I’ll have you know I took out student loans for college — it was mid-1970s levels of tuition, but it was still debt — and I also had to work my way through for four years, plus summers spent doing stoop labor to build up some savings. And then I paid it all off with the sweat of my brow, diligently making those quarterly payments, and eventually working my way out from under the burden. It was an obligation! I was loaned that money on specific terms, and I signed a contract!
And now Joe Biden is wiping out $10,000-20,000 of debt per college student with a snap of his fingers? They can just forget about it?
Good. It should be more, but this is a great start.
I don’t have good memories of all the labor I put in just to get the education I wanted. I was going to school to learn biology, not to pick weeds or put in long hours cleaning glassware or scrubbing cat poop out of an animal facility, and really, the job I was training for was not one that would ever pay a big salary, so deferring repayments until I was wealthy was never going to happen. So yeah, give those young folks a break, especially since tuition costs have skyrocketed since my day.
I have no patience for the flurry of outraged Republicans demanding that everyone must suffer as they did (as if they did — I predict that the ones who squawk the loudest are the children of privilege who had Mummy & Daddy pay for everything, and buy them a new car and European vacations on top of that). College ought to be free to everyone. It’s the only way we’re going to educate ourselves out of the mess we find ourselves in.
Additionally…
Preemptively posting this. pic.twitter.com/3xSCANnBGg
— Anthony Michael Kreis (@AnthonyMKreis) August 24, 2022
Those poor losers! You should give more money to some bankers to atone for their suffering.
The loudest complaints around me in social media are the libertarians who just insist the government shouldn’t be paying for anything. They just don’t want to pay taxes for anything, because they’re assholes.
Given how much the government spends dropping high explosives on people, there ought to be free education for anyone making under $60,000/yr.
It’s shocking that the republicans are actually opposing debt forgiveness. Between this and Roe and vote suppression, the democrats should be able to obliterate them. All they need is a whiff of ruthlessness.
Elsewhere I’ve been reading reports about women under 25 flocking to register to vote, and something like 70% are going democrat. Maybe, just maybe, the republicans have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Since Obama’s presidency, my right-wing father has often taunted me over the issue of student debt forgiveness. “Hey! When is Obama going to cancel your student loans like he said he would?” Now, I don’t recall Barry ever saying he wanted to do that. Secondly, even if he did and reneged on the promise, will the Republicans cancel my debts? No?
Now, I’ve got A LOT of complaints about Barry and Brandon (No. 1 They’re both far too right wing). However, trying to get me to not vote for a politician because of a broken campaign promise that the other party diametrically opposes seems… stupid.
That said, this issue is all moot in my case: I was unfortunate enough to take out the bulk of my current student loan debt during that fabled period when Dubya handed federal student loans over to private lenders. While I’m certainly glad other folks are getting relief, I can’t help but feel and little jealous and that I’m being fucked over… AGAIN!
No, it not. These are people where the Just World fallacy and Social Darwinism (yes, even the Creationists) are part of the foundations of their political philosophy. (The rest being white supremacy, capitalist greed, military and police authoritarianism, mindless jingoism, and of course, Christian superstition.) They LOVE the idea of people suffering for their “irresponsibility” (i.e. inability to come up with huge wads of cash) because they think those people are lazy, stupid, or just plain “evil.”
I won’t go that far.
But everyone who wants a college degree and is capable of it, should be able to get a college degree!!!
In the Dark Ages of the 1970s, when I went to school, that was actually more or less how it was.
Pure commieism.
I graduated from college debt free and completely broke.
This wasn’t unusual at all for the time. Student loans existed but they weren’t the mega loans of today.
Tuition was something like $600 a year my first year and it was heavily subsidized by the state.
I just checked, the current cost and was shocked. It is now $12,000 a year with $4,000 in fees. They estimate a 4 year degree will cost $120,000 for in state.
Something that used to work for everyone, low cost and available college degrees, doesn’t work any more. I’d have to look up a lot to explain why but part of it is that the state subsidy is all but gone.
