worth over $10 billion; government-subsidized and highly controversial a few years ago). Apparently the global stock of radio altimeters within striking distance of 5G frequencies are also on that list.
This raises at least two big questions. One, why wasn't this already known and accounted for in 5G deployment. And two, is this 5G deployment really worth telling everyone else that they have to change their technology so that 5G can use their frequency range? The latter question may be a good spot to consider if "capitalism run amok" is accurate.
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On January 19 2022 23:23 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2022 16:54 WombaT wrote:
I still, having only skimmed this and other articles am a tad confused as to how this is effecting aircraft, given 5G’s range. I’m assuming radar data is relayed from ground stations to aircraft and its those being fucked with? Basically, aircraft use radar to measure their altitude by sending and receiving radio waves over a certain frequency. Turns out that for some airplanes, that frequency is close enough to the frequency of 5G that the altimeter thinks that a stray 5G signal is actually a sign that their altitude is lower than expected or that there's an obstacle around or something. Significantly annoying under the best conditions, downright dangerous in any reduced visibility scenarios. More generally, a lot of groups that use radio have basically been asked to step aside and yield their frequency range for the glory of 5G. Satellites are one example; the US government had a lot of comsats have to replace their old satellites so that 5G could broadcast over the same range (an effort worth over $10 billion; government-subsidized and highly controversial a few years ago). Apparently the global stock of radio altimeters within striking distance of 5G frequencies are also on that list. This raises at least two big questions. One, why wasn't this already known and accounted for in 5G deployment. And two, is this 5G deployment really worth telling everyone else that they have to change their technology so that 5G can use their frequency range? The latter question may be a good spot to consider if "capitalism run amok" is accurate.
Doesn't sound like anything to do with capitalism at all really. In fact, frequency range regulation looks like a very typical example of somewhere the free market doesn't apply at all, unless the government chooses to treat it as a commodity they own and can sell usage of by auctioning off ranges to whoever is willing to pay the most for them for a period of time. If 5G operators want to buy a frequency range from aircraft operators and comsats, then that should be compensated by 5G operators, as capitalism would work. 5G operators could then factor that cost into their equation on whether or not the frequency range was worth the money.
That doesn't sound like what happened at all. Rather whatever agency in charge of regulating frequency bands fucked up and sold a range to 5G operators that it had already conceded use to for aircrafts and comsats. Given that it is a US government fuckup, that means it's a US government problem to solve... apparently costing 10 billion dollars. It's a fuckup, but doesn´t sound like a problem of capitalism.
And in any case, it isnt free market capitalism. Without any government regulation nobody would police radio usage at all, and airlines would keep flying, without even knowing telecom companies were using a frequency range that fucked with their altimeters. Planes would crash into the ground, and the free market would subsequently decide with their money whether that problem should be solved by airlines or telecom companies.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 19 2022 23:47 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2022 23:23 LegalLord wrote:On January 19 2022 16:54 WombaT wrote:
I still, having only skimmed this and other articles am a tad confused as to how this is effecting aircraft, given 5G’s range. I’m assuming radar data is relayed from ground stations to aircraft and its those being fucked with? Basically, aircraft use radar to measure their altitude by sending and receiving radio waves over a certain frequency. Turns out that for some airplanes, that frequency is close enough to the frequency of 5G that the altimeter thinks that a stray 5G signal is actually a sign that their altitude is lower than expected or that there's an obstacle around or something. Significantly annoying under the best conditions, downright dangerous in any reduced visibility scenarios. More generally, a lot of groups that use radio have basically been asked to step aside and yield their frequency range for the glory of 5G. Satellites are one example; the US government had a lot of comsats have to replace their old satellites so that 5G could broadcast over the same range (an effort worth over $10 billion; government-subsidized and highly controversial a few years ago). Apparently the global stock of radio altimeters within striking distance of 5G frequencies are also on that list. This raises at least two big questions. One, why wasn't this already known and accounted for in 5G deployment. And two, is this 5G deployment really worth telling everyone else that they have to change their technology so that 5G can use their frequency range? The latter question may be a good spot to consider if "capitalism run amok" is accurate. Doesn't sound like anything to do with capitalism at all really. In fact, frequency range regulation looks like a very typical example of somewhere the free market doesn't apply at all, unless the government chooses to treat it as a commodity they own and can sell usage of by auctioning off ranges to whoever is willing to pay the most for them for a period of time. If 5G operators want to buy a frequency range from aircraft operators and comsats, then that should be compensated by 5G operators, as capitalism would work. 5G operators could then factor that cost into their equation on whether or not the frequency range was worth the money. That doesn't sound like what happened at all. Rather whatever agency in charge of regulating frequency bands fucked up and sold a range to 5G operators that it had already conceded use to for aircrafts and comsats. Given that it is a US government fuckup, that means it's a US government problem to solve... apparently costing 10 billion dollars. It's a fuckup, but doesn´t sound like a problem of capitalism. And in any case, it isnt free market capitalism. Without any government regulation nobody would police radio usage at all, and airlines would keep flying, without even knowing telecom companies were using a frequency range that fucked with their altimeters. Planes would crash into the ground, and the free market would subsequently decide with their money whether that problem should be solved by airlines or telecom companies.
Bending government regulations to the whims of profit motives and playing various games of government rent-seeking is pretty classic capitalist behavior. Both the satellite question (how much money is moving spectrum worth; who should get the profits from selling the old question) and the airplane question (falling through the cracks in a "whoops, didn't catch this major problem" scenario), all in the pursuit of "we have to do this for the glory of 5G leadership" are pretty classic situations that happen under a realistic capitalistic scenario. Sure, it's not quite what happens on a graph of two widgets in a grade school textbook, but neither is anything else that happens in the real world.
Granted, "capitalism run amok" isn't my words, it's Mohdoo's. I'm not sure I agree with that per se; I just think it's a straight bad idea. But playing rent seeking and regulatory capture as "not real capitalism" seems disingenuous. It's absolutely a government & regulator problem to solve, but a capitalism problem to have generated in the first place.
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On January 19 2022 05:48 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2022 01:06 Nick_54 wrote:On January 18 2022 21:44 EnDeR_ wrote:On January 18 2022 17:45 Nick_54 wrote:On January 18 2022 17:31 EnDeR_ wrote:On January 18 2022 17:22 Nick_54 wrote:On January 18 2022 17:04 gobbledydook wrote:
Is it fair to cancel student debt? What about those who decided to pay their fees and not incur debt? What about those who decided not to go to college because of the debt?
Is it fair that university administrators, professors, and staff make obscene salaries while 18 year old students are forced take on life changing debts at an age they don't know what they're getting into. They're fucking crooks and the main problem as far as I'm concerned along with forgiving the debt. The issue has to be corrected for generations going forward. Very sure that the majority of university administrators, professors and staff do not make obscene salaries. There are some eyewatering salaries, true, but these are exceptions, not the norm and tend to be the really senior staff. You included university staff in your list which also includes sanitation staff as well as catering staff or even campus police -- I'd be surprised if any of those are much above minimum wage. The cost of education has little to do with the salaries of the people running the place. You should do your homework. It's a bit like the poster a couple pages back that argued they could cut school budgets by 50% by cutting salaries of overpaid staff... Obviously I'm not talking about the staff making minimum wage. Campus police should be severely defunded if not eliminated entirely. I'm talking about the public servants making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Football and basketball coaches making million up millions. The cost of university needs to go down as well the debt forgiveness to not put the next generation in this spot. I've done enough homework to know that teenagers racking up 6 figure debts to pay 6 and 7 figure salaries to go along with golden parachutes for the elite isn't right. I'm not saying it would solve the cost problem entirely, but its a start. Certainly one can reduce the cost of education by removing services. I'm not going to defend the exploitation of college students for profit (which I find abhorrent -- they should be paid) but I think it is arguable that having a top-tier team brings in more value than it costs in the form of sponsorships, advertising, investments, etc. and effectively making your education actually have higher value for the cost. In other words, removing them arguably would not make your education cheaper because that's not why your education costs are so stupidly expensive. I highly disagree with the top-tier pay, even if it brings it a top-tier team having good value. Obviously if it had value there wouldn't be a bunch of broke graduates in debt right now. What? I don't understand the argument here. If a branch of the university generates money than it costs to run it, it does not necessarily mean that the gains will be spent in lowering tuition fees -- in my experience, they're far more likely to be re-invested back into other areas of the university to attract more international students that pay far more fees than home students, which itself generates more revenue for the university that then gets reinvested back into even more services/facilities to attract even more high-paying students. In a vacuum it'd be a winning strategy, but the fact that all universities compete for the same pool of students means that everything just got more expensive for everybody.
