Talking About Students Loans Is Pandering; Doing Something About Student Loans Is Progress
The latest appeal to the votes of young people involves the student loan crisis. President Obama has started to “talk” about student loans to show that he’s paying attention to young people issues. Mitt Romney is talking about student loans to show that he’s not overlooking the issue either. Students (or former students with debt) are thinking, hey, they’re finally paying attention to an issue that’s near and dear to me.
Fact: They’re not. In fact, what both the president and his opponent are doing is called pandering. Pandering is when someone talks about an issue that is important to people, but in reality, they’re not actually going to do anything substantial about it. They might, if forced into a corner, make some minor stride, but when pandering, the point is to show that you care without actually really caring.
Obama mentioned yesterday that he just recently paid off his student loans. So young people should understand that he “feels” your pain. No, he doesn’t. He’s a one percenter who is filthy rich and will never have to worry about paying off a loan again in his lifetime. He mentioned he paid off his loans 8 years ago. 8 years ago, he was in the Senate, which meant he was in a position that allowed him almost unlimited access to the abilty to paying off his debt. THAT is how he paid off his student loans. Not through some great government assistance that came to his rescue. Unless you consider that government assistance to be a position in the Senate.
And Romney talking about student loans is just a filthy rich billionaire who doesn’t give a flying crap about people in debt. He made his money off of other people, and when people do that, they don’t care about the struggles of others, especially when your company that made you rich makes a mint off of people who are struggling anyway.
What’s of more concern here is the fact that so many of us are overwhelmed with student loan debt that we may never be able to pay off in our lifetimes. Generally, the response of the rest of society (usually from people who are well off and have never had to really suffer under any real debt) is that it’s all our own fault for going into debt, that we’re a bunch of lazy young people who need to go get a job, or some other innane banter that unravels once you actually start thinking about it.
Neither President Obama nor Citizen Romney have any intentions of doing anything to upset the apple cart of student loan debt that so many banks are profiting off these days. Government looks after the wealthy and the banks, not students or common citizens. Instead, government panders to the common people, throws them table scraps and then pretends they really care.
Expect more of this kind of drivel leading up to the Election of 2012. Neither Congress nor the President is going to enact anything that really helps students. Keeping a loan rate at a lower interest rate ISN’T assisting anyone in any great way as the debt still exists, the balance continues to increase, and nothing actually got any better. It’s just more of the same, kind of like “keeping Bush’s tax cuts” is somehow supposed to “create jobs” by doing exactly what we’ve been doing before when somehow that wasn’t leading to the creation of jobs in the past, but is somehow going to lead to a surplus of jobs that logical economics can’t seem to figure out how to make happen.
What would solve the student loan problem? Mass forgiveness of debt, kind of like people have been advocating for forclosures, which are forgiven through bankruptcy. The problem with student loan debt is that bankruptcy does NOTHING to assist someone. If you fall under, you fall under for life, and you’ll never get back out under it because the lobbyist groups that put our government people in power were on the side of banks that wanted to screw over students with student loan debt. Think about this for a moment. You can gamble away every cent you might ever borrow from a bank and be forgiven, but if one dime of that was in student loan debt, you’re screwed. As long as that one issue remains, no politician is ever going to help out the little guy. Why not? Because they honestly don’t care.
If they tell you they do care, they’re pandering. Remember that because no one else is going to tell you that. Instead, the media will tell us what a great job both sides are doing at “caring about” the problem by doing absolutely nothing but painting over the broken foundation.
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Ava Swanne
TheBadScot
Algis Kemezys
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Margaret Feike
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Salon.com
Comments
The other argument is that students knew what they were getting into when they took out loans. First, they have been told throughout their lives that the key to success was to go to college, so they thought they were playing by the rules. In most cases, you can't go to college without loans unless you're very financially well off.
Second, it is difficult for even a seasoned consumer to understand that student loans can never be discharged. Ever. Not in the case of unemployment, disaster or bankruptcy. No other type of debt is so impossible to discharge. And when you default, it creates a spiral of penalties and compound interest. It is difficult to grasp as an 18-year-old freshman that you can make payments equal to your entire loan principle ... and yet still owe more than you borrowed in the first place.
The whole system is a travesty.
This is an example of the GOP and the Dems colluding to co-opt the issue and diffuse the potency of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
plain and simple.
BRIGITTE GRISANTI
I am glad to hear people speaking on the importance of the almighty student loans, for which many of us would not be able to attend school. It is a very dual argument, there are too many times to tell, that if you aren't in school that you should be. Then when you do decide to finally, "do it" you are met with a differnt rsistance. What gives? Thankfully people continue to go back to school in record numbers as people swim about in a society where the street soars can suck you right in if you let them. The street soars in this case, are exactly the nay sayers and others that are not in your best inerest and they are out there with little spiny stinging insights on stats that would make most not to want to get educated. But the area that encompassess many of the baby boom generation is what are you going to do with a low paying minium wage job? Number 1. then number2. is how many Mac Donalds can America open, especially in light of our over weight population? no celluloid included in that comment. Then where are the other so called jobs? there are many bogus adds, why isn't anyone cracking down on that? We live in a society that is trying in my eyes to stop much of the pandering and much of the bureaucy that has damaged us in the past. But the job market is continuosly changing, which makes it harder for a sandwich generation for people like myself and I will gladly use myself as an example. I do not get into smart phones, but I am learning slowly but surely, my kids upload apps with the blink of an eye, not to mention people who work in the tech arts. Our governement must associate each and every individual that makes the committment to go back to school as a national resource, because these people are envigoarated, and even though they may be older due to the increased need in many other areas that the baby boom is going to need and encounter and due to the fact that people are living longer we will need educators at all level, whther it be in the handling of medication or in other areas it will need that B.S. or that B.A. not to mention a Masters to finish the demands of many areas of Social Sciences. The governement should inherently be Thanking these brave individuals to be inclined to face this daunting task and do the foot work in order to not only achieve but virtually survive. I hope these Washington Lawmakers consider there own comparison of what it was like to pay for a student loan, I am sure there has to be a couple that weren't given a silver spoon at birth.
During the Clinton administration, there were similar talks about this same issue.
I wish someone would explain to me why some student loan defaults have no statute of limitations per original payback terms and why so many collection agencies working for the higher educational institutions often rely upon faulty recordkeeping during their collection pursuits.
In my case, wages were garnished and income taxes were extracted and now that decades have expired and I've demanded records of their offsets, nobody has ever provided me with anything in writing.
Add to that this awful concept; the bankers were trained in Gordon Gekko moralities by those colleges. See how these tattered vines twist and turn, and the source of the evil growth are colleges and universities?
And nobody really investigates this source, because no one has ever considered higher education to be a self-serving, greedy organization. All those tweed jackets with patches on the elbows, and sheepskins on the walls, and well-manicured campuses (fertilized by the dead bodies of student hopes) fooled you all, didn't they?
To be honest, the ability to declare bankruptcy IS the solution here, but that’s the one carrot they won’t give. I think they should also consider moving loans for students.