Young Americans are piling the blame for their student debt balances on conservatives, according to a poll by Generation Lab provided exclusively to Axios.
Pay you debts. It’s not that hard
I think they’re right to blame SCOTUS and the GOP for the debt forgiveness politics ruling, because that’s 100% down to the GOP needing people to feel pain when there’s a democrat in the oval office.
And yet, I think it’s worth realizing that debt forgiveness is a patch to a prior problem that was also created by gross political fuckery. For example, when the boomers went to college (in the 60s and 70s) public colleges were broadly well-funded and tuition for them was low enough that it was possible to work part-time for minimum wage and get through school without lots of debt. But then, desegregation happened and those schools could no longer discriminate on race- and through magic coincidence (cough cough racist state governors like Reagan) state university systems saw funding cuts and increases to tuition (which effectively discriminated by pricing poor and minority folk largely out). By the 80s and early 90s, when folks like Clinton saw that college financing was the new segregation, the ‘solution’ was to make college loans effectively universally available (but as a sop to the lenders, make the loans federally backstopped and impossible to discharge in bankruptcy). When lots of easy money suddenly became available to students, universities did things (like hire legions of MBA/Administrators to farm that windfall) that turned higher ed into an evil growth industry built at least in part on debt bondage.
TL/DR; student lending and forgiveness is just a patch on problems created by the last solution to problems caused by racism
“The GOP is to blame for student debt, and young voters know it” would be a less biased headline
The Trump admin used the Heroes Act (Passed by George W) to pause student loan interest due to the pandemic. But as soon as the Dems used the exact same Heroes Act to forgive student loans, the GOP SCOTUS said no can do fella.
Also, standing rules were just ignored because of the law they don’t like Biden.
It’s unfortunate that debt forgiveness was ever conceived in the first place. It fails on so many levels, but now it even fails the people that expected to be forgiven. Even if it were possible to continue with what was pledged, it’s still a half measure temporary bandaid and not a solution.