The university making money and more revenue is not the problem, the students being robbed and forced into huge debt is.
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On January 19 2022 16:42 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2022 05:35 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 05:13 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:56 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 04:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:26 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 02:46 Liquid`Drone wrote:
My university in Norway was mostly free ($50 per semester tuition fee, couple hundred $ per semester for books), 40% of my student loans were turned into scholarships (happens automatically when you pass your subjects), but I still accumulated more than $35k in student loans. (I still needed a place to stay, food to eat, and beer to drink.) Today, as a teacher, because I have a master's degree and three subjects I can teach, my salary is significantly higher than the salary of other teachers who spent fewer years in university. (Something like 30% higher than someone with 4 instead of 7 years of education.) Among people with the same profession, there's a fairly direct correlation between people with more student loans and higher salaries.
If Norwegian student loans were erased tomorrow, it would to a greater degree benefit myself and others with longer education and higher pay, and it would hardly benefit poor people at all. Furthermore, I could have gotten by with less student loans. However, that would have meant I'd either have to work more or party less or eat less tasty food or engage less in relative luxury when I was a student.
While I understand that salaries in the US are less explicitly defined in relation to your level of education, that I guess a larger % of student loans are entirely necessary because they pay for tuition and that consequently the points I'm making for Norway aren't equally valid for the US, is there really no relationship between a) frugality and student loans and b) future pay and student loans?
If there is no such relationship, that literally nobody foregoes getting student loans because they don't want to incur the debt, and that nobody gets more student loans because they expect to earn a higher future salary because of it, then sure. Just erase all the debt, clearly it was incurred for everyone across the board regardless of choices they made and without granting any benefit. But if not getting student loans was a legitimate option for some people who got student loans and if some people get more student loans because that will enable them to get higher pay in the future, blanket student loan forgiveness strikes me as a rather poor method of redistribution.
Targeted student loan forgiveness (percentages of certain types of loans) or interest exemption is a different beast altogether, I can easily get behind both of those. Part of the issue here is that you are comparing 2 incredibly different countries with wildly different systems. As an example, 40% of people with student loans don't actually have a degree to show for it. Lots of people have lifelong debt without any benefit whatsoever. You have cited interest rates of Norway's loan system before. Imagine if it was (on average) 6% instead of that. There are a variety of other factors too, but those are some of the major ones. The discussion is not what would happen in Norway. The situations are wildly different and the societies the systems are a part of are also very different. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but someone without a degree in Norway has a lower chance of filing for bankruptcy from medical debt than someone in the US. I've never heard of a Norwegian person filing for bankruptcy from medical debt, that's not really a concept we have. Anyway, I agree that the countries and systems are very different and can't be directly compared, which is why I'm asking about stuff like 'to what degree does the size of your student loan influence your future pay' (because in Norway they're definitely related). Again, if they're not related, and if higher priced college/university is basically a scam, that's a more convincing argument in favor of blanket student loan forgiveness. But if people with $80k loans make 50% more than people with $20k loans, then erasing the entire debt for both those groups of people will be way more beneficial towards people who make more money. If people with $30k loans make more than people with 0 loan because they figured they couldn't afford college, then erasing the entire debt again favors the wealthier group. There are some careers where you of course make more money (STEM, Finance, Law, all the fields you associate with high pay) but it is not a generalized thing. Teachers generally have very poor pay in the US. And the reason I brought up 40% of people with debt not even having a degree was to show that even if we ignore the poor financial performance of a wide range of degrees, 40% of people with student debt don't even have a degree. They didn't finish.
Why should not finishing mean you don't have to pay, though? I assume it's not that 40% were arbitrarily kicked out or failed for reasons entirely outside their own control.Again, some of the sums seem exorbitant, the interest rate strikes me as absurd, education should be free or close to free, and I think the US is in dire need of serious redistribution of resources. BUT, I'm still seeing people making the decision to get expensive education and I think I'm seeing that in quite some cases, the more expensive education results in higher paying jobs. None of this is convincing me that non-targeted student debt relief is a particularly good method to achieve the redistribution of wealth that I acknowledge is important. I'm not saying "so they shouldn't have to pay". I am pointing out why the situation is very bad right now and a lot of people are suffering under debt they have no hope of ever paying off. Assigning guilt to matters of financial policy doesn't usually make sense. It is ethical to pay for addicts to get off of drugs, despite the long number of mistakes they have made in life. This is because not only is it good to help people, but society also benefits from having a contributing member of society who stops harming society. Asking ourselves if someone suffering "deserves" to be saved is not always the right approach. In a general sense, I would say the financial sector has been allowed (through capitalism) to exploit the working class to an extent that the ship is beginning to sink. 6% interest student loans are an example of this exploitation. The US government should not feel ethical collecting 6% interest on student loans. The entire loan system in the US is designed to exploit. The US government participating in this is criminal. The US government has guilt to atone for. This is a situation largely created by them. If your aim here is to reduce suffering, why not focus on where the amount of money involved here can reduce the most suffering with an Executive Order, rather than this blind focus on student loans? What if, instead of forgiving all student loans, he were to forgive (or rather have the government buy up debts) all debt for people earning below the median wage in the county (so yeah, in San Francisco that would be higher than in rural Oklahoma). Wouldn't that reduce considerably more suffering than blanket student debt forgiveness? And if Trump can appropriate FEMA/military funds to build a wall, I'm sure there's some flimsy excuse Biden can use to appropriate Department of Education funds to pay off credit card debt. And if the lump some of debt we're talking about here is greater than the lump some of student loans, then we can lower the threshold: all debt for the lowest N percentile earners by county, with N such that the total amount is equal to the total amount of student debt you want forgiven.
This is a false dichotomy. Biden can do both of these through executive order. I support both. I think one of the big thing people are missing here is the idea that he doesn't have $1 in his pocket and has to decide where to spend it. A lot of the skepticism I am seeing seems somehow grounded in the idea that whatever Biden does will take 3 years, so he has to choose extremely carefully which thing he spends 3 years of paperwork on. This is not the case. Student debt could be cancelled by the end of this week if he decided to. And then he moves on to other things. There is no bandwidth consideration here.
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On January 20 2022 00:37 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2022 23:47 Acrofales wrote:On January 19 2022 23:23 LegalLord wrote:On January 19 2022 16:54 WombaT wrote:
I still, having only skimmed this and other articles am a tad confused as to how this is effecting aircraft, given 5G’s range. I’m assuming radar data is relayed from ground stations to aircraft and its those being fucked with? Basically, aircraft use radar to measure their altitude by sending and receiving radio waves over a certain frequency. Turns out that for some airplanes, that frequency is close enough to the frequency of 5G that the altimeter thinks that a stray 5G signal is actually a sign that their altitude is lower than expected or that there's an obstacle around or something. Significantly annoying under the best conditions, downright dangerous in any reduced visibility scenarios. More generally, a lot of groups that use radio have basically been asked to step aside and yield their frequency range for the glory of 5G. Satellites are one example; the US government had a lot of comsats have to replace their old satellites so that 5G could broadcast over the same range (an effort worth over $10 billion; government-subsidized and highly controversial a few years ago). Apparently the global stock of radio altimeters within striking distance of 5G frequencies are also on that list. This raises at least two big questions. One, why wasn't this already known and accounted for in 5G deployment. And two, is this 5G deployment really worth telling everyone else that they have to change their technology so that 5G can use their frequency range? The latter question may be a good spot to consider if "capitalism run amok" is accurate. Doesn't sound like anything to do with capitalism at all really. In fact, frequency range regulation looks like a very typical example of somewhere the free market doesn't apply at all, unless the government chooses to treat it as a commodity they own and can sell usage of by auctioning off ranges to whoever is willing to pay the most for them for a period of time. If 5G operators want to buy a frequency range from aircraft operators and comsats, then that should be compensated by 5G operators, as capitalism would work. 5G operators could then factor that cost into their equation on whether or not the frequency range was worth the money. That doesn't sound like what happened at all. Rather whatever agency in charge of regulating frequency bands fucked up and sold a range to 5G operators that it had already conceded use to for aircrafts and comsats. Given that it is a US government fuckup, that means it's a US government problem to solve... apparently costing 10 billion dollars. It's a fuckup, but doesn´t sound like a problem of capitalism. And in any case, it isnt free market capitalism. Without any government regulation nobody would police radio usage at all, and airlines would keep flying, without even knowing telecom companies were using a frequency range that fucked with their altimeters. Planes would crash into the ground, and the free market would subsequently decide with their money whether that problem should be solved by airlines or telecom companies. Bending government regulations to the whims of profit motives and playing various games of government rent-seeking is pretty classic capitalist behavior. Both the satellite question (how much money is moving spectrum worth; who should get the profits from selling the old question) and the airplane question (falling through the cracks in a "whoops, didn't catch this major problem" scenario), all in the pursuit of "we have to do this for the glory of 5G leadership" are pretty classic situations that happen under a realistic capitalistic scenario. Sure, it's not quite what happens on a graph of two widgets in a grade school textbook, but neither is anything else that happens in the real world. Granted, "capitalism run amok" isn't my words, it's Mohdoo's. I'm not sure I agree with that per se; I just think it's a straight bad idea. But playing rent seeking and regulatory capture as "not real capitalism" seems disingenuous. It's absolutely a government & regulator problem to solve, but a capitalism problem to have generated in the first place.
