The reverse class resentment on student debt/free college is disturbing.

[PatrickforO]

59. OK it wasn't a great analogy. But my point still stands.

Just because many of us, including myself, have in the past paid off student loans, it does not relieve us of the responsibility of looking objectively at what is going on with student debt, and how our children and grandchildren are now just starting out after graduating college as debt slaves. Because when you are a newbie and your first job after graduation is at the bottom of the totem pole, say $14 or $15 an hour, and you owe $350 a month on your student loans, you are essentially a slave to that debt.

Not to mention the cost of remittance. In my state, Colorado, local businesses forego around $2.4 billion a year in lost sales due to student loan payments flowing out of the state.

In addition, we as Democrats claim we want people to have good jobs with reasonable job security, decent healthcare, a decent old-age pension, safe and reasonable working conditions, with reasonable job security. Unfortunately MOST new job creation is done by small businesses, and people in the Millennial generation are not starting businesses at the same rate as Xers or Boomers did. Why?

The primary reason is that if you throw the dice and borrow capital to start a business and then it fails, you STILL owe on your student loan, and if you end up having to go bankrupt it is almost impossible to even reduce the principle amount. Joe Biden was one of four Democrats in the Senate who supported the 2005 changes in the bankruptcy laws. Did you know? He was.

So, basically our kids and their children will end up being debt slaves because in my metro area nearly HALF of all job listings require some college or vo-tech, and over 30% require a bachelors degree. So mixed messages. We tell our kids, "Oh, you have to go to college to get any kind of decent job and have a good life, and then due primarily to states cutting back on higher education funding, costs have soared, you have a problem.

It is like so very many things in this capitalist utopia - risk is mainly passed on to taxpayers, while profits are stratospheric. Loan practices grow more predatory as regulations are reduced, and the costs are passed more and more and more onto consumers. Problem is, if we see healthcare as a basic right, then public funding for it becomes a moral issue, and if we see an educated labor force as important for continued prosperity, then public funding for higher education becomes both a moral and an economic issue.

To refuse to increase subsidies for higher education so it is debt free just because some people who have borrowed and subsequently paid back their student loans is penny-wise and pound foolish, because of the economic ramifications.

If you go into the US Census and navigate their terrible new platform successfully, you can actually get the inventory of degrees in any given geography by age. If you then do the proper calculations, you can see that many degreed people 'age out' of the labor force each year, but there are fewer new graduates to take their places.

That's why I say penny wise and pound foolish.