The Three Big Reasons Student Loan Forgiveness Is A Terrible Idea

11 Jul, 2019 by John Hawkins

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When liberals compete with each other, the “winner” inevitably comes down to who can portray themselves as the biggest victim, who can claim to be the most offended & who’s the most willing to spend other people’s money to try to buy votes.

In the competitive 2020 field, that final metric has produced a push from candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for the government to pay off everyone’s student loans. From the nakedly political liberal perspective, this has the benefit of incentivizing young Americans to vote Democratic, while funneling massive amounts of money to liberal colleges that will push their views. In addition, the more students you have spending 8 years getting degrees in women’s studies and “anti-cis normative Communist basket weaving” in the future, the more it benefits them.

However, this is not a policy that benefits the rest of America and there are some very good reasons for that. We could note that it would cost more than a trillion dollars, but sadly, no one seems to care about spending money we don’t have these days. It’s also worth noting that it takes us further down the slippery slope of government dependence. If we even have the government paying for college, why not food? Water? Clothes? Shelter? If anything, we need to be looking for ways to transfer responsibility BACK to the public, not looking for new things Big Daddy Government can give us for “free.”

That being said, there are three reasons that stand out above the others when it comes to explaining why the government should be forgiving student loans.

1) College students need to be held responsible for their own loans: Why would we want to set up a system that pays Malia Obama or Barron Trump’s way through college? Why should some plastic surgeon who’ll be making $300,000 a year one day have everyone else paying his bills? Setting that aside, over the course of their lifetimes, college students earn roughly $900,000 more per year than people who don’t go to college and on average end up spending only 6% of their income after leaving school to pay back their loans. If college is a profit-making endeavor over the long-term, why shouldn’t the people getting that benefit be the ones paying for it?

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