Something to show anyone complaining about Biden's student loan forgiveness

[FSogol]

Link to tweet

?s=20&t=E4kMFO19poVFCyfQc-Y6Qw

and for the non-twitter adept:

Warren Gunnels
@GunnelsWarren

Average Weekly Wages
1973: $873
2022: $813

Median Home
1973: $30,200
2022: $433,100

Monthly Rent
1973: $108
2022: $2,002

Tuition and Fees at University of California
1973: $150
2022: $13,104

Boomer: But why can't the slackers pay for college & pay off their loans like we did?

[EYESORE 9001]

1. This boomer says nothing of the sort

It’s just another attempt to divide us - this time along generational lines. Don’t fall for it.

[Faux pas]

10. Ditto

[crickets]

15. Agreed. nt

[DURHAM D]

16. Ditto.

[SergeStorms]

22. Yeah, careful with the "boomer" bashing.

It's never wise to paint with an over-sized brush.

[EYESORE 9001]

28. Broad brush indeed

Over 76 million. There’s no way to pigeonhole that large a demographic into a single set of characteristics.

[70sEraVet]

2. My only problem with this is -- who in 1973 had an average weekly income of $873?

Typo? Or is that one adjusted for inflation, but the others arent?

[Mr.Bill]

4. That figure has to be

adjusted for inflation.

[teach1st]

5. See my post number 3

Directly below yours. You can check out the source for his weekly income numbers.

[70sEraVet]

6. All I can say is, boy was I getting' screwed (and had nothing to do with the sexual Revolution).

[teach1st]

7. We were all getting screwed. I don't think it's correct

Adjusted for inflation? The other numbers don't seem to be adjusted.

[H2O Man]

11. It appears to

be with a focus on California. It is possible that wages there were higher than other parts of the country.

[Greybnk48]

27. Not my husband, or anyone I knew! n/t

[teach1st]

3. His sources

Thanks for posting! His followup tweet lists his sources. I haven't checked them out.

Link to tweet

OK, Dude, here are the damn receipts:

Weekly Wages:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qozP

Median Home Price:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

Monthly Rent
1973: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/time-series/coh-grossrents/grossrents-unadj.txt
2022: https://redfin.com/news/redfin-rental-report-may-2022/

UC Tuition and Fees:
2022: https://dailycal.org/2014/12/22/history-uc-tuition-since-1868/
1973: https://t.co/MHZqndejaF

[FSogol]

8. Thanks. n/t

[BlueCheeseAgain]

18. I checked them out.

Unfortunately, he's basically lying to us. Even though he'd still have a point if he told the truth.

This person cannot be taken seriously.

[brush]

9. Ridiculous. Soom boomers are still paying off student loans.

We can do better. Many of the boomer cohort are the original protest generation, something that GenXers and Millennials seem to have forgotten how to do.

Keyboard warriors do not equal with actual, in-person, street protestors.

[AntivaxHunters]

12. Do polls count?

Look at the generational gap.
It's a BIG difference.

Link to tweet

[AntivaxHunters]

13. Warren out there telling the truth again

and yup.....
Look at the age difference and where people stand on student loans.

[crickets]

14. Excellent info.

I just watched a video related to this topic minutes ago. This is about universal access to higher education and is a follow-up to a prior discussion regarding some people being salty about Biden's student debt relief:

Opposition is often rooted in classism. "Free education devalues higher education for everyone." Not so, but then not everyone sees a degree as a symbol of education. They see it as a membership card, a club pass. True, it is often a path to a higher paying job, but it's not a guarantee.

There are people who want barriers to higher education because they don't want the additional competition. They don't want to see fluidity and change in socioeconomic mobility; they see this as a threat to their 'place' in the world. This selfish thinking does not recognize that greater levels of higher education (whether at college or trade schools) will improve society in general for everyone.

This dovetails with the reasons why RWers are pushing back so hard on this debt relief: they don't want an educated populace. An educated populace is harder to trick into voting against their own self interests.

[BlueCheeseAgain]

17. I'm sorry-- these numbers are so deliberately misleading as to be a lie.

I'm not blaming you, FSogol-- I'm blaming the original tweeter, Warren Gunnels.

I've looked into the sources in his followup tweet, helpfully provided by teach1st.

