You people are fantastic. As of early this morning, Bulwark readers have raised $74,000+ for World Central Kitchen. Our original goal was $5K, which we raised to $15K, and then $20K on the first day. . . . If you want to help Chef José Andrés and his team,
Moral hazard - thank you, Charlie, for making me think a bit. My initial reaction has always been to give a break to those kids who, for whatever reason, borrowed funds for college education and find themselves under water. In my mind the entire federal student loan program needs a hard look to assess when and whether to extend credit for education.
No doubt there are institutions out there that have taken advantage of students who are left with debt and a worthless degree of some kind. Those institutions should pay the price - be closed down - if they can’t deliver. By the same token our kids need to be better counseled to avoid what are really scams.
I know that there are specific programs where student debt is “forgiven” for public service- no doubt military veterans and military service should qualify. Query, can this programs be expanded so that the debt maybe forgiven but there is public service associated with the debt reduction? It is not a “free lunch” to the debtor.
I agree, we should not be “bribing” young people for their votes and this certainly looks like that fact pattern. Again, thanks very much for making me think - moral hazard here is very real and as a society we need to be very cautious.
I'm a political moderate, and I'm opposed to forgiving student loan debt except in dire circumstances. The people who took out those loans knew what they were taking on, and they did it anyway. In doing so, they also reaped the benefit from them - a college education. But now that it's time to start paying them back, they're whining about how hard it is and how it's cramping their lifestyle, preventing them from buying a home, etc.
My husband and I know all about that. We took on a massive amount of student loan debt so that he could get his master's degree from one of the Ivies and find a better job. During the subsequent repayment term, the economy crashed, my husband lost his job, we had to sell our house and relocate, twice, so he could pursue job opportunities - which meant I had to quit my job and find new work, too. We downsized everything in our lives just so we could meet our financial obligations, including his student loan debt. It took 10 years to get out from under it.
I completely sympathize with people facing a mountain of student loan debt. Been there. But I also know they took on an obligation to repay those loans, and they have to suck it up and do it - just as we did.
One thing I will not tolerate, though, is being lectured by the likes of Thurston Romney III about 'bribes' when he was perfectly happy to take his own in form of tax giveaways to people like him over decades. But then I haven't forgotten his crack about 47% of the country not carrying their load, while those same people were carrying him. My response to Romney isn't printable.
Any student loan forgiveness would need to come with a plan to lower college costs dramatically, otherwise we're going to keep finding ourselves in the same boat. I'm sure older folks wouldn't like the forgiveness aspect, but I'll pose three questions: how much was college when they were 18, what percentage of jobs required a college degree, and what was the average home price the year they graduated? Taxpayers, especially those in wealthier states, bail out and / or highly subsidize corporations, farmers, and poorer states every single year -- why not help out the generation that faced multiple recessions, skyrocketing housing prices, and stagnant wages just as they were entering the job market. The income which would otherwise be going towards repayment could fuel an explosion in spending across every aspect of the economy.
Regarding Mitt Romney's sarcastic tweet about a wealth tax: Maybe he should read your column "Does America Have An Oligarchy Problem?" taking a good look at those graphs of wealth distribution in the US.
How does Romney sleep at night carrying water for a party run by a man he knows is evil and dangerous? I guess the LDS God is cool with doing such things
Comment on yesterday's pod with David Frum: Hard disagree with David's position that DeSantis was pushed or led into his 'don't say gay' bill or his subsequent Disney smackdown bill. DeSantis has a tremendous ego and his brand and practice is to never accommodate, never compromise, and, most importantly, never back down. Look at his refusal to rule out a 2024 run or explicitly endorse Trump. Look at his vetoing of a REPUB created congressional redistricting map in favor of his own (which the Florida Rs then subserviently approved). I could go on. DeSantis is playing to his (increasingly national) base and proactively riding/shaping the culture wars, and his $100 million war chest demonstrates his success. He thinks he has found the winning formula, and he is going to continue to play it for all it's worth.
Teen-rapist" Gaetz seems to have gone 1990s Word-Art with his screed against his Dear Leaders. Looks like they must have taken his big-boy computer away from him.
BTW, doesn't Gaetz look like he is a member of the Munster Family, (not including Marianne)?
Even in states with "high" percentages of young people with college degrees, less than 50% of residents have a college degree and the average is about one-third of the population. Basically Democrats are proposing to subsidize college for a small percentage of people -- and even smaller when you exclude people with little or no student loan debt -- and are pissing off most Americans who don't have these debts or who planned their lives appropriately. This is yet another example of Twitter elites blinding a party to what is actually important. (Oh, and Twitter elites also have student debt).
"Exit take: Before you comment, look up the term 'moral hazard.'"