Let me rephrase then: do you think the problem of two different sectors being granted usage of the same resource by government is something that wouldn't occur in a non-capitalist country, or alternatively, the cost of rectifying the problem would not be covered by government? Seems to me it's primarily a problem of government incompetence, regardless of whether lobbying and rent-seeking are "capitalist behaviour".
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On January 20 2022 01:59 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2022 16:42 Acrofales wrote:On January 19 2022 05:35 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 05:13 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:56 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 04:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:26 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 02:46 Liquid`Drone wrote:
My university in Norway was mostly free ($50 per semester tuition fee, couple hundred $ per semester for books), 40% of my student loans were turned into scholarships (happens automatically when you pass your subjects), but I still accumulated more than $35k in student loans. (I still needed a place to stay, food to eat, and beer to drink.) Today, as a teacher, because I have a master's degree and three subjects I can teach, my salary is significantly higher than the salary of other teachers who spent fewer years in university. (Something like 30% higher than someone with 4 instead of 7 years of education.) Among people with the same profession, there's a fairly direct correlation between people with more student loans and higher salaries.
If Norwegian student loans were erased tomorrow, it would to a greater degree benefit myself and others with longer education and higher pay, and it would hardly benefit poor people at all. Furthermore, I could have gotten by with less student loans. However, that would have meant I'd either have to work more or party less or eat less tasty food or engage less in relative luxury when I was a student.
While I understand that salaries in the US are less explicitly defined in relation to your level of education, that I guess a larger % of student loans are entirely necessary because they pay for tuition and that consequently the points I'm making for Norway aren't equally valid for the US, is there really no relationship between a) frugality and student loans and b) future pay and student loans?
If there is no such relationship, that literally nobody foregoes getting student loans because they don't want to incur the debt, and that nobody gets more student loans because they expect to earn a higher future salary because of it, then sure. Just erase all the debt, clearly it was incurred for everyone across the board regardless of choices they made and without granting any benefit. But if not getting student loans was a legitimate option for some people who got student loans and if some people get more student loans because that will enable them to get higher pay in the future, blanket student loan forgiveness strikes me as a rather poor method of redistribution.
Targeted student loan forgiveness (percentages of certain types of loans) or interest exemption is a different beast altogether, I can easily get behind both of those. Part of the issue here is that you are comparing 2 incredibly different countries with wildly different systems. As an example, 40% of people with student loans don't actually have a degree to show for it. Lots of people have lifelong debt without any benefit whatsoever. You have cited interest rates of Norway's loan system before. Imagine if it was (on average) 6% instead of that. There are a variety of other factors too, but those are some of the major ones. The discussion is not what would happen in Norway. The situations are wildly different and the societies the systems are a part of are also very different. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but someone without a degree in Norway has a lower chance of filing for bankruptcy from medical debt than someone in the US. I've never heard of a Norwegian person filing for bankruptcy from medical debt, that's not really a concept we have. Anyway, I agree that the countries and systems are very different and can't be directly compared, which is why I'm asking about stuff like 'to what degree does the size of your student loan influence your future pay' (because in Norway they're definitely related). Again, if they're not related, and if higher priced college/university is basically a scam, that's a more convincing argument in favor of blanket student loan forgiveness. But if people with $80k loans make 50% more than people with $20k loans, then erasing the entire debt for both those groups of people will be way more beneficial towards people who make more money. If people with $30k loans make more than people with 0 loan because they figured they couldn't afford college, then erasing the entire debt again favors the wealthier group. There are some careers where you of course make more money (STEM, Finance, Law, all the fields you associate with high pay) but it is not a generalized thing. Teachers generally have very poor pay in the US. And the reason I brought up 40% of people with debt not even having a degree was to show that even if we ignore the poor financial performance of a wide range of degrees, 40% of people with student debt don't even have a degree. They didn't finish.
Why should not finishing mean you don't have to pay, though? I assume it's not that 40% were arbitrarily kicked out or failed for reasons entirely outside their own control.Again, some of the sums seem exorbitant, the interest rate strikes me as absurd, education should be free or close to free, and I think the US is in dire need of serious redistribution of resources. BUT, I'm still seeing people making the decision to get expensive education and I think I'm seeing that in quite some cases, the more expensive education results in higher paying jobs. None of this is convincing me that non-targeted student debt relief is a particularly good method to achieve the redistribution of wealth that I acknowledge is important. I'm not saying "so they shouldn't have to pay". I am pointing out why the situation is very bad right now and a lot of people are suffering under debt they have no hope of ever paying off. Assigning guilt to matters of financial policy doesn't usually make sense. It is ethical to pay for addicts to get off of drugs, despite the long number of mistakes they have made in life. This is because not only is it good to help people, but society also benefits from having a contributing member of society who stops harming society. Asking ourselves if someone suffering "deserves" to be saved is not always the right approach. In a general sense, I would say the financial sector has been allowed (through capitalism) to exploit the working class to an extent that the ship is beginning to sink. 6% interest student loans are an example of this exploitation. The US government should not feel ethical collecting 6% interest on student loans. The entire loan system in the US is designed to exploit. The US government participating in this is criminal. The US government has guilt to atone for. This is a situation largely created by them. If your aim here is to reduce suffering, why not focus on where the amount of money involved here can reduce the most suffering with an Executive Order, rather than this blind focus on student loans? What if, instead of forgiving all student loans, he were to forgive (or rather have the government buy up debts) all debt for people earning below the median wage in the county (so yeah, in San Francisco that would be higher than in rural Oklahoma). Wouldn't that reduce considerably more suffering than blanket student debt forgiveness? And if Trump can appropriate FEMA/military funds to build a wall, I'm sure there's some flimsy excuse Biden can use to appropriate Department of Education funds to pay off credit card debt. And if the lump some of debt we're talking about here is greater than the lump some of student loans, then we can lower the threshold: all debt for the lowest N percentile earners by county, with N such that the total amount is equal to the total amount of student debt you want forgiven. This is a false dichotomy. Biden can do both of these through executive order. I support both. I think one of the big thing people are missing here is the idea that he doesn't have $1 in his pocket and has to decide where to spend it. A lot of the skepticism I am seeing seems somehow grounded in the idea that whatever Biden does will take 3 years, so he has to choose extremely carefully which thing he spends 3 years of paperwork on. This is not the case. Student debt could be cancelled by the end of this week if he decided to. And then he moves on to other things. There is no bandwidth consideration here.
I guess if the US government is not bound by such mundane problems as only having finite resources to spend, and the only thing stopping the US government from spending its infinite resources is Congress then by all means, do both. Hell, do everything!
But in the real world, either action comes accompanied with debt to be paid by (future) tax payers... and if your aim is to reduce suffering now, that has to be traded off against the future suffering that debt will cause to future tax payers.
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Tax the billionaires, I think they could use a bit of future suffering tbh. Present suffering too, they've been all too lacking in the suffering department for too long now.
