On Student Debt

 Correction/update  (I hate it when that happens)

It is commendable that young people take on major debts to better themselves by obtaining a quality education, and it is noble that the government would want to ease the pain of such an undertaking. 

There are around 45 million students/former students with school debt totaling over $1.7 Trillion. The current administration’s plan calls for qualifying students to receive debt forgiveness raging between $10,000 and $20,000 each.  According to the Congressional Budget Office the total cost of this program would be $400 Billion. This equates to an average of $2500 per taxpayer. 

Let’s consider the ramifications of this plan:

–       Graduates with substantial, perhaps daunting, student debt, do have prospective attractive earning potential. Repayment may take time but perhaps quite manageable with incomes in the upper percentiles.

–       Taxpayers who may have taken personal loans or scraped and sacrificed to pay their own children’s tuition will perforce contribute to the education of others they do not even know and may be unable to afford.  Smacks as rather unfair.

–       $400 Billion otherwise used would build us 60 badly needed 1000-megawatt nuclear power plants, or 160 large 35 MGD desalination plants, or 300,000 miles of railroad tracks, or 1,000,000 electric school busses, or 100,000 wind turbines, or 10,000,000 trailers for the homeless, for Fema, etc. or – – – or – – –  

–       The added expense on taxpayers to underwrite this gesture comes at a time when many are on fixed incomes, struggling to cope with high inflation, medical bills and weather-related expenses.

–       And what about loans taken out by mom & pop enterprises that may not be working out for them as hoped, or loans taken out to cover major medical bills, or to rebuild a home ravaged by fire. Why are graduates with college degrees more needy than these folks?

–       And, Umm. Does anyone think that the appreciation of 45 million prospective voters might not be manifest at the polls?

And perhaps more importantly, the precedent of bailing out us Americans anytime we suffer a hardship is a path we walk down at our own peril. It seems that gone are the days when people took responsibility for their own decisions, their own mistakes, or their own bad luck. How long can Uncle Sam afford to ride to our rescue at every mishap, every catastrophe, every faux pas and every unexpected expensive event? 

For sure there are times when government intervention is absolutely essential, but we must be ruthlessly selective and lucidly discerning in doling out hard-earned taxpayer income and levying ever increasing taxes on the people. 

And tell me where in the Constitution does it say that it is the government’s role to rescue debtors.

–        – – Just the view of a common man