Can you understand why the people who just watched PPP loans turn into a giant fraud fest while all the people involved got a pass find this to be a particularly unfunny joke? Moral hazard never seems to be a concern when it comes to cutting politically favored groups checks.
Message to progressives demanding student debt cancellation:
Deliver 66 seats in the Senate and a 288 seat majority in the House to the Democrats THEN you will have earned the practical and political. right and power to demand anything you like.
Since you don't have the votes to cancel student debt then STOP holding out that hope to young voters as a realistic possibility. It just isn't.
Young voters (and everyone else) will EITHER flock to the polls to save democracy in 2022 and 2024 OR they will passive/aggressively accept the Banana Republican dictatorship waiting in the wings.
Just like 2020 there is only ONE thing on the ballot in 2022 and 2024--- the preservation of democracy in America.
The Progressive thinking is this - Democrats are in trouble in the midterms because they haven't delivered on their promises. But whose promises, exactly? Theirs. Their candidates (Sanders and Warren) did NOT win the nomination. A majority of Democratic voters rejected them and their agenda, as would have a majority of voters from all parties in the general if they had won the nomination.
But they insulate themselves from any responsibility for Democratic losses with the totally asinine and unproven "didn't go far enough" attitude. It's always all or nothing, revolution now, from them. Even though a majority of American voters do not want to contemplate much of their cradle to grave entitlements agenda during times of economic uncertainty.
The day I take advice from Mitch Rmoney, vulture capitalist who made a good profit on student debt (that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy), will be a Cold Day In Hell Indeed. This guy was the previous record holder for Most Lies Spouted In A Campaign (980 total, showing what a "piker" he actually is). This is the guy who gave the "47% makers and takers" speech and has never shown any evidence of having changed his mind.
The only thing you can say well of him is that he believes in Democracy. But so does Marine Le Pen, who conceded last Sunday as nicely as Rmoney did in 2012, demonstrating what a low bar it should be.
When someone worth $300 million tells you how worried they are about someone getting a financial deal, you know for a fact what they're worried about is their $300 million. The man is a member of The One Percent. There are no "truly good" one percenters.
As to the debt forgiveness, what they're talking about is forgiving the debt of the majority of the debt holders - the middle class/working class folks who couldn't finish college but still have all that debt they incurred trying to raise themselves up. Why is it Republicans seem to forget about them?
Whenever any Republican disses this idea, check his stock holdings, because he's making money from the fact that Student Debt is the one thing that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, due to the Republican "bankruptcy reform." Whenever you run across a government policy that hurts people, if you trace it back, you will always find that A Republican Did It.
Regarding student loan debt, sometimes I think Democrats want to lose. There is no clearer way to state “we are no longer the party of the working class” than by canceling debt of student loans. And who honestly thinks progressives would suddenly start approving of Biden even if he did do it. They would just complain about the next controversial issue that he has not gone full progressive on.
Regarding student loans we have to be more clear on what the problem is. A lot of for profit schools are scams. They encourage financially strapped people to run up huge student loan debt for an, at best, dubious education. But even legitimate higher institutions regularly lie to students about employment opportunities post-graduation. There is a lot of fraud involved in encouraging these (generally) young men and women to run up huge student loan debt for an education that simply is not worth the cost.
You also have a problem that lenders LOVE to loan people money for education because student loan debt is extremely difficult to discharge in bankruptcy. Because student loans are treated differently than other unsecured debt, lenders have no problem making loans even though they know the thing the person is buying - the education - is not worth the money that is being spent. A lender is not going to loan you $10,000 to buy a car worth $5,000. But a lender will loan you $100,000 for an education that is worth maybe $5,000 if that.
Forgiveness of loans fixes none of these problems. In fact it makes it makes the problem worse. But there is a fix. Congress can pass a law treating student loan debt exactly like any other unsecure debt regarding discharging it in bankruptcy. That change would remove many of the incentives and disincentives that has created the current student debt crisis which is a huge problem.
“Tucker Carlson is attacking GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy — and Elise Stefanik — for having a short-lived spasm of decency after January 6:”
Stefanik never had spasms of decency of any length. When even MTG was texting Meadows to get Trump to call off the dogs our Elise remained silent. Unless I’ve missed it, there have been no pleadings from her to be relayed to Trump. Of course, she knew she was safe from the mob anyway.
The issue with these GOP candidates is all part of the product lifecycle, right? We are at the phase where everything wants to imitate everything else so everything is completely homogenized. That definitely opens the door for a market innovator break through as Ms. Comstock suggests.
My questions are a) are Trump-aligned voters really willing to vote for the person who can say "Trump" the most? and b) will these people struggling to lower themselves create an opportunity where a slate of plainly obvious sycophants turns 2022 into 2020-but-for-Congressional-candidates where the anti-Trump voters make their move?
