this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
1677 points (98.2% liked)
Comic Strips
19635 readers
3277 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I paid off my student loans at the beginning of this month. it took me 16 years and like $65,000, right? If someone else comes in behind me, goes through the same shit that I went through, and then gets their loan forgiven or paid off in a couple of years?
Then I'm happy for them. Good for them, their life is gonna be so much easier without that burden over their head, and happier people means I get to live in a happier society, which means that I get to be happier too.
are you happy for them if they had the ability to pay off their loans and refused to do so so they could travel, eat out, and buy luxury goods? should their luxury lifestyle subsidized by the government?
Because i've met plenty of people who have done that instead of pay back their loans. not everyone involved in this is some noble actor who is struggling... many are just assholes who refuse to pay their debts w/ the expectation that is someone else's job. not that different than kids who go to school and party and then end up dropping out. should their loans be forgiven too?
I paid down my debts too. I lived cheap and prioritized paying them back early and haven't had any debt for almost 10 years now. at one point I was paying 30-40% of my income to my debt but I knocked down almost 40K in loans in 5 years by doing that and paying down the high interest debt ASAP. I really little empathy for people who have student loans who are traveling, partying, and spending 40% of their paycheck on luxuries while they make minimum or no payment son their debts because they expect someone else to pay it back for them.
Honestly, why would you even care?
In America student loans cannot be discharged unless you have a fatal disease or you die, and sometimes not even death causes your student loans to go away.
If they would rather sacrifice their late 30s and 40s to paying off debt the hard way that they could have paid off the easy way in their 20s, then what does it matter to you?
They're going to actually pay more back because the interest is going to keep accruing on their debts for all of those years.
You've saved yourself a lot of money, you've opened the door for yourself to have a higher quality retirement or possibly even an earlier retirement because you're being financially smart and that's good on you.
Why would you take the thing that is good on you and make it a bad on somebody else?
because if you fuck yourself over I shouldn't have to bail you out. your personal choices are not my responsibility. go ahead and party in your 20s and let your debt accrue to 200K. but don't whine about how unfair your life is when you are living paycheck to paycheck at 40 and have nothing for retirement. you did that to yourself and life is not 'unfair and cruel' because you made bad choices.
this is like you getting drunk crashing you car, and demanding someone else pay for the damages, because 'it's not your fault'. It is your fault entirely, and nobody else's. But by a lot of lemmy logic it's the fault of the alcohol company, the bar owner, and etc. as if they were suppose to prevent you from doing all of that.
personal responsibility exists. college students are not hapless victims of a cruel system. they are making choices and now they are crying that they should not have to face the consequences of the choices. I wanted to go to grad school at my dream school, but it turns out i'd have 60K in debt from going there, so I went to a place where they gave me a scholarship, even if it wasn't what I 'truly' wanted.
But plenty of people make the other choice, and go to schools and get degrees they can't afford. And further, they do nothing responsible/productive with that degree. I had a friend I stopped interacting with who got a comp sci degree from a top uni, had lots of debt, but now works part time in a bicycle shop for 15/hr and refuses to pay back loans and keeps ranting about how the govt should pay off their debt for them. I stopped interacting with this person once I realized what pathetic joke of a human being they. And they love ranting about how everyone is privledged and should pay more tax and they are so poor and helpless and they have financially abused many people with this routine. They are just a lazy entitled jerk who is throwing away their life because it's cool be a bicycle hipster and 'uncool' to work a computer programming job.
Why in the hell would anyone think this person deserves loan forgiveness? They do not. They should use their degree, get a good job, and pay back their loans themselves.
If this person however, got a degree teaching computer science and was doing something productive to society should they qualify for a partial loan forgiveness, totally.
your mistake is you assume all people are well intention ed an good actors. many are not. many human beings are exploiters, abusers, cheats, and generally shitty people who are seeking to exploit everyone/everything they can for personal gain at the loss of other people. lemmy assumes that all such people are billionaires or something... there are plenty of them who are poor who are like this as well.
I feel like that's an incredibly harsh analogy, and I don't really think it's appropriate.
It implies, relating your analogy back to student loans, that people who are incredibly intelligent and capable and good with technology chose to take a $200,000 PhD in underwater basket weaving and then they don't want to pay their student loans.
I would say a more apt analogy would be if an orchard owner didn't take proper care of their orchard and then their neighbors came over and helped them dig out all of the stumps so that they could plant new seeds.
i'm not implying anything dude. there are lots and lots of people in the real world who do stupid crap like that. for real. I have know dozen and dozens of them over the past 20 years.
but you seem to assume all people are fundamentally good by default. they are not. there is a significant percentage of people who you would hire for your orchard, and kill your trees, and then sue you for firing them. why would you want to reward these people?
FWIW I have worked with community non profits much of my adult life. A good 1/3 of the people involved, both providers and clients, are immoral shitheads. I'm not talking analogies here, I'm talking the real world. You have to setup litmus tests, waiting periods, and lots of other mechanisms to prevent those people from getting/access resources, and rooting them out even when they do. a significant part of the job, sadly. One of the reasons many 'assistance' programs are so fucking onerous w/ paper work and waiting periods is because so many bad actors seek to exploit them to the detriment of those who actually need the assistance.
and those systems break down when shitty people come in and hoover up all the resources and exploit the generosity of others. and most of those shitty people... don't need help. they just seek a method to avoid hard work.
Eh, you can't let the bastards drag you down.
I know there's a lot of bastards out there. I'm related to half of them. Like, I know how it is.