The reason for low cost college was because it would pay for itself as college degree holders make more money and pay more taxes.
Also we need an educated work force.
And, as part of an upward mobility plan. People could get out of poverty or the South or Appalachia or whatever Cthulhu forsaken place they were born in.
I didn’t need to take out loans, since some merit-based scholarships meant tuition was covered (but not books and so forth). However, even so, it was a condition of the scholarships at the time that in order to benefit from them, I had to work for the university (without pay), in various positions for such students that the school had made available by not hiring actual employees.
Tuition by itself wasn’t so expensive then, compared to what you might expect these days. So if you worked it out (I forget the exact figures now), they effectively had me doing that shit for less than minimum wage. What a great prize! At least it wasn’t somewhere off-campus, so it was more doable and might not interfere quite so much with school, I told myself. And sure, it wasn’t fucking prison labor, if that’s the standard we’re using….
Anyway, it was a very good deal for them, not for me. If my family were rich enough to just ignore those scholarships, that’s what we would’ve done, since there would’ve been no point in trying to comply with them. But I’m sure the politicians and administrators who came up with this nonsense loved being able to slash the education budget just a tiny bit more with horseshit like that. Our whole system is just fucking broken as hell because of people like this, and it has been for decades.
What sense does any of it make from an educational perspective? You’ve got somebody you think is a good student, so you go out of your way to make sure they have to spend lots of time every week not focusing on their studies…. What the fuck is that? The twisted assholes who come up with this kind of crap are not “leaders,” and it doesn’t teach anyone “responsibility.” They should be run out of town on a rail. That’s the responsible thing to do.
There’s now a whole genre of tweets (one example here) exposing various neoliberal/conservative grifters who are wailing about debt forgiveness for student loans but had taken tons of PPP money, even when it was something like a fucking podcast that would’ve had no trouble operating due to the pandemic (and probably did continue operating as usual, meaning it’s plain old fraud). That doesn’t even touch all the tax breaks and subsidies and so forth this country gives them for good reason at all. They’re always taking everything they possibly can from the rest of us, while nobody else should ever get any support whatsoever.
https://twitter.com/AnthonyMKreis/status/1562466431479885825
raven:
Why the fuck not?
So what, you’re saying you don’t want it to be illegal for some people to get a college degree? I mean, they “should be able” to do it … what the fuck does that even mean? Why do you sound so excited about such meaningless nonsense?
I graduated, from a small private college, in 1989 with total student loan debt of $7500. Yes, $7500. I held jobs of campus and work-study. My grandmother’s house in Hawaii paid form most of my college, both my sister’s college, and a really nice house along Antietam Creek.
My daughter, after five years (Psychology major, minors in sociology, women’s studies and statistics), held $100,000 in debt and I held $40,000 (which has been cancelled because of my disability retirement). She, and her husband, were able to buy a house even with the student loan payments. The small amount being cancelled will certainly help, but not all that much.
Wife has a question, though: will this debt cancellation show up as taxable income?
@2 $50k a year, STEM fields only and raise the admission and academic requirements. The reason some Democrats are against this is because they have a lot of constituents who’d resent publicly subsidizing an extra 4 years of delayed adulthood. And, they realize that, sooner or later, the taxes on the wealthy we’re talking about come out of the backs of those working class constituents, whether it’s wage stagnation or loss, reduced working hours or job reclassification (as in changing them to “contractors” in order to reduce or eliminate benefits). We’ve seen this every time and it will happen again.
And how about you, PZ? Do you want a class full of people who are motivated to make good on a commitment for improving themselves or a class full of people who are just going through the motions because they see the degree as an entitlement?
@5 Are you one of those people who think that waiters should be required to have Master’s degrees? Are trade schools in on this too or is it only the type of education you approve of?
@6 OMG! You had to work for a living?! I’m sure the single mother out there with two jobs and three kids would feel real pity for your struggles.