Moral hazard - thank you, Charlie, for making me think a bit. My initial reaction has always been to give a break to those kids who, for whatever reason, borrowed funds for college education and find themselves under water. In my mind the entire federal student loan program needs a hard look to assess when and whether to extend credit for education.
No doubt there are institutions out there that have taken advantage of students who are left with debt and a worthless degree of some kind. Those institutions should pay the price - be closed down - if they can’t deliver. By the same token our kids need to be better counseled to avoid what are really scams.
I know that there are specific programs where student debt is “forgiven” for public service- no doubt military veterans and military service should qualify. Query, can this programs be expanded so that the debt maybe forgiven but there is public service associated with the debt reduction? It is not a “free lunch” to the debtor.
I agree, we should not be “bribing” young people for their votes and this certainly looks like that fact pattern. Again, thanks very much for making me think - moral hazard here is very real and as a society we need to be very cautious.
I'm a political moderate, and I'm opposed to forgiving student loan debt except in dire circumstances. The people who took out those loans knew what they were taking on, and they did it anyway. In doing so, they also reaped the benefit from them - a college education. But now that it's time to start paying them back, they're whining about how hard it is and how it's cramping their lifestyle, preventing them from buying a home, etc.
My husband and I know all about that. We took on a massive amount of student loan debt so that he could get his master's degree from one of the Ivies and find a better job. During the subsequent repayment term, the economy crashed, my husband lost his job, we had to sell our house and relocate, twice, so he could pursue job opportunities - which meant I had to quit my job and find new work, too. We downsized everything in our lives just so we could meet our financial obligations, including his student loan debt. It took 10 years to get out from under it.
I completely sympathize with people facing a mountain of student loan debt. Been there. But I also know they took on an obligation to repay those loans, and they have to suck it up and do it - just as we did.
One thing I will not tolerate, though, is being lectured by the likes of Thurston Romney III about 'bribes' when he was perfectly happy to take his own in form of tax giveaways to people like him over decades. But then I haven't forgotten his crack about 47% of the country not carrying their load, while those same people were carrying him. My response to Romney isn't printable.
Any student loan forgiveness would need to come with a plan to lower college costs dramatically, otherwise we're going to keep finding ourselves in the same boat. I'm sure older folks wouldn't like the forgiveness aspect, but I'll pose three questions: how much was college when they were 18, what percentage of jobs required a college degree, and what was the average home price the year they graduated? Taxpayers, especially those in wealthier states, bail out and / or highly subsidize corporations, farmers, and poorer states every single year -- why not help out the generation that faced multiple recessions, skyrocketing housing prices, and stagnant wages just as they were entering the job market. The income which would otherwise be going towards repayment could fuel an explosion in spending across every aspect of the economy.
Regarding Mitt Romney's sarcastic tweet about a wealth tax: Maybe he should read your column "Does America Have An Oligarchy Problem?" taking a good look at those graphs of wealth distribution in the US.
How does Romney sleep at night carrying water for a party run by a man he knows is evil and dangerous? I guess the LDS God is cool with doing such things
Comment on yesterday's pod with David Frum: Hard disagree with David's position that DeSantis was pushed or led into his 'don't say gay' bill or his subsequent Disney smackdown bill. DeSantis has a tremendous ego and his brand and practice is to never accommodate, never compromise, and, most importantly, never back down. Look at his refusal to rule out a 2024 run or explicitly endorse Trump. Look at his vetoing of a REPUB created congressional redistricting map in favor of his own (which the Florida Rs then subserviently approved). I could go on. DeSantis is playing to his (increasingly national) base and proactively riding/shaping the culture wars, and his $100 million war chest demonstrates his success. He thinks he has found the winning formula, and he is going to continue to play it for all it's worth.
Teen-rapist" Gaetz seems to have gone 1990s Word-Art with his screed against his Dear Leaders. Looks like they must have taken his big-boy computer away from him.
BTW, doesn't Gaetz look like he is a member of the Munster Family, (not including Marianne)?
So I googled percentage of population under 50 with college degrees and you find these data from the Census: https://ncses.nsf.gov/indicators/states/indicator/bachelors-degree-holders-per-25-44-year-olds?msclkid=9467c22ac6f311ecb62b96a6fad6b779
Even in states with "high" percentages of young people with college degrees, less than 50% of residents have a college degree and the average is about one-third of the population. Basically Democrats are proposing to subsidize college for a small percentage of people -- and even smaller when you exclude people with little or no student loan debt -- and are pissing off most Americans who don't have these debts or who planned their lives appropriately. This is yet another example of Twitter elites blinding a party to what is actually important. (Oh, and Twitter elites also have student debt).
"Exit take: Before you comment, look up the term 'moral hazard.'"
