Was it also sponsored by the "I want my kids to have a better life than me" crew who then complains about kids having it too easy these days?
I want them to have it better and easier. But an easier life, not just an easy childhood that doesn't prepare them for their inevitable crushing adulthood.
I want the opposite tbh, kids just don't appreciate it. Send them to the mines first, and then give them an easy adulthood.
As a Gen-X, if I was a kid these days I'd be pissed too. It seems as much grief as they're given by adults, they understand early on they've been given the worst hand.
Our gen made such a big deal about being cynical, yet life ended up being SO MUCH WORSE than even we imagined. Although it does show we were right to be cynical.
Ya, m gut tells me teenagers are much more aware of just how bad it is because of their generation's social media. I was pretty unaware at that age. I think there was a bit of a shift in societal values and the youth reflect it more as well.
It has also steadily been getting worse and we keep telling them they are the ones who are going to get seriously shafted compared to the rest of us. That probably doesn't help.
I wasn't really aware of it as a kid either, but I don't think I ever really heard about climate change stuff until Inconvenient Truth came out. It just wasn:t something that was talked about, because we weren't really feeling the effects.
I'm amazed (in a bad way) at how far we've fallen in 25 years, and I fear for the life my child will have as an adult.
Honestly, I think we underestimate how much of an impact telling them that is. Realism isn't bad, but kids' only real point of reference is their past experience and what adults tell them. So if we set them up to think it'll be terrible compared to us, while we complain that everything is bad, they're gonna assume that's truly awful to have to be told about it.
Note: not to say things are going great.
And what a righteous 15 years of uneducated adulthood it'll be before they die of black lung.
yeah but think of all the pituitary glands we could harvest
University years aren't really "childhood", but if their childhood at the grade school level was better that would both make it happier and prepare them better for adulthood. And college.
The goverment paying off student loans is like bucketing water out of your boat and ignoring the hole. Like sure, its gonna keep some people afloat for a little longer but the issue hasn't really been addressed, the problem is still there and the cycle remains a perpetual shit storm. The cost of education is preposterous, the people taking these loans dont have jobs to support paying it back, and most of them are too young to have the experience informing them of what a monumental undertaking paying it back will be. If they tried to get the same loan for a house or business they would be denied. There are so many issues to tackle but paying off the loans rewards the groups who created the problem in the first place. It incentivizes them to continue the foul play and prey upon vulnerable youth. Without some systematic reform accompanying the loan payoffs to ensure this doesn't continue we will end up in the same situation over and over again.
While I fully agree the issue is the underlying problem... that is some All Lives Matter shit.
Because basically anyone who brings that up as an excuse to not wipe the slate clean are in that same "We need to think really hard about how we do this and not do anything for another 30 years". Same as most "Banning guns won't stop gun violence" people. It is a bad faith argument that boils down to insisting that the perfect MUST be the enemy of the good.
Im not saying we shouldn't pay off the loans or delay doing so. I'm saying that alone will not solve the problem. We must do both. I never hear discussion on that second part. Ignoring it is foolish.
And yes, the snails pace at which reform would occur is infuriating. It shouldn't take 30 years because some asshats will continue to argue in the nature of "how dare we hurt these businesses?!" while people continue to suffer. It sucks that it likely will, but if we dont start now it will never happen instead of eventually.
Same as most "Banning guns won't stop gun violence" people.
This one doesn't fit your argument. It might affect gun violence, but you're ignoring the fact that people have access to a ton of ways of killing others.
The main driver of violent crime is poverty and income inequality. The solution is to tax the rich, give everyone fair wages, provide universal healthcare, properly fund schools, etc. All things that are already part of the core liberals stance, and none of those involve introducing unpopular legislation that stomps all over constitutional rights.
But heaven forbid we talk about actually fixing the root causes of violent crime. No, some people just want to ban guns to own the conservatives, and get mad when anyone pokes holes in the plan.
Being pro-gun control is the liberal equivalent of being "pro-life".
At no point does the comment say your government shouldn't pay off loans. It sounds more like they want the perfect and the good.
The OP is a comic about people being opposed to student loans for the most stupid and selfish of reasons.
Screen Shatter proceeds to, at best, make a non sequitor about why student loan forgiveness is actually not a good thing. I then point out that while there are many arguments in favor of focusing on the root cause (that I agree should be the goal), people who bring that up in response to "should we forgive student loans" are almost always arguing in bad faith.
Think less in terms of reading completely unrelated twitter posts and more about an actual conversation and why someone would say X in response to Y. Because Context. It's a B.