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On January 20 2022 02:06 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2022 01:59 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 16:42 Acrofales wrote:On January 19 2022 05:35 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 05:13 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:56 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 04:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:26 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 02:46 Liquid`Drone wrote:
My university in Norway was mostly free ($50 per semester tuition fee, couple hundred $ per semester for books), 40% of my student loans were turned into scholarships (happens automatically when you pass your subjects), but I still accumulated more than $35k in student loans. (I still needed a place to stay, food to eat, and beer to drink.) Today, as a teacher, because I have a master's degree and three subjects I can teach, my salary is significantly higher than the salary of other teachers who spent fewer years in university. (Something like 30% higher than someone with 4 instead of 7 years of education.) Among people with the same profession, there's a fairly direct correlation between people with more student loans and higher salaries.
If Norwegian student loans were erased tomorrow, it would to a greater degree benefit myself and others with longer education and higher pay, and it would hardly benefit poor people at all. Furthermore, I could have gotten by with less student loans. However, that would have meant I'd either have to work more or party less or eat less tasty food or engage less in relative luxury when I was a student.
While I understand that salaries in the US are less explicitly defined in relation to your level of education, that I guess a larger % of student loans are entirely necessary because they pay for tuition and that consequently the points I'm making for Norway aren't equally valid for the US, is there really no relationship between a) frugality and student loans and b) future pay and student loans?
If there is no such relationship, that literally nobody foregoes getting student loans because they don't want to incur the debt, and that nobody gets more student loans because they expect to earn a higher future salary because of it, then sure. Just erase all the debt, clearly it was incurred for everyone across the board regardless of choices they made and without granting any benefit. But if not getting student loans was a legitimate option for some people who got student loans and if some people get more student loans because that will enable them to get higher pay in the future, blanket student loan forgiveness strikes me as a rather poor method of redistribution.
Targeted student loan forgiveness (percentages of certain types of loans) or interest exemption is a different beast altogether, I can easily get behind both of those. Part of the issue here is that you are comparing 2 incredibly different countries with wildly different systems. As an example, 40% of people with student loans don't actually have a degree to show for it. Lots of people have lifelong debt without any benefit whatsoever. You have cited interest rates of Norway's loan system before. Imagine if it was (on average) 6% instead of that. There are a variety of other factors too, but those are some of the major ones. The discussion is not what would happen in Norway. The situations are wildly different and the societies the systems are a part of are also very different. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but someone without a degree in Norway has a lower chance of filing for bankruptcy from medical debt than someone in the US. I've never heard of a Norwegian person filing for bankruptcy from medical debt, that's not really a concept we have. Anyway, I agree that the countries and systems are very different and can't be directly compared, which is why I'm asking about stuff like 'to what degree does the size of your student loan influence your future pay' (because in Norway they're definitely related). Again, if they're not related, and if higher priced college/university is basically a scam, that's a more convincing argument in favor of blanket student loan forgiveness. But if people with $80k loans make 50% more than people with $20k loans, then erasing the entire debt for both those groups of people will be way more beneficial towards people who make more money. If people with $30k loans make more than people with 0 loan because they figured they couldn't afford college, then erasing the entire debt again favors the wealthier group. There are some careers where you of course make more money (STEM, Finance, Law, all the fields you associate with high pay) but it is not a generalized thing. Teachers generally have very poor pay in the US. And the reason I brought up 40% of people with debt not even having a degree was to show that even if we ignore the poor financial performance of a wide range of degrees, 40% of people with student debt don't even have a degree. They didn't finish.
Why should not finishing mean you don't have to pay, though? I assume it's not that 40% were arbitrarily kicked out or failed for reasons entirely outside their own control.Again, some of the sums seem exorbitant, the interest rate strikes me as absurd, education should be free or close to free, and I think the US is in dire need of serious redistribution of resources. BUT, I'm still seeing people making the decision to get expensive education and I think I'm seeing that in quite some cases, the more expensive education results in higher paying jobs. None of this is convincing me that non-targeted student debt relief is a particularly good method to achieve the redistribution of wealth that I acknowledge is important. I'm not saying "so they shouldn't have to pay". I am pointing out why the situation is very bad right now and a lot of people are suffering under debt they have no hope of ever paying off. Assigning guilt to matters of financial policy doesn't usually make sense. It is ethical to pay for addicts to get off of drugs, despite the long number of mistakes they have made in life. This is because not only is it good to help people, but society also benefits from having a contributing member of society who stops harming society. Asking ourselves if someone suffering "deserves" to be saved is not always the right approach. In a general sense, I would say the financial sector has been allowed (through capitalism) to exploit the working class to an extent that the ship is beginning to sink. 6% interest student loans are an example of this exploitation. The US government should not feel ethical collecting 6% interest on student loans. The entire loan system in the US is designed to exploit. The US government participating in this is criminal. The US government has guilt to atone for. This is a situation largely created by them. If your aim here is to reduce suffering, why not focus on where the amount of money involved here can reduce the most suffering with an Executive Order, rather than this blind focus on student loans? What if, instead of forgiving all student loans, he were to forgive (or rather have the government buy up debts) all debt for people earning below the median wage in the county (so yeah, in San Francisco that would be higher than in rural Oklahoma). Wouldn't that reduce considerably more suffering than blanket student debt forgiveness? And if Trump can appropriate FEMA/military funds to build a wall, I'm sure there's some flimsy excuse Biden can use to appropriate Department of Education funds to pay off credit card debt. And if the lump some of debt we're talking about here is greater than the lump some of student loans, then we can lower the threshold: all debt for the lowest N percentile earners by county, with N such that the total amount is equal to the total amount of student debt you want forgiven. This is a false dichotomy. Biden can do both of these through executive order. I support both. I think one of the big thing people are missing here is the idea that he doesn't have $1 in his pocket and has to decide where to spend it. A lot of the skepticism I am seeing seems somehow grounded in the idea that whatever Biden does will take 3 years, so he has to choose extremely carefully which thing he spends 3 years of paperwork on. This is not the case. Student debt could be cancelled by the end of this week if he decided to. And then he moves on to other things. There is no bandwidth consideration here. I guess if the US government is not bound by such mundane problems as only having finite resources to spend, and the only thing stopping the US government from spending its infinite resources is Congress then by all means, do both. Hell, do everything!But in the real world, either action comes accompanied with debt to be paid by (future) tax payers... and if your aim is to reduce suffering now, that has to be traded off against the future suffering that debt will cause to future tax payers.
Debt owed to whom?
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On January 20 2022 02:06 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2022 01:59 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 16:42 Acrofales wrote:On January 19 2022 05:35 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 05:13 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:56 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 04:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:26 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 02:46 Liquid`Drone wrote:
My university in Norway was mostly free ($50 per semester tuition fee, couple hundred $ per semester for books), 40% of my student loans were turned into scholarships (happens automatically when you pass your subjects), but I still accumulated more than $35k in student loans. (I still needed a place to stay, food to eat, and beer to drink.) Today, as a teacher, because I have a master's degree and three subjects I can teach, my salary is significantly higher than the salary of other teachers who spent fewer years in university. (Something like 30% higher than someone with 4 instead of 7 years of education.) Among people with the same profession, there's a fairly direct correlation between people with more student loans and higher salaries.
If Norwegian student loans were erased tomorrow, it would to a greater degree benefit myself and others with longer education and higher pay, and it would hardly benefit poor people at all. Furthermore, I could have gotten by with less student loans. However, that would have meant I'd either have to work more or party less or eat less tasty food or engage less in relative luxury when I was a student.
While I understand that salaries in the US are less explicitly defined in relation to your level of education, that I guess a larger % of student loans are entirely necessary because they pay for tuition and that consequently the points I'm making for Norway aren't equally valid for the US, is there really no relationship between a) frugality and student loans and b) future pay and student loans?
If there is no such relationship, that literally nobody foregoes getting student loans because they don't want to incur the debt, and that nobody gets more student loans because they expect to earn a higher future salary because of it, then sure. Just erase all the debt, clearly it was incurred for everyone across the board regardless of choices they made and without granting any benefit. But if not getting student loans was a legitimate option for some people who got student loans and if some people get more student loans because that will enable them to get higher pay in the future, blanket student loan forgiveness strikes me as a rather poor method of redistribution.