Can you understand why the people who just watched PPP loans turn into a giant fraud fest while all the people involved got a pass find this to be a particularly unfunny joke? Moral hazard never seems to be a concern when it comes to cutting politically favored groups checks.
Message to progressives demanding student debt cancellation:
Deliver 66 seats in the Senate and a 288 seat majority in the House to the Democrats THEN you will have earned the practical and political. right and power to demand anything you like.
Since you don't have the votes to cancel student debt then STOP holding out that hope to young voters as a realistic possibility. It just isn't.
Young voters (and everyone else) will EITHER flock to the polls to save democracy in 2022 and 2024 OR they will passive/aggressively accept the Banana Republican dictatorship waiting in the wings.
Just like 2020 there is only ONE thing on the ballot in 2022 and 2024--- the preservation of democracy in America.
The Progressive thinking is this - Democrats are in trouble in the midterms because they haven't delivered on their promises. But whose promises, exactly? Theirs. Their candidates (Sanders and Warren) did NOT win the nomination. A majority of Democratic voters rejected them and their agenda, as would have a majority of voters from all parties in the general if they had won the nomination.
But they insulate themselves from any responsibility for Democratic losses with the totally asinine and unproven "didn't go far enough" attitude. It's always all or nothing, revolution now, from them. Even though a majority of American voters do not want to contemplate much of their cradle to grave entitlements agenda during times of economic uncertainty.
The day I take advice from Mitch Rmoney, vulture capitalist who made a good profit on student debt (that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy), will be a Cold Day In Hell Indeed. This guy was the previous record holder for Most Lies Spouted In A Campaign (980 total, showing what a "piker" he actually is). This is the guy who gave the "47% makers and takers" speech and has never shown any evidence of having changed his mind.
The only thing you can say well of him is that he believes in Democracy. But so does Marine Le Pen, who conceded last Sunday as nicely as Rmoney did in 2012, demonstrating what a low bar it should be.
When someone worth $300 million tells you how worried they are about someone getting a financial deal, you know for a fact what they're worried about is their $300 million. The man is a member of The One Percent. There are no "truly good" one percenters.
As to the debt forgiveness, what they're talking about is forgiving the debt of the majority of the debt holders - the middle class/working class folks who couldn't finish college but still have all that debt they incurred trying to raise themselves up. Why is it Republicans seem to forget about them?
Whenever any Republican disses this idea, check his stock holdings, because he's making money from the fact that Student Debt is the one thing that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, due to the Republican "bankruptcy reform." Whenever you run across a government policy that hurts people, if you trace it back, you will always find that A Republican Did It.
Regarding student loan debt, sometimes I think Democrats want to lose. There is no clearer way to state “we are no longer the party of the working class” than by canceling debt of student loans. And who honestly thinks progressives would suddenly start approving of Biden even if he did do it. They would just complain about the next controversial issue that he has not gone full progressive on.
Regarding student loans we have to be more clear on what the problem is. A lot of for profit schools are scams. They encourage financially strapped people to run up huge student loan debt for an, at best, dubious education. But even legitimate higher institutions regularly lie to students about employment opportunities post-graduation. There is a lot of fraud involved in encouraging these (generally) young men and women to run up huge student loan debt for an education that simply is not worth the cost.
You also have a problem that lenders LOVE to loan people money for education because student loan debt is extremely difficult to discharge in bankruptcy. Because student loans are treated differently than other unsecured debt, lenders have no problem making loans even though they know the thing the person is buying - the education - is not worth the money that is being spent. A lender is not going to loan you $10,000 to buy a car worth $5,000. But a lender will loan you $100,000 for an education that is worth maybe $5,000 if that.
Forgiveness of loans fixes none of these problems. In fact it makes it makes the problem worse. But there is a fix. Congress can pass a law treating student loan debt exactly like any other unsecure debt regarding discharging it in bankruptcy. That change would remove many of the incentives and disincentives that has created the current student debt crisis which is a huge problem.
“Tucker Carlson is attacking GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy — and Elise Stefanik — for having a short-lived spasm of decency after January 6:”
Stefanik never had spasms of decency of any length. When even MTG was texting Meadows to get Trump to call off the dogs our Elise remained silent. Unless I’ve missed it, there have been no pleadings from her to be relayed to Trump. Of course, she knew she was safe from the mob anyway.
The issue with these GOP candidates is all part of the product lifecycle, right? We are at the phase where everything wants to imitate everything else so everything is completely homogenized. That definitely opens the door for a market innovator break through as Ms. Comstock suggests.
My questions are a) are Trump-aligned voters really willing to vote for the person who can say "Trump" the most? and b) will these people struggling to lower themselves create an opportunity where a slate of plainly obvious sycophants turns 2022 into 2020-but-for-Congressional-candidates where the anti-Trump voters make their move?