So your ostensibly “benevolent” plan is to ransack the poorest and least developed parts of the country, hoping to extract whatever valuable (human) resources that you can from them? I can’t see how anybody would ever have a problem with that — not anybody who really counts, that is. Why not salt the earth and burn our villages to the ground, while you’re at it? Carthago delenda est and whatnot. And how do you think that has worked out over the last several decades? Do you think that might have backfired just a little bit, perhaps?
Why did you never learn to read, after all these years? Our education system really does suck.
@Susan Montgomery
In my country there is no tuition except for one state who has modest tuition for non-Eu foreigners. And yet the system is working.
Susan, share your thoughts about all those layabout kids in (K-12) public schools who don’t “work for a living.”
Child labor: a decent, necessary and perfectly normal feature of a functioning economy. Yes or no?
@14 Which tiny EU country do you live in?
@15 I save it for the people who think they’re entitled to sit on their asses for four years reading Coleridge while someone else foots the bill. I also save it for limo liberals who claim they’re for the working people but casually treat them as second-class paypigs at every opportunity.
@Susan Montgomery.
The one with the most population.
Akira MacKenzie @ # 3: …I don’t recall Barry ever saying he wanted to do that.
He did, but with catches:
@17 Is that the one with the refugee “guest workers” who pay into the system but never really benefit from it?
@17 Or is that the one that takes people off benefits if they refuse jobs as prostitutes?
@17 OR is it that country that benefits from billions in US taxpayer money courtesy of the Defense Department?
Curse my L’esprit de l’escalier!!
Susan Montgomery, #16:
Uhhh, okay…. So you talk to those people about your support for child labor. Am I reading that right? Or you only talk to them about how you oppose it? Or … huh???
If you really believe you’re right about something and can actually justify it, then why wouldn’t you be willing to say it to anyone? Where does the fucking double-standard come from? Is that also something that you “save” for certain people?
FWIW. In Oz the misnamed conservative LNP (L standing for “Liberal” which, NOT in the American sense of the word they ain’t & never were) :
Source – among other things :
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/gough-whitlams-free-university-education-reforms-led-to-legacy-of-no-upfront-fees-20141021-119bws.html
The ALP – esp Whitlam – gave Aussies free tertiary education as well as universal healthcare. The sociopathic “conservative” LNP took it away and would happily take away Medicare too if they could get away with it and not for want of trying on their part.
@19
How are they not benefiting from it? They get to use our subsidized public transport, cultural programs, schools, universities, etc.
@20
That is fake news and you know it. The jobs were as a barmaid in a brothel and as a vendor in a sex shop, not as prostitutes. And yes, the current AGII is a disgrace and changing it was one of the major promises of the currently gouverning parties. Let’S hope they will deliver.
In any case, what does either of that have to do with no tuition?
@20:
Old (c. 2005) fake news.
Snopes says “false”.
@21
How does it benefit from US taxpayer money? Whom is it defended from? Who would attack it?
Now get to your actual point. Tuition.
???
I can’t see how you read that into anything I wrote.
It wouldn’t bother me if rich people who could afford it, paid for their college degrees.
What I don’t like is one person having the authority to transfer $300,000,000,000 in wealth. Much of which will go to people who don’t need it. As #9 states, “The small amount being cancelled will certainly help, but not all that much..”
We’ll see if it passes muster in the Supreme Court.
@22 Hoo boy, I hit a nerve, didn’t I? You don’t like it when Hoi Polloi talks back to their betters, huh?
First off, where do you get child labor from what I said? Are you confusing me with the company that harvests your “ethically sourced” espresso beans or the Malaysian sweatshop which made your Che Guevara T-Shirt?
And, really, if you can’t detect irony (I “save it” for people like you) what was the point of that college education in the first place?