Targeted student loan forgiveness (percentages of certain types of loans) or interest exemption is a different beast altogether, I can easily get behind both of those. Part of the issue here is that you are comparing 2 incredibly different countries with wildly different systems. As an example, 40% of people with student loans don't actually have a degree to show for it. Lots of people have lifelong debt without any benefit whatsoever. You have cited interest rates of Norway's loan system before. Imagine if it was (on average) 6% instead of that. There are a variety of other factors too, but those are some of the major ones. The discussion is not what would happen in Norway. The situations are wildly different and the societies the systems are a part of are also very different. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but someone without a degree in Norway has a lower chance of filing for bankruptcy from medical debt than someone in the US. I've never heard of a Norwegian person filing for bankruptcy from medical debt, that's not really a concept we have. Anyway, I agree that the countries and systems are very different and can't be directly compared, which is why I'm asking about stuff like 'to what degree does the size of your student loan influence your future pay' (because in Norway they're definitely related). Again, if they're not related, and if higher priced college/university is basically a scam, that's a more convincing argument in favor of blanket student loan forgiveness. But if people with $80k loans make 50% more than people with $20k loans, then erasing the entire debt for both those groups of people will be way more beneficial towards people who make more money. If people with $30k loans make more than people with 0 loan because they figured they couldn't afford college, then erasing the entire debt again favors the wealthier group. There are some careers where you of course make more money (STEM, Finance, Law, all the fields you associate with high pay) but it is not a generalized thing. Teachers generally have very poor pay in the US. And the reason I brought up 40% of people with debt not even having a degree was to show that even if we ignore the poor financial performance of a wide range of degrees, 40% of people with student debt don't even have a degree. They didn't finish.
Why should not finishing mean you don't have to pay, though? I assume it's not that 40% were arbitrarily kicked out or failed for reasons entirely outside their own control.Again, some of the sums seem exorbitant, the interest rate strikes me as absurd, education should be free or close to free, and I think the US is in dire need of serious redistribution of resources. BUT, I'm still seeing people making the decision to get expensive education and I think I'm seeing that in quite some cases, the more expensive education results in higher paying jobs. None of this is convincing me that non-targeted student debt relief is a particularly good method to achieve the redistribution of wealth that I acknowledge is important. I'm not saying "so they shouldn't have to pay". I am pointing out why the situation is very bad right now and a lot of people are suffering under debt they have no hope of ever paying off. Assigning guilt to matters of financial policy doesn't usually make sense. It is ethical to pay for addicts to get off of drugs, despite the long number of mistakes they have made in life. This is because not only is it good to help people, but society also benefits from having a contributing member of society who stops harming society. Asking ourselves if someone suffering "deserves" to be saved is not always the right approach. In a general sense, I would say the financial sector has been allowed (through capitalism) to exploit the working class to an extent that the ship is beginning to sink. 6% interest student loans are an example of this exploitation. The US government should not feel ethical collecting 6% interest on student loans. The entire loan system in the US is designed to exploit. The US government participating in this is criminal. The US government has guilt to atone for. This is a situation largely created by them. If your aim here is to reduce suffering, why not focus on where the amount of money involved here can reduce the most suffering with an Executive Order, rather than this blind focus on student loans? What if, instead of forgiving all student loans, he were to forgive (or rather have the government buy up debts) all debt for people earning below the median wage in the county (so yeah, in San Francisco that would be higher than in rural Oklahoma). Wouldn't that reduce considerably more suffering than blanket student debt forgiveness? And if Trump can appropriate FEMA/military funds to build a wall, I'm sure there's some flimsy excuse Biden can use to appropriate Department of Education funds to pay off credit card debt. And if the lump some of debt we're talking about here is greater than the lump some of student loans, then we can lower the threshold: all debt for the lowest N percentile earners by county, with N such that the total amount is equal to the total amount of student debt you want forgiven. This is a false dichotomy. Biden can do both of these through executive order. I support both. I think one of the big thing people are missing here is the idea that he doesn't have $1 in his pocket and has to decide where to spend it. A lot of the skepticism I am seeing seems somehow grounded in the idea that whatever Biden does will take 3 years, so he has to choose extremely carefully which thing he spends 3 years of paperwork on. This is not the case. Student debt could be cancelled by the end of this week if he decided to. And then he moves on to other things. There is no bandwidth consideration here. I guess if the US government is not bound by such mundane problems as only having finite resources to spend, and the only thing stopping the US government from spending its infinite resources is Congress then by all means, do both. Hell, do everything!But in the real world, either action comes accompanied with debt to be paid by (future) tax payers... and if your aim is to reduce suffering now, that has to be traded off against the future suffering that debt will cause to future tax payers.
You are applying consumer checkbook logic to financial dynamics of a world power government. They are not the same. The last 50 years show they are not the same. We have no incentive to apply the kind of logic you are putting forth to the US government.
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Aren't we a bit naive to think forgiving all student loans will have zero impact on the financial market? I am pretty sure release several million americans from crippling debt is a good thing for the local and maybe even the global economy, but there are also concerns about the biggest economy in the world suddenly not getting back money they are owed. The financial market is build on stability and i doubt the markets would just not fall into a death spiral when something as drastic as this is done. I mean, it's possible the shockwaves of actually removing the profit aspect from education might be higher, but who knows exactly what will happen if 2 trillion of debt is simply waived away with one executive order.
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On January 20 2022 03:38 Broetchenholer wrote:
Aren't we a bit naive to think forgiving all student loans will have zero impact on the financial market? I am pretty sure release several million americans from crippling debt is a good thing for the local and maybe even the global economy, but there are also concerns about the biggest economy in the world suddenly not getting back money they are owed. The financial market is build on stability and i doubt the markets would just not fall into a death spiral when something as drastic as this is done. I mean, it's possible the shockwaves of actually removing the profit aspect from education might be higher, but who knows exactly what will happen if 2 trillion of debt is simply waived away with one executive order.
The goal of large changes is never to play a perfect game. "zero impact" is a ridiculous metric to meet. In any large corporation or organization, big decisions are made every day where there are always pros and cons. Anyone in this thread who manages big number budgets or works in "big deal" roles is well familiar with the idea that almost every decision we make has a list of pros and cons. I am honestly perplexed by the bizarre requirements people like Drone are putting forth. It is possible some people's careers don't force them into positions where decisions need to be made quickly, with giant repercussions, with limited information, with multiple choices possible, each with their own disadvantages. The world simply doesn't work in this idealistic way you are striving for. We are not going to solve the student debt crisis in some kinda Disney Princess Movie way. There is no such thing. Obamacare had a long list of negatives despite being an overall net positive.
When making big deal decisions, it is important to recognize what damage/problems are CURRENTLY in effect and to recognize that there is a benefit to those problems going away. Shying away from a solution because it is imperfect rarely makes sense. In general, a problem does not boil over to gain people's attention without having some pretty bad qualities.
If we were playing a game of heroes of might and magic 3, yes, I would say we should make sure to plan each move diligently and make sure we operate with nothing but breakneck efficiency. It would be appropriate to just save the game, take some time off, think about it for a bit, then pick it back up tomorrow. But since this is an actual real-world situation with measurable, very negative impacts on society yesterday, today and tomorrow, it does not make sense to tell ourselves to wait until we have solved the issue in its most complete, efficient form. That is not how any important decision is ever made in any large-scale complex. It is fictitious.
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On January 20 2022 02:26 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2022 02:06 Acrofales wrote:On January 20 2022 01:59 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 16:42 Acrofales wrote:On January 19 2022 05:35 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 05:13 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:56 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 04:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:26 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 02:46 Liquid`Drone wrote:
My university in Norway was mostly free ($50 per semester tuition fee, couple hundred $ per semester for books), 40% of my student loans were turned into scholarships (happens automatically when you pass your subjects), but I still accumulated more than $35k in student loans. (I still needed a place to stay, food to eat, and beer to drink.) Today, as a teacher, because I have a master's degree and three subjects I can teach, my salary is significantly higher than the salary of other teachers who spent fewer years in university. (Something like 30% higher than someone with 4 instead of 7 years of education.) Among people with the same profession, there's a fairly direct correlation between people with more student loans and higher salaries.