That doesn't mean that I have to abandon my optimism, or to intentionally choose to see the evil in people.
These resources would not be handed out carte blanche, and I am not the person who is arguing for them to be handed out carte blanche.
I am saying that we should change the way the interest is counted so that there is no interest being charged on the interest that has been charged.
Doing that one thing would change the debt structure of student loans so that when people make consistent payments over a decade, it will almost always, in and of itself, completely pay off their student loans, and that would be the money they borrowed, plus the interest on the money that was borrowed.
It would give people who are struggling a light at the end of the tunnel that they can strive towards and that they can know for a fact will not be taken away from them, and that is powerful.
I would also argue that student loans should be able to be discharged through bankruptcy with maybe a moderate justification adjudicated by a judge, so that for the people at the very bottom of the scale who are most oppressed by their bad choices, they can wreck their credit and completely and totally wipe the slate clean and be able to start over.
Do you disagree with either of those two premises?
'I don't want my tax dollars paying for people who are irresponsible with their debt.'
"Honestly, why would you even care?"
Why would they care how their tax money is spent? Is that a serious question?
Yes, it is. And the reason why we have taxes in the first place is because we are a society. And the key thing that makes a society a society is that the people that have a strength use that strength to help the people that do not have that strength.
That is the social contract. The helping of other people is why we pay taxes.
That help comes in many forms. That help pays for police departments so that the victims of criminals have defenders to either stop the crime from happening or to capture and punish the person that committed the crime.
That pays for fire departments, for hospitals, for roads, for public services, for parks, for electricity lines to be installed, for data lines, for the internet. It pays for social programs, and it pays the salaries of the people that put the work in to make all of these things happen.
If instead of, a couple of extra bombers for our military every year, that money was used to alleviate the financial burden of student loans that were taken on by people who tried to get training to do a job, to earn more money, to then themselves pay more taxes, to contribute more to society, I'm perfectly fine with that outcome.
It's kind of concerning that you're not seeing the bigger picture.
I'm sure other people in your life have explained this exact same scenario to you. I don't believe that I am unveiling new knowledge or a new viewpoint.
Why would you not want your tax money to go to help people?
What is it about that scenario that galls you?
because we want to help the right people. i want to help an immigrant mom who gets a degree to be a nurse.
i don't want to help some entitled kid who got an art degree and refuses to get a job because it's not cool for their 'brand' to have a job. If the loan forgiveness was contingent on this person getting a productive job then it would be different.
Incentives need to be structured and targeted to be effective. Throwing money arbitrarily at a problem and hoping for the best is not effective.
Well yes, I also agree, like anybody that's just saying "throw away $1.6 trillion so that everyone can sing "Tra-la-La" all the way to the bank" should be put into a straight jacket and not listened to until they are heavily medicated.
But at the same time, I feel like the current system is too rigid, and too unforgiving, and too based in capitalism to actually be something that our society should continue using as-is.
I believe there should be changes in the interest structure of our student loan debts so that compound interest is not a portion of them, and that they should be charged in such a way that making 120 appropriate payments equals the debt is paid even if there is a small balance remaining.
I believe there should be release valves for the people who are so financially oppressed by the burden of their student loans that they cannot function at their optimum in society, and that using that release valve should be akin to declaring bankruptcy, it should have massive consequences that ultimately are lesser than the consequences of continuing to struggle to pay onerous student loan debt.
And finally, I believe that implementing these social resources, this restructuring of the way we handle student loans, would make America a happier place for the people like me and you who have paid off our student loans, or are successfully paying off our student loans.
We would have fewer, sad, upset, miserable people to interact with because of the student loan debt crisis, and that happier society would be our reward for the small percentage of our taxes that go towards covering over the mistakes of others. Not a blank slate, not us going into debt to help assholes, just making the world a better place for people that made stupid mistakes.
And this is exactly why taxpayers without college educations shouldn't be subsidizing those who do. The lion's share of the "strength" is in the latter category.
You write "help people", but you specifically want to help the (educational) demographic of people who least need it, statistically.
I never can quite understand the concept of casting aspersions on a person you're having a debate with.
Accusing me of being educationally elitist does not serve your side of the conversation.
It only increases the divide between us, and it makes me not like you as a person.
If your goal is to be disliked, you're very, very close to your goal.
But if your goal is instead to argue, which is what my assumption was, that people who make financially bad decisions regarding their education should suffer the consequences of those decisions... Well, I mean, it's not like I was going to like you for your stance anyway, but at least you wouldn't be attacking me for no reason.
This accusation exists only in your mind. I pointed out that, in advocating for student loan forgiveness, you are advocating for a financial incentive that is going solely to the demographic of people who are the least impoverished, on average.
And that is a simple, plain, objective fact, not an accusation on any moral axis, or "casting aspersions". I didn't say a single word about you as a person, you pulled that literally out of thin air. Not appreciated.
You are talking specifically to me making an accusation that assumes incorrect information about me, therefore labeling it as an accusation is an accurate statement.
I assumed nothing about you, at all. These are the facts plainly stated in our exchange:
If anything, I would be justified in labeling you as being disingenuous, based on your obviously-deliberate mischaracterization of my argument, but I didn't even do that, I just replaced your straw man with the actual argument. Even then, there has been no 'incorrect information assumed about you'.
All of the information I responded to was overtly present within the words you wrote.
for some people there is no morality or moral hazard. or apparently it only applies above a certain economic class.
and yet these people rail against the immorality of billionaires and how they shouldn't exist because they exploit people and the government.
but if you make 50K and you exploit the government and other people... well then there is nothing wrong with that!