@24 a) I guess there’s some marginal benefits. I guess it might enhance your liberal paradise reputation if they weren’t second class citizens but what do I know? b) Ack! I read that a while ago and obviously forgot the details. It’s still kinda sleazy. c) That is a good question. One that only ever gets answered whenever America contemplates leaving NATO. And the money that goes into those installations goes into European coffers one way or another. Whether it’s directly to Enlightened European arms manufacturers like FN or H&K or to local contractors or by servicepeople spending money in nearby towns. Take all that out of the equation and how much money are you left with for tuition?
It bothers me that you would even consider the notion that the unemployment agency would force people to prostitue themselves. Even in the two examples I cited these were mistakes made by automation that were promptly corrected. But right wing media of course had a field day with that. You parroting that shit doesn’t make you look good.
“That is a good question.”
So answer it!
“Take all that out of the equation and how much money are you left with for tuition?”
Plenty, since it’s funded by taxes. That “American taxpayer money” is a drop in the bucket, as Germany has the fourth largest gross domestic product in the world. Now stop rehashing right wing propaganda. The only reason free tuition wouldn’t work in the USA is because of the “fuck you, I got mine” mentally so prevalent in large parts of the population.
I would answer that question by saying that I fully support the US leaving NATO. Now, watch the Peanut Gallery tell me that Europe is on the brink of disaster without us.
Who’s buying what Germany is selling, anyway?
@Susan
it’d have been nice to have a moment of time at all to have sat on my ass during university. unfortunately my mornings and afternoons were spent attending lectures and my evenings and weekends were spent doing a physical job that didn’t really pay me enough to make much of a difference. On top of everything else it was hard to find a moment to breathe or, you know, go get some kind of treatment for my quickly worsening mental illness.
I guess that’s all moot now. I dropped out of school because of the stress and now have a pile of loans that I’m never going to be able to pay. Too bad I just didn’t work hard enough, eh? Too much Coleridge.
I’m willing to bet Germany ain’t swimming in Rubles, Rupees or Yuan. Switzerland, for example, has a steady supply of money to launder from dictators, terrorists and human traffickers but who buys your exports?
I don’t even know who the fuck Coleridge is, but I surely think I’m a Generic Sparkling White Wine Socialist.
And I would fully suport Germany leaving NATO or a full disbanding of NATO. Again, and for the last time, what does any of this have to do with tuition?
“Who’s buying what Germany is selling, anyway?”
Considering Germany is third place in the world concerning exports and almost matches the US at a quarter the population, I’d say someone has to.
Now what’s wrong with not charging tution?
@32 I feel for you. You’re a victim of the predatory loan industry and the overblown hype of a college education. I have no objection to people like you getting relief but there’s a difference between that and the attitude that some around here have that they’re entitled to indulge themselves while many more sacrifice to keep the wheels turning.
@35 Nothing, so long as it doesn’t come at the expense of others.
Boy I certainly hope that Susan gets paid for her time here, it would give me some hope for her intelligence, although I wouldn’t be surprised if she really is a True Believer with that nasty streak they all seem to carry with them.
@38 More elitism! And this time it’s the “Anyone who disagrees with me is either dishonest or stupid” variety.
raven:
Would it bother you if rich people who could afford it had to pay for their kids’ elementary or high school?
Wait a second … aren’t these people supposed to be paying taxes already? So what’s the fucking difference? People have a right to an education, full stop.
All you’re effectively doing is asking for some kind of dumbass means-testing (i.e., more of the same), which is utterly pointless unless your goal is to hurt poorer people or to prevent access to certain undesirables (e.g., women, racial minorities, etc.).
Quoting an “educational advisor” for Nixon and a Reagan stooge (see here):
You see, the only reason people ought to be unemployed is because owners/shareholders aren’t raking in profits to their full satisfaction, despite exploiting the workforce and gouging consumers whenever they feel like it. And if they were educated too, those people probably wouldn’t appreciate that very much. They might even vote against such things or (gasp) unionize.
Wow. Something certainly triggered Susan Montgomery.
I want a class full of people who want to be there, and who are not prevented from being there by class, race, or health. That’s not so hard to imagine, is it?