If Norwegian student loans were erased tomorrow, it would to a greater degree benefit myself and others with longer education and higher pay, and it would hardly benefit poor people at all. Furthermore, I could have gotten by with less student loans. However, that would have meant I'd either have to work more or party less or eat less tasty food or engage less in relative luxury when I was a student.
While I understand that salaries in the US are less explicitly defined in relation to your level of education, that I guess a larger % of student loans are entirely necessary because they pay for tuition and that consequently the points I'm making for Norway aren't equally valid for the US, is there really no relationship between a) frugality and student loans and b) future pay and student loans?
If there is no such relationship, that literally nobody foregoes getting student loans because they don't want to incur the debt, and that nobody gets more student loans because they expect to earn a higher future salary because of it, then sure. Just erase all the debt, clearly it was incurred for everyone across the board regardless of choices they made and without granting any benefit. But if not getting student loans was a legitimate option for some people who got student loans and if some people get more student loans because that will enable them to get higher pay in the future, blanket student loan forgiveness strikes me as a rather poor method of redistribution.
Targeted student loan forgiveness (percentages of certain types of loans) or interest exemption is a different beast altogether, I can easily get behind both of those. Part of the issue here is that you are comparing 2 incredibly different countries with wildly different systems. As an example, 40% of people with student loans don't actually have a degree to show for it. Lots of people have lifelong debt without any benefit whatsoever. You have cited interest rates of Norway's loan system before. Imagine if it was (on average) 6% instead of that. There are a variety of other factors too, but those are some of the major ones. The discussion is not what would happen in Norway. The situations are wildly different and the societies the systems are a part of are also very different. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but someone without a degree in Norway has a lower chance of filing for bankruptcy from medical debt than someone in the US. I've never heard of a Norwegian person filing for bankruptcy from medical debt, that's not really a concept we have. Anyway, I agree that the countries and systems are very different and can't be directly compared, which is why I'm asking about stuff like 'to what degree does the size of your student loan influence your future pay' (because in Norway they're definitely related). Again, if they're not related, and if higher priced college/university is basically a scam, that's a more convincing argument in favor of blanket student loan forgiveness. But if people with $80k loans make 50% more than people with $20k loans, then erasing the entire debt for both those groups of people will be way more beneficial towards people who make more money. If people with $30k loans make more than people with 0 loan because they figured they couldn't afford college, then erasing the entire debt again favors the wealthier group. There are some careers where you of course make more money (STEM, Finance, Law, all the fields you associate with high pay) but it is not a generalized thing. Teachers generally have very poor pay in the US. And the reason I brought up 40% of people with debt not even having a degree was to show that even if we ignore the poor financial performance of a wide range of degrees, 40% of people with student debt don't even have a degree. They didn't finish.
Why should not finishing mean you don't have to pay, though? I assume it's not that 40% were arbitrarily kicked out or failed for reasons entirely outside their own control.Again, some of the sums seem exorbitant, the interest rate strikes me as absurd, education should be free or close to free, and I think the US is in dire need of serious redistribution of resources. BUT, I'm still seeing people making the decision to get expensive education and I think I'm seeing that in quite some cases, the more expensive education results in higher paying jobs. None of this is convincing me that non-targeted student debt relief is a particularly good method to achieve the redistribution of wealth that I acknowledge is important. I'm not saying "so they shouldn't have to pay". I am pointing out why the situation is very bad right now and a lot of people are suffering under debt they have no hope of ever paying off. Assigning guilt to matters of financial policy doesn't usually make sense. It is ethical to pay for addicts to get off of drugs, despite the long number of mistakes they have made in life. This is because not only is it good to help people, but society also benefits from having a contributing member of society who stops harming society. Asking ourselves if someone suffering "deserves" to be saved is not always the right approach. In a general sense, I would say the financial sector has been allowed (through capitalism) to exploit the working class to an extent that the ship is beginning to sink. 6% interest student loans are an example of this exploitation. The US government should not feel ethical collecting 6% interest on student loans. The entire loan system in the US is designed to exploit. The US government participating in this is criminal. The US government has guilt to atone for. This is a situation largely created by them. If your aim here is to reduce suffering, why not focus on where the amount of money involved here can reduce the most suffering with an Executive Order, rather than this blind focus on student loans? What if, instead of forgiving all student loans, he were to forgive (or rather have the government buy up debts) all debt for people earning below the median wage in the county (so yeah, in San Francisco that would be higher than in rural Oklahoma). Wouldn't that reduce considerably more suffering than blanket student debt forgiveness? And if Trump can appropriate FEMA/military funds to build a wall, I'm sure there's some flimsy excuse Biden can use to appropriate Department of Education funds to pay off credit card debt. And if the lump some of debt we're talking about here is greater than the lump some of student loans, then we can lower the threshold: all debt for the lowest N percentile earners by county, with N such that the total amount is equal to the total amount of student debt you want forgiven. This is a false dichotomy. Biden can do both of these through executive order. I support both. I think one of the big thing people are missing here is the idea that he doesn't have $1 in his pocket and has to decide where to spend it. A lot of the skepticism I am seeing seems somehow grounded in the idea that whatever Biden does will take 3 years, so he has to choose extremely carefully which thing he spends 3 years of paperwork on. This is not the case. Student debt could be cancelled by the end of this week if he decided to. And then he moves on to other things. There is no bandwidth consideration here. I guess if the US government is not bound by such mundane problems as only having finite resources to spend, and the only thing stopping the US government from spending its infinite resources is Congress then by all means, do both. Hell, do everything!But in the real world, either action comes accompanied with debt to be paid by (future) tax payers... and if your aim is to reduce suffering now, that has to be traded off against the future suffering that debt will cause to future tax payers. Debt owed to whom?
Obviously to the future US government. I know the money printer has been going brrrrrrr pretty much without a limit for a while now, but let's not act as if that bubble isn't going to collapse at some point. Presumably a decent part of the Department of Education's budget is currently balancing because a large sum of money is owed to them by (former) students. You cancel that gap, you still have to balance the budget. Probably by just creating some more out of nowhere. I guess if you believe the US dollar is already doomed because of the brrrrr, and that will cause a giant reset in the whole world economy and/or WW3, then the US government might as well live now like there's no tomorrow, but if you assume all current debt will have to be paid by future citizens then you can't just cancel all debt without making it so future people have to pay for it somehow.
I guess the brrrrrr economy has gone to everyone's heads.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On January 20 2022 02:03 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2022 00:37 LegalLord wrote:On January 19 2022 23:47 Acrofales wrote:On January 19 2022 23:23 LegalLord wrote:On January 19 2022 16:54 WombaT wrote:
I still, having only skimmed this and other articles am a tad confused as to how this is effecting aircraft, given 5G’s range. I’m assuming radar data is relayed from ground stations to aircraft and its those being fucked with? Basically, aircraft use radar to measure their altitude by sending and receiving radio waves over a certain frequency. Turns out that for some airplanes, that frequency is close enough to the frequency of 5G that the altimeter thinks that a stray 5G signal is actually a sign that their altitude is lower than expected or that there's an obstacle around or something. Significantly annoying under the best conditions, downright dangerous in any reduced visibility scenarios. More generally, a lot of groups that use radio have basically been asked to step aside and yield their frequency range for the glory of 5G. Satellites are one example; the US government had a lot of comsats have to replace their old satellites so that 5G could broadcast over the same range (an effort worth over $10 billion; government-subsidized and highly controversial a few years ago). Apparently the global stock of radio altimeters within striking distance of 5G frequencies are also on that list. This raises at least two big questions. One, why wasn't this already known and accounted for in 5G deployment. And two, is this 5G deployment really worth telling everyone else that they have to change their technology so that 5G can use their frequency range? The latter question may be a good spot to consider if "capitalism run amok" is accurate. Doesn't sound like anything to do with capitalism at all really. In fact, frequency range regulation looks like a very typical example of somewhere the free market doesn't apply at all, unless the government chooses to treat it as a commodity they own and can sell usage of by auctioning off ranges to whoever is willing to pay the most for them for a period of time. If 5G operators want to buy a frequency range from aircraft operators and comsats, then that should be compensated by 5G operators, as capitalism would work. 5G operators could then factor that cost into their equation on whether or not the frequency range was worth the money. That doesn't sound like what happened at all. Rather whatever agency in charge of regulating frequency bands fucked up and sold a range to 5G operators that it had already conceded use to for aircrafts and comsats. Given that it is a US government fuckup, that means it's a US government problem to solve... apparently costing 10 billion dollars. It's a fuckup, but doesn´t sound like a problem of capitalism. And in any case, it isnt free market capitalism. Without any government regulation nobody would police radio usage at all, and airlines would keep flying, without even knowing telecom companies were using a frequency range that fucked with their altimeters. Planes would crash into the ground, and the free market would subsequently decide with their money whether that problem should be solved by airlines or telecom companies. Bending government regulations to the whims of profit motives and playing various games of government rent-seeking is pretty classic capitalist behavior. Both the satellite question (how much money is moving spectrum worth; who should get the profits from selling the old question) and the airplane question (falling through the cracks in a "whoops, didn't catch this major problem" scenario), all in the pursuit of "we have to do this for the glory of 5G leadership" are pretty classic situations that happen under a realistic capitalistic scenario. Sure, it's not quite what happens on a graph of two widgets in a grade school textbook, but neither is anything else that happens in the real world. Granted, "capitalism run amok" isn't my words, it's Mohdoo's. I'm not sure I agree with that per se; I just think it's a straight bad idea. But playing rent seeking and regulatory capture as "not real capitalism" seems disingenuous. It's absolutely a government & regulator problem to solve, but a capitalism problem to have generated in the first place. Let me rephrase then: do you think the problem of two different sectors being granted usage of the same resource by government is something that wouldn't occur in a non-capitalist country, or alternatively, the cost of rectifying the problem would not be covered by government? Seems to me it's primarily a problem of government incompetence, regardless of whether lobbying and rent-seeking are "capitalist behaviour".
