Comic Strips

Too big to fail means that the failure of a business or industry would take the country down with it. The college industry (as it's more an industry than anything else) has effectively become "too big to fail". But what's so insidious about it is that rather than all these schools carrying the debt, they've literally pushed it onto the students.

Forgiving student loans without a plan is a bailout for colleges and only accelerates the broken system.

As for screwing people over with changes to forgiveness plans (or making them too rigid in structure) is an example of something that needs to be fixed because it's clearly not working.

I would say that I'm okay with having some rules and not just giving people carte blanche to blow through however many hundreds of thousands of dollars they can get in student loans.

But at the same time, I feel like there should be some checks and balances.

We should make debt forgiveness an attainable thing for everyone. I feel like that's not really a controversial statement.

Your art student, who maybe racked up $100k, they've been paying on it for ten years. Interest has caused it to become $115k.

Like, something is not right, right?

If you pay on a debt for ten years, the balance should go down, right?

I would say, carte blanche forgiveness for anyone, regardless of who they are or what has happened, if they make 10 years of the given payments. Not even 10 years successively, like 120 payments, the debt is paid.

That should be structured so that people are being told, "once you graduate college you will be paying $XXX per month for ten full years to pay this off."

For the people who are college educated, but unfortunately, for whatever reason, could not get a job that enabled them to pay the full amount of their student loans back, well, you know, that sucks for America.

But that is going to be the smaller portion of the total.

They're still going to make 120 payments.

They are still going to be financially burdened with paying for their education for a decade.

If you look ahead to the outcomes for the country, do that for 20 years, then the generation 20 years from now will be well-educated and aware of the risks of getting a college degree that maybe sounds fun but pays bupkis.

In the meantime we would have more people motivated and working hard to make those 120 payments.

We would ultimately recoup the grand majority of that trillion dollars within the next 10 years.

And after that 10 years has passed from the day that that law was signed into place, you would have 90 million employed people with a track history of paying 120 payments and a trillion dollars worth of debt.

Now those 90,000,000 people are free of the burden of their student loans and looking to buy houses and having better income and buying cars and revitalizing the economy with their extra spare cash to burn.

That's such a cheap shot at my point.

1. People chose to take out these loans, this isn't like cancer or slavery.
2. Someone has to pay for the loans. When forgiven that means every tax payer is taking on that burden. So yes a good thing happening to you can be a bad thing for other people.
3. Most importantly, forgiving current loans doesn't prevent more people from falling into the same pitfalls. Meaning you're just perpetuating the problem

My point is don't forgive loans if you haven't fixed the problem because all your doing then is perpetuating the broken system and burdening everyone with student debt.