I also favor a healthy educational ecosystem: trade schools, community colleges, state universities, private schools, whatever.
Somebody’s carrying a heavy load of resentment.
Susan, a quote for your perusal: A cynic is a person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
It is utterly sad that some people are incapable of appreciating that not all games are zero sum. Just because there are folks who are benefiting does not mean you are being injured. I got my doctorate back in a time when one could do so without going into debt–indeed, I actually saved money as I had no opportunity to spend it, given my 90-hour work weeks. Now folk’s put in 90 hours and pay for the privilege of doing so.
What is needed is to roll back the damage done by Reagan, the Bushes and Cheetolini. Educating people enriches their lives, enriches society and protects democracy. It might have also done wonders for your attitude.
Susan @ 39, yeah probably.
Susan Montgomery
I hear variations of this argument all of the time. It’s ironic the size of the US both explains why it does too much globally (militarily) and too little domestically.
@41 The thing is, PZ, when you make something free, it usually becomes worth the price. And you are going to get a substantial element of Karens and their spawn demanding degrees without effort because “our taxes pay for this”. And you can also look for over-filled classrooms and zero help once the penny-pinching begins. You should know them well enough already that they’re going to pile in as many students as they can get while keeping staff costs down – and there’s no way the government can be everywhere at once to make sure UM plays fair.
And what “triggered” me is your and cr’s declaration that certain kinds of work are beneath your dignity. Someone’s got to do it while you play with your spiders, after all. Maybe you shouldn’t shit on those people by declaring your too good to do those jobs – all while also declaring yourself their champion?
I might be willing to change my tune if you can explain to me why the educated liberal elites are getting suckerpunched every day and twice on Sundays by the Idiocracy. If college really is this worthless, maybe it should be free.
*you’re…
@Susan Montgomery
I could have believed your righteous indignation if you hadn’t repeatedly parroted bullshit right wing propaganda about “American taxpayers” payrolling free tution in “tiny EU countries” whose unemployment offices force people into prostitution.
But you did. You’re pathetic.
@Susan #36
With respect, I don’t appreciate being patronized like that. I know I fell victim to a false belief that the loans could be my bridge out of the poverty I grew up in. That doesn’t mean I see the education I worked very fucking hard at as overblown hype. I wanted to learn about the things I was studying. The skills and knowledge I earned in college are economically valuable and applicable right now but because I’m probably never going to be able to go back and finish my degree it’s a neverending uphill battle to even find a job where those skills and knowledge are relevant and fairly compensated.
I don’t really care which industry in particular you think I’m a victim of, because functionally under the system that exists as it is now and any system that would have always demanded more from me, I’m a victim of dreaming too big and burning out with no chance in hell of success because people like you still decide what’s viable and necessary.
Furthermore, as a child of a single mother of three who struggled to put food on the table, fuck you for using my childhood reality as a rhetorical device.
It’s the same argument thatsays wars must never end because if peace is negotiated it’s unfair to all those who died before.
If you hadn’t already noticed that Susan Montgomery is a right-winger, you must not be reading most of her comments. Like a Log Cabin Republican, there are a couple of very specific civil rights issues (where she personally has skin in the game) where she opposes the right wing, but on everything else she might as well be Lauren Boebert.
Incidentally, in my ideal world, not only would higher education be free for those who want it, but students would be paid to attend higher education of any kind, including vocational training. The state intends to profit off the higher wages and the byproducts of education (like, say, new technology or an up-to-code building stock) — it’s an investment. You pay for investments.
The problem with this is it’s not going to help anyone in the long run. It just shifts the burden to different people — primarily the poor — and in many cases to the same people through other means.
More inflation, more public debt, more taxes, and even more outrageous higher education expenses. Meanwhile a few well off people who make the cut (seriously, why does a couple making 250k/year need debt relief?) and the organizations that charge massive tuition fees will benefit.
This is a well intentioned action, but what is actually needed is to provide free undergraduate education (with entry based on merit) and to restructure current debts with usurious interest and allow discharge through bankruptcy.