Hey, "capitalism at its worst" isn't my claim; I mentioned it to offer context to why that claim came up in the first place. I mostly just take exception to trying to exonerate capital motives in this situation. My objection to the 5G problems stops merely at "it's just a bad idea and isn't worth it."
To answer your question: this is definitely a problem that is largely regulatory, and a failure of regulatory agencies to come to a proper resolution is the main issue. But for 5G in particular, if not for "capitalist behavior" it would not have happened because the driving for this specific problem is a desire for major telecom companies to make money off of deploying cell towers. The regulators messed up in managing a decidedly commercial concern. Yes, they'd have messed up all the same for some potential analogous scenario of non-capitalist telecom and air travel, but commercial motivations aren't blameless here either.
To add at least one specific example: regulatory capture is a good source for "government incompetence" as you might see here. Would be real nice if those regulators dropped some paperwork here and there to let these cell towers go up with the quickness! Or if the aviation authorities stepped aside for a while and didn't bother with commercially problematic in-depth reviews of potential impacts.
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On January 20 2022 01:29 Nick_54 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 19 2022 05:48 EnDeR_ wrote:On January 19 2022 01:06 Nick_54 wrote:On January 18 2022 21:44 EnDeR_ wrote:On January 18 2022 17:45 Nick_54 wrote:On January 18 2022 17:31 EnDeR_ wrote:On January 18 2022 17:22 Nick_54 wrote:On January 18 2022 17:04 gobbledydook wrote:
Is it fair to cancel student debt? What about those who decided to pay their fees and not incur debt? What about those who decided not to go to college because of the debt?
Is it fair that university administrators, professors, and staff make obscene salaries while 18 year old students are forced take on life changing debts at an age they don't know what they're getting into. They're fucking crooks and the main problem as far as I'm concerned along with forgiving the debt. The issue has to be corrected for generations going forward. Very sure that the majority of university administrators, professors and staff do not make obscene salaries. There are some eyewatering salaries, true, but these are exceptions, not the norm and tend to be the really senior staff. You included university staff in your list which also includes sanitation staff as well as catering staff or even campus police -- I'd be surprised if any of those are much above minimum wage. The cost of education has little to do with the salaries of the people running the place. You should do your homework. It's a bit like the poster a couple pages back that argued they could cut school budgets by 50% by cutting salaries of overpaid staff... Obviously I'm not talking about the staff making minimum wage. Campus police should be severely defunded if not eliminated entirely. I'm talking about the public servants making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Football and basketball coaches making million up millions. The cost of university needs to go down as well the debt forgiveness to not put the next generation in this spot. I've done enough homework to know that teenagers racking up 6 figure debts to pay 6 and 7 figure salaries to go along with golden parachutes for the elite isn't right. I'm not saying it would solve the cost problem entirely, but its a start. Certainly one can reduce the cost of education by removing services. I'm not going to defend the exploitation of college students for profit (which I find abhorrent -- they should be paid) but I think it is arguable that having a top-tier team brings in more value than it costs in the form of sponsorships, advertising, investments, etc. and effectively making your education actually have higher value for the cost. In other words, removing them arguably would not make your education cheaper because that's not why your education costs are so stupidly expensive. I highly disagree with the top-tier pay, even if it brings it a top-tier team having good value. Obviously if it had value there wouldn't be a bunch of broke graduates in debt right now. What? I don't understand the argument here. If a branch of the university generates money than it costs to run it, it does not necessarily mean that the gains will be spent in lowering tuition fees -- in my experience, they're far more likely to be re-invested back into other areas of the university to attract more international students that pay far more fees than home students, which itself generates more revenue for the university that then gets reinvested back into even more services/facilities to attract even more high-paying students. In a vacuum it'd be a winning strategy, but the fact that all universities compete for the same pool of students means that everything just got more expensive for everybody. The university making money and more revenue is not the problem, the students being robbed and forced into huge debt is.
If you'd like to have a discussion on this topic, you will have to make some arguments rather than simple assertions, otherwise it doesn't make much sense.
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Norway28674 Posts
On January 20 2022 03:56 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2022 03:38 Broetchenholer wrote:
Aren't we a bit naive to think forgiving all student loans will have zero impact on the financial market? I am pretty sure release several million americans from crippling debt is a good thing for the local and maybe even the global economy, but there are also concerns about the biggest economy in the world suddenly not getting back money they are owed. The financial market is build on stability and i doubt the markets would just not fall into a death spiral when something as drastic as this is done. I mean, it's possible the shockwaves of actually removing the profit aspect from education might be higher, but who knows exactly what will happen if 2 trillion of debt is simply waived away with one executive order. The goal of large changes is never to play a perfect game. "zero impact" is a ridiculous metric to meet. In any large corporation or organization, big decisions are made every day where there are always pros and cons. Anyone in this thread who manages big number budgets or works in "big deal" roles is well familiar with the idea that almost every decision we make has a list of pros and cons. I am honestly perplexed by the bizarre requirements people like Drone are putting forth. It is possible some people's careers don't force them into positions where decisions need to be made quickly, with giant repercussions, with limited information, with multiple choices possible, each with their own disadvantages. The world simply doesn't work in this idealistic way you are striving for. We are not going to solve the student debt crisis in some kinda Disney Princess Movie way. There is no such thing. Obamacare had a long list of negatives despite being an overall net positive. When making big deal decisions, it is important to recognize what damage/problems are CURRENTLY in effect and to recognize that there is a benefit to those problems going away. Shying away from a solution because it is imperfect rarely makes sense. In general, a problem does not boil over to gain people's attention without having some pretty bad qualities. If we were playing a game of heroes of might and magic 3, yes, I would say we should make sure to plan each move diligently and make sure we operate with nothing but breakneck efficiency. It would be appropriate to just save the game, take some time off, think about it for a bit, then pick it back up tomorrow. But since this is an actual real-world situation with measurable, very negative impacts on society yesterday, today and tomorrow, it does not make sense to tell ourselves to wait until we have solved the issue in its most complete, efficient form. That is not how any important decision is ever made in any large-scale complex. It is fictitious.
What bizarre requirement(s) have I put forth?
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On January 20 2022 04:08 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2022 02:26 farvacola wrote:On January 20 2022 02:06 Acrofales wrote:On January 20 2022 01:59 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 16:42 Acrofales wrote:On January 19 2022 05:35 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 05:13 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:56 Mohdoo wrote:On January 19 2022 04:52 Liquid`Drone wrote:On January 19 2022 04:26 Mohdoo wrote:
[quote]
Part of the issue here is that you are comparing 2 incredibly different countries with wildly different systems. As an example, 40% of people with student loans don't actually have a degree to show for it. Lots of people have lifelong debt without any benefit whatsoever.