Way too many jobs require degrees to apply as well. Yeah, if you're a doctor, scientist, engineer, or other specialist that really does require advanced education, you need that level of education.
But I'm hiring a new permit tech to process contractor registrations, take permit payments, and answer the phone. It's ludicrous that the city wants them to have a degree in "Public Administration, Fiance, Construction Science, or a related field."
That mindset sure is a great way to make sure nothing ever gets better for anyone.
Congratulations.
For me, I do kind of think that if someone paid and then forgiveness happened, they ought to be at least partially compensated if they have any history of being low income. They could have put their loan payments into something else but they didn't so they'd kind of end up screwed over by their slavishly responsible bill paying.
That said: its stupid to not want broad student loan forgiveness because the student loan crisis is literally damaging the economy. Its hurting everyone, even people who already paid their loans off.
I totally agree with this. If someone is opposed to student loan forgiveness because they had to pay theirs off, that person sucks. But if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too, and not as part of opposition, then I am sympathetic.
if that person thinks maybe they should get a portion of their payments back too
I think every one of them assumes they will never get a cent of that money back. They do live in America, after all, the land of "fuck you; got mine."
Change the legislation to give every living person back every cent they ever paid towards student loans, and many opinions would change.
The Republican party would still be completely against it though, so we'd still have millions of boot lickers out there arguing to hurt their own financial situation in order to please their superiors.
You don't need to cure cancer, you need to be able to prevent it in the first place.
Ofc this is following the metaphor, for actual cancer you need both.
For student loans you need to fix the system, higher education in Europe is free, but it really isn't, you pay for your education over your lifetime by earning more money with your higher education and thus paying more in taxes and social security.
Ofc it's not a perfect system, but much better than having young idiots be purposely exposed to predatory lending.
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.
I mean I sold 4 years of my life to the military to not have to take loans out, so I get the gut reaction
The main cause of the student loan issue is the commodification of education. Everyone wanted to go to college and at first it was optional but then as more people did it it became a requirement, then they realized they can charge more and more for education that is worse and worse because a good chunk of people dont actually want to learn / be there. They're just there for the paper that'll let them get jobs and not be unemployed, or even just to say that they went.
I look around and people are playing damn Pokémon Showdown in class, there was that one scandal of an influencer girl who was the daughter of someone important that bought her admission to Stanford(?) and would stream literally about how she didn't care about education she just wanted the college experience.
Hot take: Not everyone should be going to college, High School should just prepare people better. Even if we forgive all loans right now it doesn't fix the issue. Instead of your problem it will just be your kids' problem
While I agree in theory, I'm not really sure there's much that can be done in practice. The genie is out of the bottle here: jobs want the paper, so people get the paper, leading to jobs expecting people to have the paper. An employer is unlikely to deliberately "lower their standards" (in their view) if the pool of potential employees with a degree is large enough for their needs already. Since you can't legislate that employers are not allowed to require a degree, and you can't expect people to not get a degree and sacrifice their own potential future to break that cycle, we're kind of at an impasse.
That's why the only way forward that anyone's figured out so far is government funded higher education.
Edit:typos
What happened to all that student loan vote-for-me-again (or so it felt for a European, IMO) relief stuff in the end?
It's next to the Epstein's files.
I cant believe how many time I have to say "just because I was hungry yesterday doesn't mean you sould starve tomorrow." That line was fundamental in my upbringing, it's so simple and do correct and now,no one understands this very basic concept for children
I think there are three problems with loan forgiveness:
It’s almost like “too big to fail” but for people.
How? "Too big to fail" is bad because companies have multiple other methods of dealing with debt, like selling assets and declaring bankruptcy. Student loans can't be discharged via bankruptcy, and most people with loans don't have enough assets to cover their loans.
My loans were discharged under Biden, but that's because the government fucked me over on the PSLF and changed their mind after I'd done the time doing palliative care for developmentally disabled adults.
You want to talk about sacrifice? I did a decade of dealing with literal feces because I was providing care to autistic people that had developed dementia, and I was only getting a couple bucks more than minimum wage. The payoff was supposed to be student loan forgiveness, but the fucking government went back on their word, and now Biden's the bad guy for doing what was originally promised? C'mon.
This is som weird metaphor... So some people get voluntary "cancer" in hope theycan fight it and it will benefit them in the long run, and some don't. While someone will have just the benefits and not the cancer while everyone chips in.
I get that in the long run highly educated people tend to pay more taxes. So makeing education affordable in is a net benefit for everyone. But this analogy is just weird...