@Vicar #51
I think the comparison to Lauren Boebert is a little extreme. She’s a neolib, but she’s not cryptofascist. Come on now.
Hardly a sentence that isn’t just a load of stereotyping bullshit. Maybe you could “save” all of your inane comments for somebody else … but I really do pity that person and just have to hope that they can find a way out of the room before it’s too late.
(Not all Karens is what I’m saying. Fair warning that the “hippies” or whatever might make you puke, but rest assured that this is intentional.)
I said no such thing. You just can’t read and/or can’t be honest. We already went over that.
I might be willing to change my tune if you can explain to me why the educated liberal elites are getting suckerpunched every day and twice on Sundays by the Idiocracy.
Because the idiocracy are cunning, if not smart?
That’s one answer. A more complicated but better one is that the educated liberal elites (to use your terminology) wake up every morning and ask themselves, “what shall I do today to further the projects that give my life meaning?” while the idiocrats are trying to take over, fuck things up in general, or stop progress in specific. The idiocrats have the advantage that they can attack a broad attack surface while the educated liberal elites are just trying to live their own lives.
Opposition-only chuds don’t win except by making others lose; they are not actually trying to do anything.
@ 53. Ada Christine : “@Vicar #51 I think the comparison to Lauren Boebert is a little extreme. She’s a neolib, but she’s not cryptofascist.”
I presume you meant Susan Montgomery (SM) and NOT Lauren Boebert by the “she” there in which case, yeah probly. Dunno really but don’t think SM is fascist or repug here? Getting a slightly liberatarian~ish vibe myself from her FWIW but I guess / hope she’ll speak (type ) for herself on what her views are here.
@31. Susan Montgomery : “Who’s buying what Germany is selling, anyway?”
Since you asked :
Source : https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/DEU/Year/2019/TradeFlow/EXPIMP/Partner/by-country#:~:text=Germany%20trade%20balance%2C%20exports%20and%20imports%20by%20country&text=In%202019%2C%20Germany%20major%20trading,United%20States%2C%20France%20and%20Poland.
(Am I the only one with google and did you actually want an answer to that? Kinda weird rhetorical question if meant to be such.)
I expect that hasn’t changed that much since. Germany is doing fine economically and like many European nation has a pretty reasonable semi-socialist (mixed socialist capitalist market system?) high taxing thus also high service providing.society where healthcare and edcuation are pretty easily accessible and inequality isn’t at the horrific levels it is in the USA from my impression and understanding. Not that I’m an expert but think it is along Danish, Dutch, Scandanavian type lines? Those here from Deutschland please correct me if I’m wrong.*
Which leads me to your (SM) #:37 :
Er, what? You mean like people paying their share of taxes to belong to a compassionate, happy society that provides its citizens with an opportunity / invests in its people to become educated and also have decent healthcare, etc? As opposed to what, having a system where the rich can afford to get educated empowering & enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense forcing the less well off into poverty, disempowerment and suffering as though that’s reasonable, just and sustainable? Do you think having public infrastructure, a military, being citziens of any nation doesn’t also “come at the expense of others” or a collective thing where people esp the richest ones pay taxes? What exactly is your objection specifically here? Are you a libertarian or something?
Then what annoyed me was your (SM’s) :
Wow. Murdoch type strawperson stereotype of people here much?
FWIW I’ve never owned a Che Guevara T-shirt in my life. Not a big fan of Che though would say he did some good ina amxed legacy but I certainly don’t idolise him. Nor do I think that many here actually do. Do you think we are unaware of his flaws and all Castroists here? How is Guevara and his iconic T-shirt image relevant here? Don’t drink expresso personally either though do like a mocchachino or flat white in my lunchbreaks sometimes – from the machine at work. What’s wrong with buying “ethcially sourced” beans or anything else anyhow if you can? Anyhow, this seems like a massive unwarranted and unsupported overgeneralisation on your part against the commentators here.There’s more I could and might still say but enough for now.