You have cited interest rates of Norway's loan system before. Imagine if it was (on average) 6% instead of that. There are a variety of other factors too, but those are some of the major ones. The discussion is not what would happen in Norway. The situations are wildly different and the societies the systems are a part of are also very different.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but someone without a degree in Norway has a lower chance of filing for bankruptcy from medical debt than someone in the US. I've never heard of a Norwegian person filing for bankruptcy from medical debt, that's not really a concept we have. Anyway, I agree that the countries and systems are very different and can't be directly compared, which is why I'm asking about stuff like 'to what degree does the size of your student loan influence your future pay' (because in Norway they're definitely related). Again, if they're not related, and if higher priced college/university is basically a scam, that's a more convincing argument in favor of blanket student loan forgiveness. But if people with $80k loans make 50% more than people with $20k loans, then erasing the entire debt for both those groups of people will be way more beneficial towards people who make more money. If people with $30k loans make more than people with 0 loan because they figured they couldn't afford college, then erasing the entire debt again favors the wealthier group. There are some careers where you of course make more money (STEM, Finance, Law, all the fields you associate with high pay) but it is not a generalized thing. Teachers generally have very poor pay in the US. And the reason I brought up 40% of people with debt not even having a degree was to show that even if we ignore the poor financial performance of a wide range of degrees, 40% of people with student debt don't even have a degree. They didn't finish.
Why should not finishing mean you don't have to pay, though? I assume it's not that 40% were arbitrarily kicked out or failed for reasons entirely outside their own control.Again, some of the sums seem exorbitant, the interest rate strikes me as absurd, education should be free or close to free, and I think the US is in dire need of serious redistribution of resources. BUT, I'm still seeing people making the decision to get expensive education and I think I'm seeing that in quite some cases, the more expensive education results in higher paying jobs. None of this is convincing me that non-targeted student debt relief is a particularly good method to achieve the redistribution of wealth that I acknowledge is important. I'm not saying "so they shouldn't have to pay". I am pointing out why the situation is very bad right now and a lot of people are suffering under debt they have no hope of ever paying off. Assigning guilt to matters of financial policy doesn't usually make sense. It is ethical to pay for addicts to get off of drugs, despite the long number of mistakes they have made in life. This is because not only is it good to help people, but society also benefits from having a contributing member of society who stops harming society. Asking ourselves if someone suffering "deserves" to be saved is not always the right approach. In a general sense, I would say the financial sector has been allowed (through capitalism) to exploit the working class to an extent that the ship is beginning to sink. 6% interest student loans are an example of this exploitation. The US government should not feel ethical collecting 6% interest on student loans. The entire loan system in the US is designed to exploit. The US government participating in this is criminal. The US government has guilt to atone for. This is a situation largely created by them. If your aim here is to reduce suffering, why not focus on where the amount of money involved here can reduce the most suffering with an Executive Order, rather than this blind focus on student loans? What if, instead of forgiving all student loans, he were to forgive (or rather have the government buy up debts) all debt for people earning below the median wage in the county (so yeah, in San Francisco that would be higher than in rural Oklahoma). Wouldn't that reduce considerably more suffering than blanket student debt forgiveness? And if Trump can appropriate FEMA/military funds to build a wall, I'm sure there's some flimsy excuse Biden can use to appropriate Department of Education funds to pay off credit card debt. And if the lump some of debt we're talking about here is greater than the lump some of student loans, then we can lower the threshold: all debt for the lowest N percentile earners by county, with N such that the total amount is equal to the total amount of student debt you want forgiven. This is a false dichotomy. Biden can do both of these through executive order. I support both. I think one of the big thing people are missing here is the idea that he doesn't have $1 in his pocket and has to decide where to spend it. A lot of the skepticism I am seeing seems somehow grounded in the idea that whatever Biden does will take 3 years, so he has to choose extremely carefully which thing he spends 3 years of paperwork on. This is not the case. Student debt could be cancelled by the end of this week if he decided to. And then he moves on to other things. There is no bandwidth consideration here. I guess if the US government is not bound by such mundane problems as only having finite resources to spend, and the only thing stopping the US government from spending its infinite resources is Congress then by all means, do both. Hell, do everything!But in the real world, either action comes accompanied with debt to be paid by (future) tax payers... and if your aim is to reduce suffering now, that has to be traded off against the future suffering that debt will cause to future tax payers. Debt owed to whom? Obviously to the future US government. I know the money printer has been going brrrrrrr pretty much without a limit for a while now, but let's not act as if that bubble isn't going to collapse at some point. Presumably a decent part of the Department of Education's budget is currently balancing because a large sum of money is owed to them by (former) students. You cancel that gap, you still have to balance the budget. Probably by just creating some more out of nowhere. I guess if you believe the US dollar is already doomed because of the brrrrr, and that will cause a giant reset in the whole world economy and/or WW3, then the US government might as well live now like there's no tomorrow, but if you assume all current debt will have to be paid by future citizens then you can't just cancel all debt without making it so future people have to pay for it somehow. I guess the brrrrrr economy has gone to everyone's heads.
What does any of that have to do with "the real world"? In "the real world," the annual budget of the federal government is only somewhat associated with the national debt and the value/role of USD, which is related to why there continues to be a great deal of controversy surrounding the precise relationship between US federal government revenues and expenditures. Moreover, I don't think one needs to make any assumptions regarding bubbles and the US economy in order to support broad social spending like student debt cancellation. In fact, I don't think it's possible for the value of USD to collapse as a component of a bubble burst, certainly not without a number of other world-changing things happening first or in concert.
The point of all that is to say, as Mohdoo already has, that kitchen table economics and simple, reflexive notions of money don't exactly apply to the US federal government, not without heavy qualifiers and an acknowledgement that a lot of what goes down beneath the hood of the economy doesn't look much like "the real world" as commonly understood at all.
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On January 20 2022 04:30 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On January 20 2022 03:56 Mohdoo wrote:On January 20 2022 03:38 Broetchenholer wrote:
Aren't we a bit naive to think forgiving all student loans will have zero impact on the financial market? I am pretty sure release several million americans from crippling debt is a good thing for the local and maybe even the global economy, but there are also concerns about the biggest economy in the world suddenly not getting back money they are owed. The financial market is build on stability and i doubt the markets would just not fall into a death spiral when something as drastic as this is done. I mean, it's possible the shockwaves of actually removing the profit aspect from education might be higher, but who knows exactly what will happen if 2 trillion of debt is simply waived away with one executive order. The goal of large changes is never to play a perfect game. "zero impact" is a ridiculous metric to meet. In any large corporation or organization, big decisions are made every day where there are always pros and cons. Anyone in this thread who manages big number budgets or works in "big deal" roles is well familiar with the idea that almost every decision we make has a list of pros and cons. I am honestly perplexed by the bizarre requirements people like Drone are putting forth. It is possible some people's careers don't force them into positions where decisions need to be made quickly, with giant repercussions, with limited information, with multiple choices possible, each with their own disadvantages. The world simply doesn't work in this idealistic way you are striving for. We are not going to solve the student debt crisis in some kinda Disney Princess Movie way. There is no such thing. Obamacare had a long list of negatives despite being an overall net positive. When making big deal decisions, it is important to recognize what damage/problems are CURRENTLY in effect and to recognize that there is a benefit to those problems going away. Shying away from a solution because it is imperfect rarely makes sense. In general, a problem does not boil over to gain people's attention without having some pretty bad qualities. If we were playing a game of heroes of might and magic 3, yes, I would say we should make sure to plan each move diligently and make sure we operate with nothing but breakneck efficiency. It would be appropriate to just save the game, take some time off, think about it for a bit, then pick it back up tomorrow. But since this is an actual real-world situation with measurable, very negative impacts on society yesterday, today and tomorrow, it does not make sense to tell ourselves to wait until we have solved the issue in its most complete, efficient form. That is not how any important decision is ever made in any large-scale complex. It is fictitious. What bizarre requirement(s) have I put forth?
Perhaps it is unclear what constitutes a good enough solution to you. In general, you say that until this can be done in some mysteriously elegant way, it isn't good enough. This to me shows that you aren't grasping the idea of immediate harm and the idea that most problems of this scale do not have the kind of solution you seem to imagine.
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