this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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You can say the same thing about child tax credits with no means testing. The idea is that it benefits society in general for people to have kids, so we subsidize it. Same with higher education.
The real crime of th student loan system though, is that the interest rates are ridiculous. I would be happy if the taxpayers just subsidized it to the extent that the loans were zero interest. Though obviously it would be far better to just guarantee free higher education instead of a convoluted system of loans.
No, you can't, because the 'has a child' demographic is not wealthier on average than the demographic who is childless—the literal opposite is true. If there was a 'no child tax credit', I would be against it for the exact same reason I'm against college student loan forgiveness.
No, this is not a valid analogy.
If you're already in college, you don't need a government handout to complete your education and in turn bring that value to society. It would be orders of magnitude more valuable for that same money, for example, to be used to get people into college who, for purely financial reasons, never went at all.
Student loan forgiveness does not increase the number of college graduates, as having student loan debt is in no way an obstacle to completing your degree. Your analogy would only work if we were talking about an incentive given to people who never began a college education.
That doesn't require subsidy, since if you think about it, interest is essentially a 'fee' for borrowing the $X, and not part of what was originally borrowed. Having governmental student loans be interest-free is an idea I can get behind, for the reason you mentioned, subsidizing things that are 'profitable' to society in the long run.
Now, maybe I just didn't realize, but if there is a loan forgiveness 'policy' being put forth that defines the forgiveness as 'we'll treat everything you've paid toward the loan over its lifetime as if it was all toward principal' (basically 'pretending' it was 0% interest all along), and then from there, reducing the actual principal by that amount, and considering the loan paid off if that would bring it to zero, then I'm in favor of that. At worst, that results in the government getting 'less extra' money from the students who borrowed, without making anyone owe less than what they originally borrowed. And then going forward, have them be interest-free, so we don't have to go back and do this again in X years.
That sounds fine to me. But if extra money is going out, it should be going to those who need it the most. Either that, or 'universal' stuff that goes to everyone in cases where the cost of means-testing is literally more expensive than it would be to just give it to everyone.