this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024

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726

Student loan forgiveness (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The wealthier you are, the greater the expectation that others will serve you.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Remember the lords and peasants system? We actually haven’t moved on from that just given it a new coat.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

And instead of breaking your back ploughing fields.. you now fuck it up in a desk chair.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

But hey, we're living much longer these days.

Think about how much more productivity time we're donating to our lords and masters!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yup. We had a couple moments but we never exploited them to prevent capitalists from turning themselves into nobles in all but name.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

Not fancy private schools. They'll cover majority cost of their kid's private school.

They want YOUR poor kid to go to a religious school - if they win on the vouchers, eventually the vouchers won't cover the cost of most of the former public schools and private schools. But those religious schools... They'll be standing there salivating with open arms and subsidized voucher tuition. Without other options, you'll send your kid and tell yourself it won't be that bad, tell yourself you'll keep communicating with them to contextualize the education versus the religion, but life will happen. The church will have millions more kids to attempt to indoctrinate than they do in today's regularly declining religious communities.

Under his fucking eye.

Vote. Tell your people to vote and call your "both sides" uncle a piece of shit to his misinformed face.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

AI garbage, get that weak shit outta here

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

20 gallons of water, gone

[+] cygnus -30 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I don't think this comparison really works. These people are against their money going to other people, whether it's to a public school or to pay off somebody else's student loans. Agree with them or not, those things are logically consistent.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 6 months ago (1 children)

School vouchers are paid for with taxes. So their money is going to other people.

[–] cygnus -5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Yes, but they see it as their tax money being returned to them. The argument for vouchers is that without them, they're paying for schools they don't use.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Are you operating under the absolutely bizarre assumption that the only Republicans who are in favor of school vouchers have school-aged children? Or children at all?

[–] cygnus 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I'm using "they" more broadly here to include people who share that moral foundation. School vouchers slot into the same worldview as being anti-welfare and pro-private-healthcare, for example, which could be summed up as "I got mine, get your own". I don't subscribe to that personally, but it doesn't help matters to completely misrepresent that position.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I do not see how a childless Republican got theirs with school vouchers. The only people school vouchers benefit are people with school-age kids that want to send them to private religious school.

The reason they're in favor of school vouchers is that they hate public school and they want to religiously indoctrinate children.

[+] cygnus -6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You're being too literal. This is an ideology. They see having money as a proxy for responsibility and success, and redistribution of it as rewarding the unworthy. All practical manifestations of this, whether it's schools or healthcare or whatever, stem from that ideology.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Except that "the unworthy" are doctors and lawyers. Including Republican doctors and lawyers. Who will be paying back student loans their whole life. So maybe there's more to it than that.

[–] cygnus -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

No, because if they are worthy and pull hard enough on their bootstraps, they too with reach the apotheosis of wealth. Think of it as a trial, or perhaps a filter. If they don't make it, they need to try harder. I'd maybe compare it to Darwinism, or even to military esprit de corps.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You do know those doctors and lawyers paying back their student loans can be Republicans, right? Do you think they believe they've failed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps enough?

I'm in Indiana. I'm surrounded by Republicans. My wife has Republican relatives who are in these situations and in successful careers. This is not how they think. School vouchers are about their idea that public schools are atheist liberal institutions which will teach children to be transgender and worship Satan.

[–] cygnus 3 points 6 months ago

I'm basing my POV less on anecdata and moreso on reading (Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, uh, comes to mind). With that said, I can certainly imagine that things have pulled in the direction you describe since Trump, so perhaps those sources don't reflect the current reality quite as much.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Which is a dumb and bad argument because better public schools make for the people you run into around town being smarter. Everybody wins.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 6 months ago

Vouchers are my tax dollars. So they don't want their money to go to anyone else, but they're ok taking everyone else's.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Here's a fun thing about student loans: we have stupidly high tuition thanks to CA governor Reagan and president Nixon wanting to reduce the number of students protesting against the Vietnam War. Of course the excuse they used was to balance the budget. This is just one more in a long line of things that Reagan and Nixon ruined in this country for decades.

https://12ft.io/https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/

Also, the real reason school vouchers were pushed was to backdoor segregation after Brown v Board of Education desegregated schools.

https://12ft.io/https://www.forbes.com/sites/raymondpierce/2021/05/06/the-racist-history-of-school-choice/

Here's the original since 12ft.io looks a little weird on mobile. https://www.forbes.com/sites/raymondpierce/2021/05/06/the-racist-history-of-school-choice/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

These people are against their money going to other people

It's more strategic. Student loan debt is a mechanism for controlling the employment prospects of college grads.

Public debt forgiveness becomes a method for funneling students into low paying, morally hazardous jobs (prosecutors, police, the public side of the MIC, education in underfunded neighborhoods, bureaucrat in a corrupt or underfunded agency) where you've got an incentive to keep your head down and do the work rather than organize your office or resist deplorable government policies.

Private industries, similarly, offer the better salaries doing the more morally repugnant work - mining and chemical manufacturing, big finance and HFT, pharma, automotive, credit and collections - which draws in the most talented people to apply their talents in the worst ways.

You're constantly asked to sell out your principles for a paycheck/debt relief, or the most invasive and obnoxious applications of technology. You're never going into business for yourself to challenge a corporate behemoth or pursuing public work that both benefits people and pays well. You're never going into activism or politics without a corporate paymaster.

Ever notice how many SCOTUS judges and Senators are in the Federalist Society or from the Heritage Foundation relative to the Sierra Club or the ACLU? A big part of that is simply about the money.

[–] cygnus 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I think you're ascribing much deeper thoughts and foresight to the average Republican voter than is warranted.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

It's much bigger than "Republican voters". You'll find plenty of blue states with students drowning in debt and "business-friendly" politicians espousing the exact same "it wouldn't be fair" anti-debt relief rhetoric.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Eh, I don't think this strategy needs to go much farther than the halls of wherever the RNC is meeting that week. If this is the overarching plan, the political moves the party makes are other things that support this outcome. In this case, any narrative that amounts to "loan forgiveness is bad" is all that needs to be sold to the voter. In fact it's better that way since they'll be compelled to vote against their own interest.

TL:DR: "support your corporate overlords you peasants" doesn't sit well with most people so they just say something else instead.