Gunnels wants to make it seem that wages have not kept up with living costs. To do that, he commits such an obvious and cardinal mistake that it seems certain that it was malicious:

In his numbers, the wages are adjusted for inflation. The costs are not.

A dollar in 1973 is worth about $6.60 today. So even if prices hadn't changed at all relative to inflation, it would still look like everything is six times more expensive now than then.

As it happens, it is true that those costs are higher now than before. In today's dollars, a home in 1973 would cost $190,000. That's still a big increase, though it doesn't take into account that houses today are a lot bigger and better constructed than ones from 1973.

For monthly rent, it's a little disquieting that Gunnels uses two different sources for the 1973 and 2022 numbers. Looking into it, the 1973 number is actually from the 1970 census. Maybe that's only a small fudge factor. The 2022 number is from Redfin, and tracks the monthly rent in "the top 50 US metros", which is likely to be quite a bit different than the overall number. I went looking for the Census number for 2022 (Gunnels' table ends in 2020, with a rent of $602.) According to this Census document, the median asking rent in 2022 was $1314. So we're talking about a doubling of rent in constant dollars, as opposed to the factor of 20 Gunnels cites.

The weird thing is that Gunnels does still have a point. Home prices, rent, and public university tuition have gone up in cost, relative to wages, since 1973, even after adjusting for inflation. So why does he do something so deceptive? It's hard to say. But it's insulting to our intelligence and deserves to be called out.

[flashman13]

21. Excuse me!!

These numbers are absolutely correct. My first non-school related apartment in 1974 was $60 a month. My folks bought our house in a suburb of South Miami, Fla. It was 4 bedrooms, 3 bath, 2 car garage, with a large swimming pool on an acre lot. They paid $33,000. I bought a top of the line, brand new '65 GTO for $2,400. How do I know. I was there. BTW, I went to one of the best engineering school in the country to study CE and the tuition was $2,400 per year.

[OrangeJoe]

23. The criticism is not being levied at the costs

No one is questioning his costs in current dollars. It's the wages portion of his equation that is misleading because it was adjusted for inflation.

[Pinback]

29. Right.

I read those #s and thought, “Remove the 8 on the weekly income and it’d be about right!”

[Zeitghost]

30. Not even close to correct

The income looks to be inflation adjusted, the expenses were not.

[The Conductor]

20. Like That, Try This, too...

According to one source I could find, some 48 million Americans were carrying that school debt that the Republicans are screaming would cost the U.S. $600 billion to pay off. Let's accept their bogus number for now and look at that a moment...

Did anyone on the right realize that those Americans can deduct up to $2,500 of the interest of those school loans every year? Let's be super generous and say people pay off those loans in ten years, even though almost no one can do that. 49 million x $2,500 x 10 years is $1.2 trillion more in taxes those people will pay after working debt-free.

Last I checked, $1.2 trillion is more than $600 billion, so even the Rethuiglicans own bogus numbers don't work for them.

This is so much like the situation with the G.I. Bill after World War II, another program the Republicans labelled a giveaway that would destroy the country and make everyone lazy. All that did was usher in the golden age of American expansiveness to dominate aerospace, electronics, technology, computers, engineering and science for a couple of generations. All those guys who sent astronauts to the Moon were G.I. Bill folks. That was a helluva a payoff for a fairly modest investment, as it turned out. And all those folks paid taxes on the higher pay they were making, too.

[lees1975]

24. Four years at a private college did not cost me as much as one year does at the same college now.

My total student debt when I graduated from college 40 years ago was less than $3,000 and that was scattered across three of the four years I was in school. My first semester, including tuition, room and board, fees and books, came to $1125. I was hired for a teaching position two months before graduating, and I worked for a full year and a half before the loan payments started, at $44.50 a month, or less than 5% of my take home pay. That same college now is one of the least expensive private colleges in the state, and one semester with room and board is $16,000. I know teachers now who come out of college and their loan payment is almost 40% of their income.
That, as far as I am concerned, warrants as much relief as can be given.

Slackers? How ridiculous is that accusation!

[usonian]

25. Simpler: this.

Forgiven?

[Greybnk48]

26. IMO, "Ok, Boomer" is ignorant and no better than "Let's Go Brandon."

I will be 74 in the Fall and I finished paying off my grad school loans just three years ago.

Many of us had to go back to school to re-train in order to have a job or to earn enough to thrive. And many people my age had to take out loans too.