Originally Posted by pdx rick
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Many Boomers are upset with this proposal, stating "I paid ALL of my student loan."


For many Boomers - that's a lie. Because prior to the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform by Republicans under W Bush, Boomers and those older discharged their student loans in bankruptcy.

The reason why Student Loans were singled-out as not being able to be included in bankruptcy in 2005, is because Boomers and older were all doing that - especially if they were going through a divorce - it was a "clean start."

As with a lot of things in life and Boomers - they got what they wanted and have prevented generations after them from having the same advantages in life that have have enjoyed.

And also, in the heyday of most Boomers, tuition was couch change.
My tuition at Brown was couch change, my tuition at UCLA Extension was couch change.

As a nation we argue about the dumbest things sometimes. Arguing about a higher minimum wage, for instance...if we had enough good stable decent paying jobs with a modicum of a career path, we'd hardly be arguing about minimum wage jobs because those would go back to being jobs for kids and seniors who want to pad their Social Security "just enough" without triggering cuts to their old age pensions.
We sent many of those good paying jobs overseas. That wasn't to help us, it was to help the poor put upon rich folks, you know, the PERSECUTED rich folks?

We argue about helping people with tuition debt (student loans) but if we simply went back to making college more affordable, there wouldn't BE a student loan debt crisis, it would just be the handful of folks who made bad choices. Most people would chuckle and say that tuition is couch change again, like it was once upon a time.
But when you see well over a TRILLION dollars, you KNOW it can't be chalked up to "poor life choices"... because when it's a trillion dollars plus, it can't be, just like it can't be "a majority of teachers just deciding to be lazy bums" when referring to the teacher shortage.
We're paying good teachers crap and treating them like crap.

We argue about healthcare costs but once upon a time it was illegal to run health insurance at a profit. We allowed leadership to sunset that concept and now we are face to face with the monster that took its place, and yet we argue if it's right to call it a monster.
Sorry, it IS a monster and our forbears knew this, which is WHY they used to prohibit the idea.

Face facts, all this crap we're dealing with now stems largely from the wide-ranging attacks on the New Deal and on public goods and services.
And we know who spearheaded those attacks back then and who is leading them now.

It's time to accept the fact that their ideas were crap then, and crap now, and it's time to reverse that kind of thinking.