.* As for NATO; going off topic but wasn’t the UN meant to be the Global peace enforcer for everyone ending international wars? Be nice if that had worked out as once dreamed. Sigh.Collective non-aggression & mutual defence treaties with everyone for every nation maybe?
@ SteveOR # 56. Yes, I do mean that Lauren Boebert is a cryptofascist (of the rotation cipher variety), not Susan.
Maybe Montgomery is just jealous because Coleridge was an “opium fiend” and socially accepted?
An awful lot of scientists who have difficulty communicating their ideas to those outside their fields could benefit from reading Lyrical Ballads and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, while also getting enough perspective through study of Coleridge’s lesser efforts to perhaps — just perhaps — have profound second thoughts about p-hacking. (Not to mention hacking the letter after that, which may well be involved in Montgomery’s… ill-founded… screeds.) And I say all this as a lukewarm reader of Coleridge; Coleridge’s friend Wordsworth would have been a better choice. To slightly channel an SNL sketch:
More
cowbellColeridge! It needs morecowbellColeridge!I get to say this because I have both STEM and non-STEM degrees:†
Anyone who proclaims “STEM represents the only degrees that are worth pursuing/should be subsidized” doesn’t understand the difference between “training” and “education”… and why the DeVos et al. push to have schools (all the way up through bachelor’s degrees) train people for immediate utility on the job market (which, they seldom acknowledge, they control as employers) and nothing else is merely disguised class warfare. As those workers’ skills become obsolete in a decade and their lack of true education is a barrier to retraining for anything except an iteration of the same job they have now, and they won’t have energy to become entrepreneurs and shove the current moneyed folk aside.
† And no undergraduate debt… unless you count the four years of indentured servitude thereafter, making a salary less than a parochial-school teacher with the addiitonal privilege of having my butt shot at (more than once).
(On rereading, the first line is ambiguous — was only intending to suggest jealousy of “bad behavior” plus social acceptance, for some value of “bad.” But I was trying to be the login timeout.)
@9 “Wife has a question, though: will this debt cancellation show up as taxable income?”
That’s actually a really excellent question.
https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/changes-to-the-2021-publication-4681
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p4681.pdf
You want page 4 on the second link
also, the organizations that allow you to work in underserved areas to reduce or eliminate student debt frequently get the 1099-C codes wrong. If you get one with wrong codes, contact the organization that sent the 1099-C & tell them to send you a correct one.
Also, if that 10K forgiveness is considered income, as most canceled debt is, then it would be more like 7K-8K forgiveness. Less if that “income” kicks people out of the income qualifications for the education credits, the earned income credit and the like.
@60: But there’s an exception if the cancellation still leaves one substantially in debt and it’s not the only debt of that legal nature (that is, secured or unsecured). For example, a cancellation of $20,000 for a student who then went on to grad school and kept piling up debt, to a total of say $80,000, may not have to treat that forgiveness as income.
It’s complicated. Here’s a slightly out-of-date introduction, in plainer language than Publication 4681 provides.
And I thoroughly expect that there will be more guidance available Real Soon Now. It also assumes that the actual regulatory language doesn’t exclude this forgiveness of a government debt from taxable income, and I suspect that’s being at least considered.
Germany’s #1 export destination is… the USA.
https://medium.com/@IjeomaOluo/the-anger-of-the-white-male-lie-6f9a6e646d47
Food for thought. Farewell, PZ.
“And as I watch white men scramble to justify the brutality they visit upon the rest of the world in rage over a life that they think they lost, even though it never was and was never going to be theirs I sometimes wonder what is worse?
Having to fight to get what you’ve been told you have no right to ask for? Having to fight for your very humanity and your right to exist?
Or fighting to punish those who you think stole something from you that never actually existed and throwing your comforts and privileges to the ground in disgust because they insult the greatness you’ll never achieve?”
Is that a flounce? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
I doubt it.
If you can’t tell, it’s not a good flounce.
4.0 from the Russian judge.