Forgive debt, yes, but increase aid to lower costs

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

It’s outrageous that U.S. taxpayers would have to foot the bill for — by one early estimate — some $700 billion for a bailout resulting from financial decisions for which taxpayers had no responsibility. Right?

No, not the student loan debt relief program that President Biden announced Thursday.

The $700 billion mentioned above was set aside as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, otherwise known as the big bank bailout. In truth, the Troubled Asset Relief Program used about $426 billion to purchase toxic assets from banks to keep them from going under. And in the end, more than $441 billion was recovered, generating a $15.3 billion profit for the U.S. Treasury. Along with that tidy profit, the program kept the Great Recession — as bad as it was — from hitting Americans even harder that it did.

This time the investment that Biden has outlined is not in banks but in 43 million Americans who have amassed about $1.75 trillion in student loan debt, pursuing educations and degrees intended to launch careers, support families, pay taxes and perform the jobs America needs filled now and in coming decades.

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https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-forgive-debt-yes-but-increase-aid-to-lower-costs/

[Hoosier_Progressiv]

1. Forgive debt

In 1988 I went to Purdue West Lafayette to start work on a Ph.D. I started using my own money I was saving as a down payment to buy a house. During my second year, I needed some financial help. I applied for a "guaranteed" student loan. I was told under rules enacted during the Reagan administration, I "made to much money the year before to qualify." Reagan "trickle down" economics at its best. I ended up with a part-time job and a student loan from a bank at half of what I could have used. The rest of my "student loan" was a credit card. Luckily, I landed a job before graduating teaching a university and started to earn money to pay off the debt. It was less than $10K including the credit card, and I needed to finish my dissertation to be converted to tenure track or be dismissed. I retired a full professor 30 years later.

I do not begrudge any help today's grads get. Furthermore, I fully support that states step up and return to the level of financial support that allowed me to have lower tuition rates when I was an undergrad in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the time I started teaching at the university level, states had been slashing support for education like it (education) was a blight on society. To the far-right, it is, because they do not like an educated electorate.

So, yes, we need to raise state level funding for education to reduce the cost. I have been donating to my alma mater and my employer's foundations to help less fortunate students out. The smarter they are, the better this country will become.