I don't know man, at the end of the day it is unfair, and making fun of that seems inappropriate.
Dude.
Fuck cancer, AND fuck people that have that logic about school loans or anything else.
Plot twist, he actually beat up every single kid in the paediatric cancer ward at his local hospital.
Capitalism is cancer, prove me wrong.
Noo, cancer is when cells start to grow infinitely and therefore destroy the body. Capitalism is about economic infinite growth that destroys the planet and the people. Know the difference.
Read all the comments🧵. Nobody mentioned that higher education was free in the 🇺🇲 until a racist made it costly for colors to attend.
Changed the link, since folks had difficulty trickling to the sources.🥁
made it costly for colors to attend
Are you sure that's the right link? The Wikipedia page talks about a law that mandates a permit for carrying firearms.
False equivalent. People do not choose to have cancer, but some people chose poorly and took out loans they could not afford; that is on them.
I mean I wouldn't want it to not exist but if I just nearly died of chemo + cancer I'd be a little mad if they found an EASIER way to cure cancer...
Cancer survivor here. Nothing would make me more happy to see a simple cure for what almost killed me, the sooner the better. Even if it was just after I finished chemo; perhaps even especially right after it to be honest. Remember that there's always the 5-year time where the danger of the cancer coming back is constantly lingering (especially during the first 12 months). Even if you just finished chemo, that new drug means you won't have to go through chemo again for that cancer no matter what happens from now on. Nothing, and I mean abso-fucking-lutely nothing, would've given me more peace of mind at that time.
That would actually kind of be funny in retrospect. Like, if you survived it, and it was the most horrible, painful year of your life, and then the day the doctor gave you the all-clear, the FDA released a drug that takes care of it in seven days with minimum side effects.
Like any time anybody said anything to me, I would be whipping out my cancer photos and then using that to explain that the universe hates me, and so therefore I am absolved of all sin.
I just want the playing field to be level, I prioritized paying my loans off instead of buying a home when that would have actually been affordable. Now that money is gone and the housing market has blown up so much that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to afford it. If all the people currently paying their loans suddenly get the slate cleared it will create even more competition for homes and my situation will be even worse. Reimburse me for mine and I'll shut the fuck up about it.
Dead curious if anyone can provide a legit rebuttal to this comment rather than down voting.
This would be more like cancer treatment being made free for all after a certain date, I can def see someone who went bankrupt paying for their treatment being a bit salty. Hell, Tesla and Apple buyers get mad when there is a steep discount after they buy, and this is factored into costumer relation decisions. Ultimately, people can tell individuals making this posters argument to "get fucked," but it just alienates more people.
I am once again reminded: Humanity is fucking ugly. I'm starting to get nihilists.
Yeah I don't think this covers the situation as much as it's a nice feel good story.
Imagine for a second you are relatively poor, you go to a state school or community college in order to afford it. You have loans, but they are small.
Now imagine you're upper middle class, you go to a private or out of state school and take loans out for a much much larger amount than the other person, with the expectation that you're getting more value for your money (let's ignore the labyrinth there for a second -- this is something many people believe and believing it, for some, makes it true).
Now, both loans are forgiven
Youve succeeded in making the rich richer, giving them both the higher valued education and all of their money back.
Or imagine you're that poor student but you're smart: you got a grant or scholarship making your loans nonexistent, but only if you go to the state school.
Once again, forgiving loans makes the already wealthy person significantly more wealthy and does nothing to benefit the poorer person.
Yes, of course, there's a wide range of reasons a person might go down either route, and I'm absolutely certain there are many millions of people who have gotten loans way above their wealth in order to go to a better school and jump out of poverty (or whatever). This comic ignores the nuance.
In the cancer analogy, this would be a poor person dying or otherwise experiencing terrible health problems because they couldn't get the care they needed, then when a cure is developed, only administering it to the people who could afford care to begin with (ie american health care)
I don't feel like the comparison works, because we don't know a clear cure for cancer right now, but loan forgiveness is something we can technically do just fine (it's entirely human made after all)
I don't think you can feel unfairness about something not happening that, to our current knowledge, is not possible. You can feel a bit unfairness if something that might as well have helped you, won't be done for you... For no clear reason.
I'm somewhat torn on this:
Yes, I totally agree that federal loans should be forgiven even if someone pays theirs off.
Private loans though? Not so much. That's basically the same as a mortgage from a bank. Or a car loan even. That money ultimately ends up in the borrower's possession after the school balance is paid. That? I am not so willing to share the cost of.
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