It baffles me so many people oppose Student Loan Forgiveness. The government is NOT supposed to make money. Especially not this way. They've made incredible amounts of money through student loans by selling them off to Private Banks through refinancing, soaring interest rates, endless payments and complete immunity to bankruptcy (for Federal loans, not private). Oh, and even if you get a 25 year loan discharged and it was 100k? Guess what? You have to pay taxes on that because the government counts that as FUCKING INCOME. That's right, that's the reason the IBR plans have that forgiveness. To fuck you over completely and pretend you made 100k all at once. It is absolute fucking insanity. It is in no way rational and designed to make profit by enslaving people too young and naive to understand the consequences of these costs. Its made all the more worse by the many providers, complicated payment plans, unclear interest rates, confusing naming schemes...believe me, I have been there. Student loans are a fucking Kafkaesque goddamn nightmare. I have an IBR repayment plan and suddenly for no reason one of my federal loans instantly went into repayment for far, far beyond what my IBR says it should be. And it still says I'm enrolled in IBR and up to date on documentation.
It is an absolute clusterfuck of confusion, corruption and exploitation. It is the very definition of bad government and governmental interference. If a school back in the day did something like this, the entire administration would be executed for usury.
I fully believe that there should only be Federal Student Loans for STEM degrees (Actually, ICE has a list of STEM degrees for immigration purposes, as to what the government believes are STEM. You can look it up here:
https://www.ice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Document/2016/stem-list.pdf ). Private loans for everything else. Make all student loans dischargeable through bankruptcy. Multiple and clear repayment policies that are transparent with full calculators for your state and income. Only a select few licensed loan providers.
You're right, the whole system has to be overhauled. But the system has fucked everyone taking out a loan and profited massively off the misery of people too young to understand what they were getting into. You also have to realize Bill Clinton made student loans undischargable through Bankruptcy. It wasn't a Republican policy, but a Democratic one. Clinton is responsible for the crisis, because if you could bankrupt loans, the government would have to be more cautious. One good thing Obama did was the IBR and payment plans. It at least alleviated the bleeding and probably prevented a crisis.
But good old Joe doesn't give a fuck because he's an old man and a faggot neo-lib. If you're against student loan forgiveness, it doesn't make sense. You're supporting a neo-liberal policy designed to subjugate people by putting them into slavery for most of their lives. The more people have to work, the less they can resist. The more dependent they are on the government. Believe me, the taxpayer has already profited from the money given out. You're yelling at an 16-17 year old who is massively pressured by all areas of society including their friends and their authority figures to take out these loans without understanding them. The schools who don't give proper guidance, and their career offices look like a fucking unemployment office in the ghetto with a poster of 'Hang in There' with a cat in a building that hasn't been renovated since the 1950s.
The student loan system by design is to trap you into untenable debt. Because this debt chains you to the government, which every neo-lib masturbates over.